This post is about two new command-line utilities: rep and ren. Both are available on GitHub.

How to Use Rep

1. Perform a search with a grep tool like ripgrep:

   

2. Pipe the results of the search to rep, and provide search and replace terms as arguments:

   

3. If the diff looks good, pass the -w flag to rep to write the changes to the files:

   

rep & ren

rep and ren are two new tools for performing find and replace in files, and renaming files, respectively.

They share a similar design in two ways:

1. Standard input determines what should be changed. rep takes grep-formatted text via standard input to determine which lines to change, and ren takes a single file per line to determine which files to rename.
2. A preview of the resulting diff is printed to standard output by default. By default, rep and ren both print a diff of the changes that would result by performing the find and replace or rename. In order to actually write the changes to disk, both have a -w / --write flag.

Origin Story

Search is what pulled my editing towards the command line¹. It began with ack. ack is like grep but it automatically searches recursively and ignores version control directories (e.g., .git/). Just enter ack foo at your shell prompt and see all the results in your project. Today, I use ripgrep, an iteration on the same idea with with a beautifully organized set of command-line flags.

If you do a lot of searching from the command line, eventually you also want to do some editing there. After you’ve performed a search, and you have a list of matches you want to change, what now? For a long time, my answer was to load the matches into the vim quickfix list and use vim built-in support for operating on grep matches to perform the replacement.

Loading matching into an editor and performing the replacement there is a great approach, and it’s ideal for more complex edits². But there are times when I’d prefer skip the editor altogether. For one, if it’s a quick edit, it’s slower. I’d rather just type out my replacement on the command line without opening my editor³. Then there’s the matter of repeatability: I often do a sequence of several edits, then realize I made a mistake somewhere in the sequence, have to revert the replacement (e.g., with a git checkout .) and start over. If instead I do the edits from the command line, I can just find the replacement in my shell history, fix it there, and quickly re-run the steps in order.

Why not sed?

sed is the definitive search and replace utility for the Unix command line, the problem is, it doesn’t combine well with ripgrep. Here’s the command from an example of a popular answer on Stackoverflow about how you do a recursive find and replace with sed:

find /home/www \( -type d -name .git -prune \) -o -type f -print0 \
    | xargs -0 sed -i 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'

You could adapt this to use rg instead of find by using the -l flag which only lists files with matches:

rg "subdomainA\.example\.com" -l -0 \
    | xargs -0 sed -i 's/subdomainA\.example\.com/subdomainB.example.com/g'

The problem with this approach is that sed is then performing the search again from scratch on each file, and since sed and rg have different regular expression engines, the matches could be different (or the search could fail with a syntax error)⁴.

Only performing the replacement on matching lines also makes it easier to write the replacement, because the replacement can then leverage the filtering that’s already been performed by the search. For example, if you were trying to do a find and replacement on function names that end in foo: To find the matching functions, you might including some of the syntax for the function signature (e.g., rg -n 'function .*Foo.*\(' to match all the functions containing Foo), then once you have the matching lines, you can just pipe that to rep Foo Bar (omitting the function signature syntax) to perform the replacement (with sed the replacement would also need to include the function signature, because sed is going to search every line in the file).

These workflow improvements arise because the semantic meaning of the sed command means is to perform a find and replace on the matching files, whereas the rep command means do the replacement on the matching lines.

Another, equally problematic, issue with sed approach is it’s hard to tell what the exactly the result of your find and replace will be. In other words, it’s difficult to interpret the preview what will be done with sed. The sed interface is built around standard streams, as in it takes input either through standard input, or file parameters, and then writes the output directly to standard output, or edits the files in place with a flag. This means that to preview the replacement you’ll just see the raw text of the entire contents of every file that your command will perform a replacement in. Which isn’t practical to parse to understand if the replacement is correct.

rep & ren

rep was written to solve these two problems. Semantically, rep performs the replacement on matching lines, and the replacement is previewed in the form that we’re used to reviewing to determine whether a change is correct: A diff.

ren takes a similar approach but for file renaming. The output of find (or fd) can be piped to ren, so a command looks like this: find *foo* | ren foo bar. ren also displays diff output by default, and writes the changes with -w.

Acknowledgements

• The idea for rep was inspired by wgrep for Emacs, which allows editing of a grep results in a buffer, and writing those changes to the source files.
• The structure of the source code, and much of the functionality, was borrowed from sd, rep and ren both started as forks of sd.
• The code for specifying a custom pager for both rep and ren came from the source code for delta`.

With software, I’m always trying to pick winners. I mainly care about the big apps¹: the Photoshops, the Excels, the NLEs, DAWs, IDEs. Software people spend their whole day in, that can take a lifetime to learn, that a career can be built on. I’m interested in picking winners for these apps because they’re powerful and they’re hard to learn. So if I’m going to learn one, I want to be sure I pick the right one.

I say this upfront because it means when I’m talking about software transitions, I’m mainly talking about that kind of software, industry-leading creative software, and not, say, the next big social networking platform. It also means I’m mainly talking about desktop software, because this kind of software doesn’t have any traction on mobile.

I’ve been watching this kind of software for a long time, looking for trends, ideally based on any market share numbers I find. Over time I’ve noticed something interesting: Transitions in this kind of software almost always happen in the same way. In particular they happen quickly. And once they get going, they always seem to take roughly the same amount of time. I call this the “Five-Year Rule”. The rule is simple: Either a new piece of software will become the market leader in about five years, or it never will.

In this piece we’ll look at a five transitions closely. It’s notable that for the kind of software I’m interested in, these are the only transitions I’m aware of. Five isn’t very many for the ~35 year history of creative software. For each transition, I’ve listed the years I consider the transition to have taken place over. These vary in confidence level, in particular the farther I go back, the less data I tend to have, so choosing the years involves more guesswork.

The Transitions

1. PageMaker to QuarkXPress: 1987–1993 (6 Years)
2. QuarkXPress to InDesign: 1999–2005 (6 Years)
3. Photoshop to Sketch: 2010–2015 (5 Years)
4. Sketch to Figma: 2015–2020 (5 Years)
5. The Rise of Visual Studio Code: 2015–2018 (3 Years)

Appendix Transitions

There’s an appendix section at the end where we look at a few more transitions that I also found interesting, but that don’t fit the mold of professional creative software that we’re looking at in the main transitions.

1. The PC Revolution: 1989–1994 (5 Years)
2. The Rise of Google Chrome: 2015–2018 (3 Years)
3. Subversion to Git: 2005–2010 (5 Years)

Do Software Transitions Even Actually Happen?

The answer here is of course yes, many of us who follow software are fresh off the transition from Photoshop to Figma (for user-interface design). But things aren’t as straightforward with this transition as they seem. For example, today Photoshop is still likely more popular overall than Figma, with ~30 million Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers versus Figma’s ~4 million users. It’s hard to wrap your head around the supposed loser in a transition still being more popular than the winner.

I started thinking about this question, of whether software transitions ever really happen, when I noticed just how common it was for the most popular application in a category to still be the very first application that was ever released in that category, or, they became the market leader so long ago that they might as well have been. The Adobe Creative Cloud is a hotbed of the former: After Effects (1993, Mac), Illustrator (1987, Mac), Photoshop (1990, Mac), Premiere (1991, Mac), and Lightroom (2007, Mac/Windows) are all market leaders that were also first in their category. Microsoft Excel (1987, Mac) and Word (1983, Windows) are examples of the latter, applications that weren’t first but became market leaders so long ago they might as well be (PowerPoint [1987, Mac] is another example of the former).

Software of course has a reputation of being fast-moving, so I’m surprised at how little things have changed. The obvious explanation is that it’s hard to get people to switch from software that’s hard to learn (because they’ve already invested so much time and energy into learning the software they’re currently using). But I don’t find this explanation fully satisfying, since when transitions do happen, they happen very quickly, which seems to indicate that when something truly better comes along there isn’t any hesitancy about jumping ship.

Methodology

We’re going to look at some major transitions that happened in major creative software. The process of looking at these transitions is not scientific, “the Five-Year Rule” is really just a loose rule of thumb. It’s an observation about how transitions always seem to happen over a similar time frames, but everything about this evaluation process is fuzzy. For example, when do you mark the start date of a transition? I usually use the first release date of the software, but sometimes that doesn’t make sense. Take for example the current rise of DaVinci Resolve, Resolve was originally released in 2004, but for most of it’s lifetime it was a more specialized tool focused on color grading (and only had 100 users in 2009). Later Resolve was acquired by Blackmagc Design, who both reduced the price and added functionality to make it function as a standalone NLE (e.g., comparable other NLEs like Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro) with version 11 in 2014. In this case, 2014 makes more sense as the start date for the transition in NLE’s, and using that date it roughly follows the five-year rule:

The software had a user base of more than 2 million using the free version alone as of January 2019.[90] This is a comparable user base to Apple’s Final Cut Pro X, which also had 2 million users as of April 2017.

Then there’s the question of determining when a transition has occurred. To do this, I relied on market share numbers when available (looking for the date when an up-and-coming application overtakes the dominant player in popularity) usually from informal surveys conducted online. When no data is available, I resorted to anecdotal accounts I could find online. This is of course inherently flawed, but it seems like enough to make the case for a rough rule of thumb.

The Transitions

Transitions From the Design World

All the best software transitions are from the design world. This is because design as an industry consolidates around single applications for each category (for example, Figma for user-interface design, and InDesign for print design). I’m not sure why this is, but I think a contributing factor is that design is unique relative to most other creative fields, in that the designers output generally is not the final product, e.g., a design in Figma needs to actually be implemented separately in software. Whereas say, when editing a video, the exported video is the final product.

PageMaker to QuarkXPress

QuarkXPress goes from being it’s introduction in 1987 to 95% market share during the 1990s.

PageMaker 7.0 running on Mac OS 9

Aldus PageMaker was the first widely-used desktop publishing app. Three events happened in quick succession which ushered in the desktop publishing revolution:

1. 1984: The debut of the Apple Macintosh
2. 1985: The debut of the Apple LaserWriter
3. 1985: The release of Aldus PageMaker

Soon after, QuarkXPress (1987, Mac) was released and began its ascent. There’s not much information available about this transition, but QuarkXPress version 5, released in 1990, appears to be the turning point. By 1994, when Adobe purchased Aldus, QuarkXPress was considered the dominate application by a wide margin.

The transition appears to roughly follow the five-year rule: QuarkXPress had 95% market share in the 1990s which makes it likely that by 1992 it had already surpassed PageMaker, the pattern that the five year rule predicts.

With that said, this isn’t a great example of a transition because it happened so early after the invention of desktop publishing, which means a PageMaker hadn’t really had enough time to become firmly entrenched yet. Transitions are the most interesting when they overcome the inertia an application has when it truly owns a category. This transition was included anyway because it helps set the stage for the next couple of transitions, which are also in the desktop publishing industry.

QuarkXPress to InDesign

QuarkXPress loses its dominate market position to Adobe InDesign over the course of about six years.

QuarkXPress

It’s hard to overstate how dominant QuarkXPress’s position was as the industry leader for desktop publishing software in the 1990s. For example, in 1998 Quark made an offer to buy Adobe.

But we don’t talk much about QuarkXPress today, it’s fall being so great that it’s drifted into irrelevance. I’ve always considered this the canonical software transition, because it went from being so dominate, to so rarely used. It happened long enough ago that it’s a story woven into the fabric of computing history.

How did InDesign beat QuarkXPress? It starts with our old friend PageMaker, and its parent company Aldus. Adobe purchased Aldus² in 1995, with the intent of taking on QuarkXPress. InDesign was based on the source code to a successor to PageMaker Aldus had begun developing in-house and was first released in 1999:

[Adobe] continued to develop a new desktop publishing application. Aldus had begun developing a successor to PageMaker, which was code-named “Shuksan”. Later, Adobe code-named the project “K2”, and Adobe released InDesign 1.0 in 1999.

At the time, Quark had a reputation of having become complacent, making user hostile decisions just assuming their customers would go along with it. Dean Allen describes customers animosity towards Quark:

Pagemaker [sic], a crash-prone beast with a counterintuitive interface and slow as molasses in winter, was eventually bought by Adobe, whereupon everyone stopped using it and its unofficial name (‘Pagefucker’) took on common usage. This sent Quark flinging toward its destiny: to become a hostile monopoly spinning around in circles of pointless development, embracing dead-end technologies only to abandon customers once profitability proved unlikely, hobbling their own products with draconian antipiracy measures, signing unbendable licensing agreements in blood with newspaper chains, joining up with enemy Adobe to squish Quickdraw GX (one of many promising standards that actually showed a glimpse, at great development cost, of how sophisticated graphic design on computers could be before withering and dying once Quark said no thanks), and of course pissing off customers who paid a fortune for the privilege. And still it made horribly, horribly typeset pages.

Then there’s the bit where Quark bet against Mac OS X, Dave Girard for Ars Technica has an in-depth piece on the decline QuarkXPress that contains a choice quote from Quark CEO Fred Ebrahimi:

Quark repeatedly failed to make OS X-native versions of XPress—spanning versions 4.1, 5, and 6—but the company still asked for plenty of loot for the upgrades. With user frustration high with 2002’s Quark 5, CEO Fred Ebrahimi salted the wounds by taunting users to switch to Windows if they didn’t like it, saying, “The Macintosh platform is shrinking.” Ebrahimi suggested that anyone dissatisfied with Quark’s Mac commitment should “switch to something else.”

In 2003, after a few years of development of InDesign, John Gruber at Daring Fireball posted about InDesign vs. QuarkXPress:

Competition was restored when Adobe launched InDesign, which offers vastly superior typographic features than does QuarkXPress. But QuarkXPress still dominates the industry, even though InDesign:

• has been out for several years;
• is widely-hailed as a superior product;
• costs less;
• reads QuarkXPress documents; and
• comes from a company people actually like

Daring Fireball continued to post about QuarkXPress and InDesign, and reading the chronology of the subsequent posts traces a nice little history of InDesign overtaking QuarkXPress:

• 2003: “InDesign hasn’t taken more of the market away from Quark”

  I’m not quite sure why this is, that “InDesign hasn’t taken more of the market away from Quark”. My best guess is that when Quark knocked off PageMaker, the industry was still nascent; but during the 90’s it matured and atrophied around Quark. InDesign may not be too little, but it might have been too late.

• 2005: “InDesign is clearly winning the horse race”:

  Another interesting market share story is the relative position of Quark and InDesign. InDesign is clearly winning the horse race, with sales up 37%, while Quark book sales declined 35%.

• 2006: He doesn’t know “a single designer who hasn’t switched to InDesign”:

  I personally don’t know a single designer who hasn’t switched to InDesign.

InDesign was released in 1999, so 1999–2006 is seven years, which is close enough for the accuracy we’re shooting for with the five-year rule. But that’s tracking until QuarkXPress has almost disappeared, whereas the five-year rule really tries to predict when the new player overtakes the original dominant player in popularity, which has happened earlier than that. Without any market share data to go on, we’ll just have to take a guess as to when that might have happened. For the purposes of this piece, I said six years, which is close enough accuracy for the five year rule.

InDesign

Photoshop to Sketch

Sketch becomes the most popular user-interface design tool, overtaking Photoshop over the course of about five years.

While the QuarkXPress and InDesign transitions feel like ancient history, Photoshop to Sketch still feels fresh. There’s so much mind share around this transition, and even more so for the subsequent transition from Sketch to Figma, that they feel bound to be the new default case studies in software transitions.

Before getting into the history of Sketch itself, it’s important to quickly note the history of Fireworks, the dedicated design application that Adobe acquired as part of the the Macromedia acquisition in 2005. After the acquisition, development of Fireworks was quickly paused, citing too much overlap with Photoshop, it was later officially discontinued in 2013, but it had been considered long dead before that with designers.

Fireworks is important to mention because, while it never really set the world on fire, it had already demonstrated interest in a dedicated design app, and when it was discontinued a vacuum was left that Sketch was able to capitalize on. If you’re looking for where unexpected innovations will come from, look for areas of neglect.

Sketch was first release in 2010³, but that’s not where its history begins, before Sketch, the company behind Sketch, Bohemian Coding, had a vector drawing app called DrawIt that would form its basis.

I worked as a user-interface designer at the time when Sketch was released, and at the time, Photoshop’s hold on the user-interface design market tenuous. User-interface designers only used a tiny portion of Photoshop’s features (mainly vector drawing tools and layer effects). The idea to break out those features into a separate, dedicated-design, app seemed was in the ether at the time (followed by adding some user-interface design specific features, like symbols). Adding fuel to the fire, around this time apps had begun leveraging the OS X Core Image and Core Graphics frameworks to make raster image editing apps replicating the functionality of Photoshop, like Pixelmator and Acorn. It seemed like only a matter of time until these same frameworks were leveraged to make a user-interface design app.

Sketch it made a splash with its initial release, but the inflection point was really the release of Sketch 3 in 2014⁴, which included a key feature: Symbols. Symbols are re-usable components, an important feature when designing user-interfaces which usually require repeating the same element in different contexts with slight variations (e.g., picture the same button but with different text). By the Subtraction Design Tools Survey in 2015, Sketch had received the most votes as the designer’s tool of choice, beating out Photoshop by 5%.

How was Sketch able to disrupt a behemoth application like Photoshop? That had owned the design space for so long? On one hand, it was just focus: Photoshop is a photo editor first and foremost, using it for design was always a bit of a hack. But something else happened that paved the way for the rise of Sketch, and later Figma: Flat design.

Apple announced iOS 7 in 2013, radically changing the user-interface design of iOS. Before flat design, Apple had been pushing a skeumorphic style simulating real-world objects using rich textures and whimsical animations. Photoshop, which combined rich bitmap editing features with vector editing tools, was a much better fit for the skeumorphic style than the austere flat design.

Wikipedia’s iOS 6 and iOS 7 screenshots side-by-side

Review for iPad, an app I designed during the skeumorphic era

I think it’s underappreciated just how bizarre the change from skeumorphic to flat design was to the design tool market. For the capabilities that a software package requires to serve a market to suddenly reduce so drastically was unprecedented. It’s like if 3D modeling software suddenly didn’t care about realistic textures and lighting. Of course that would open up the market to being disrupted. The priorities of the software have changed dramatically, making room for new approaches. An opportunity that more nimble startups would be best positioned to capitalize on while the larger software packages, who already have a lot of customers depending on their existing feature set, would be slower to adapt.

To top it all off, flat design also facilitated a new workflow for designers that Sketch was also able to capitalize on: Photoshop had always been used to actually export image assets that were then reassembled in code to create the design. Sketch (and later Figma) never really had to work this way, since flat design is mainly comprised of text, lines, and gradients, rather than textures, which can easily be created in code themselves, so don’t need to be exported⁵.

I’d argue that not needing to export assets is a larger change than it might seem like, because it changes which category user-interface design software fits into. For example, all of the other major applications in the Adobe Creative suite, like Premiere, Photoshop, and Illustrator, the final asset (the photo, the movie, the artwork) is actually exported from the application. In that way, Premiere, Photoshop, and Illustrator fit into a one category of sofware: Applications for making digital content. Figma and Sketch (outside of the occasional SVG export) are mainly software for communicating a design. In that way, they’re closer to presentation software like Keynote and PowerPoint, than they are to rest of the Adobe suite. Presentation software, like Sketch and Figma, are used to communicate ideas, not build the actual artifacts used to create digital content.

You can blame Adobe for missing the boat on user-interface design deserving their own tool, instead of shoehorning a photo editor for that purpose—I’d love to have been a fly on the wall in the decision to kill Fireworks for example—but it feels harder to fault them for not realizing that this new dedicated design tool would also be closer to Google Slides than to the other software in Adobe’s Creative Suite that’s their bread and butter like Premiere, Photoshop, and Illustrator.

Sketch to Figma

UI design tool popularity from the Subtraction Design Tools Survey (2015) and UX Tools (2016-2020)

This graph illustrates not just that Figma overtook Sketch over about five years (2015–2020), but also Sketch’s own five-year ascent to overtake Photoshop (since Sketch was released in 2010 and it starts out ahead in 2015).

Dylan Field and Evan Wallace started working on Figma in 2012, and it was initially released in 2016. Figma runs entirely in the browser, it has a 2D WebGL rendering engine, built in C++ and compiled to WebAssumbly, with user-interface elements implemented in React. This stack really excited a lot of people, because, before Figma there had never been a successful creative app that was a web app. After seeing The Matrix, film director Darren Aronofsky’s asked “what kind of science fiction movie can people make now?”. Similarly, after the success of Figma, startup founders have been asking “what kinds of software can be made as web apps now?” So far the answer has been “not many”, I’m not aware of a single other startup that has fulfilled this promise⁶.

As was mentioned at the end of the PageMaker to QuarkXPress section, it’s actually quite common for transitions to happen soon after the introduction of a new software category, before an application has time to become firmly entrenched in actually owning a category. For example, Microsoft Word came four years after WordPerfect, and Microsoft Excel came eight years after VisiCalc. There’s a “primordial ooze” phase right after a new category emerges where lack of product maturity means it’s relatively easy for new players to enter a category until a dominant player emerges. Sure, it’s still interesting to look at the factors that determined which application becomes successful through that process, but what’s more interesting is when an application has had time to become entrenched and then gets supplanted. In this case, the entrenched application was Photoshop, and the application responsible for supplanting it was Sketch, not Figma.

In the section on Photoshop to Sketch, we discussed an underappreciated factor in Sketch’s, and by extension, Figma’s, success: That flat design shifted the category of design software from professional creative software to something more akin to an office suite app (presentation software, like Google Slides, being the closest sibling). By the time work was starting on Figma in 2012, office suite software had already been long available and popular on the web, Google Docs was first released in 2006. This explains why no other application has been able to follow in Figma’s footsteps by bringing creative software to the web: Figma didn’t blaze a trail for other professional creative software to move to the web, instead Sketch blazed a trail for design software to become office suite software, a category that was already successful on the web.

Another factor that’s rarely mentioned in Figma’s success is that co-founder and former CTO Evan Wallace appears to me to be a once in a generation programmer, deserving to be on a short list with the likes of Ken Thompson, Linus Torvalds, and John Carmack. Figma itself is evidence of Wallace’s skill, especially since no other company seems to be able to make another web app that feels as nice. It’s rare for a technical implementation to act as a moat, but that appears to be what has happened with Figma. For evidence of how widespread the architecture Wallace pioneered for Figma is expanding, Google Docs is switching to canvas-based rendering. I’m also struck by the startling beauty of some of his early work that predates Figma, like this gorgeous WebGL water simulation presumably done while Wallace was studying computer graphics at Brown University. Then there’s esbuild, a JavaScript bundler like webpack, with amazing performance. The homepage for esbuild sports this graph:

There’s a point at which the magnitude of the performance improvements starts to show contempt for your competitors, and esbuild crosses that line. Wallace left Figma at the end of 2021, less than a year before Adobe’s acquisition of Figma was announced in 2022.

The Rise of Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code, first released in 2015, becomes the most popular text editor by 2018, over the course of just three years.

I’ve already written about the rise of Visual Studio Code. In some ways the rise of VS Code is similar to Figma, in that another, earlier, trailblazer first disrupted the market, before they came in and really took over. In Figma’s case it was Sketch, and in VS Code’s case it’s Atom, released a year before VS Code in 2014. Atom illustrated that there was a market for an open-source web-based text editor built around extensions⁷. VS Code took that formula and solved the main problem that held it back: Performance. Atom was known as being slow, and VS Code has a reputation of being snappy in comparison.

Conclusion

I looked at six examples of software transitions of big creative apps, starting with tracing the history of print design, then transitions from the user-interface design world, and finally the rise of Visual Studio Code. In this, imperfect, but hopefully still useful, analysis, all of those transitions took between three and six years with an average (and median) of five years.

When I started out writing this piece, there were a few things I wanted to illustrate. The first was that transitions even happen at all with big creative software that’s firmly entrenched in an industry. There’s a perception that most of the preference for one application over another just comes down to path dependence. And there’s a lot to that argument, these kinds of applications⁸ often have whole asset pipelines built around them⁹. But if we can illustrate that transitions do happen, then perhaps it’s less about inertia and more about the relative merits of different software packages? In the end, I found evidence of this lukewarm at best. Out of the five transitions I looked at: two of them (PageMaker to QuarkXPress and Sketch to Figma) are “primordial ooze” transitions, i.e., transitions that happened early enough after the creation of a new software category that there wasn’t enough time for path dependence to become a factor. That leaves just three transitions: QuarkXPress to InDesign, Photoshop to Sketch, and the Rise of Visual Studio Code. That’s not very many for ~35 year old industry¹⁰.

Another reason I wrote this piece is to illustrate where transitions are unlikely to happen. A lot of software just hums along with lower usage numbers, and yet I often see people commenting on how it’s on a path to disrupt an industry. But I don’t think an application humming along at lower usage numbers has ever ended up disrupting an industry. That doesn’t mean it can’ be a great business, but Adobe (the company that comes up again and again in this piece) has ~26,000 employees. The question is what scale the software will operate at. Ableton has ~350 employees and Maxon has ~300, anecdotally it seems like a lot of software categories can operate at 100> employees, but 100+ really requires owning a market of some kind.

Overall my conclusion is that what accounts for the rarity of transitions is that for a transition to happen, one of two pre-conditions need to happen that are completely outside of the control of the new piece of software: One is that the existing market leader has to make a major mistake. QuarkXPress betting against OS X for the print industry, and Adobe killing there design-focused tool Fireworks, are examples of this. The second is that a fundamental shift to the industry can happen, the rise of flat design coinciding with the ascent of Sketch is an example of this. Similarly, with the rise of web-based software on the list (VS Code and Figma), a technical groundwork had to be in place before these could become viable. For example, for Figma to create their web-based performant graphics engine, WebGL (initial release in 2011) and asm.js (initial release in 2013) both had to be in place.

In the end, just building a great software product is not enough to lead to a transition, you also need the incumbent market leader to make a mistake, or market conditions to fundamentally change (often due to new technology breakthroughs), and preferably both.

Appendix

In the appendix I’ll look at a few more interesting transitions that don’t fit in the narrow category of professional creative software.

The PC Revolution

Client-Server Architecture usage at businesses goes from 20% to over 50% in four years from 1989 to 1992.

The PC revolution had a several phases. There’s the introduction mass market computers like the Apple II, but that was an introduction not a transition (i.e., people buying a computer for the first time, not switching from one kind of computer to another), so it’s less relevant to this piece. What’s more relevant is the transition from predominantly centralized computing (e.g., a mainframes or minicomputers), to the client-server model, where the client and server are both commodity PCs (under the centralized computing model, terminals and mainframes are radically different architectures).

This transition is of course distant history. I’m mainly relying on one source: A paper titled Technical Progress and Co-invention in Computing and in the Uses of Computers by Timothy Bresnahan (Stanford University) and Shane Greenstein (University of Illinois), published in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity in 1996.

The focus of Bresnahan and Greenstein’s paper isn’t about why companies were transitioning from mainframes to client-server, it takes the stance of assuming the switch is inevitable, and is more concerned about what might slow it down, given the advantages were obvious. Here’s how they described the advantages of the client-server model:

Client/server computing emerged as a viable solution to the problem by promising to combine the power of traditional mainframe systems with the ease of use of personal computers (PCs). A network could permit the functions of a business system to be divided between powerful “servers” and easy to use “clients.” By the late 1980s the promise of C/S was articulated and demonstrated in prototypes, and the competitive impact was quick and powerful. Firms selling traditional large-scale computer systems saw dramatic falls in sales, profits, and market value.

As to what slowed down the switch, Bresnahan and Greenstein mainly attribute this to the additional cost of “co-invention”: The additional work required by businesses to adapt the new computing model to their needs (distinguished from “invention”, because this work is done by the businesses themselves):

Despite the speed and ambition of this technical progress, C/S did not become strictly better than mainframes. Instead, by the mid-1990s, each platform had distinct advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, pre-existing data and programs for large applications were (necessarily) on host-based systems. If newly developed applications were simply improvements to the old, then there would be cost advantages to continuity. If new applications also needed to interact with the old programs or data, even greater advantage would arise. Finally, even with many technical problems solved, C/S still called for co-invention, which was potentially costly and time consuming, especially for complex applications. Hence, some users were going to switch cautiously, if at all.

Figuring out how long the transition from mainframes to the client-server model took is more difficult than with software, because there isn’t a clear date to mark the start of the transition. With software, we can use the first release date of the software, but with something like the client-server model, which had many moving parts evolving together to eventually create a compelling package, there isn’t an obvious start date. Bresnahan and Greenstein choose 1989 as the start date, because in their words, “before 1989 workstations and personal computers could no more replace mainframes than could the people of Lilliput wrestle Gulliver to the ground.”

The sample of companies and their distribution of mainframe versus client-server over time.

Client-server starts out at about 20% in 1989¹¹, and the sum mixed of mainframe and client-server businesses and all client-server businesses surpasses all mainframe in 1992, so that’s four years¹².

The Rise of Google Chrome

Google Chrome is introduced in 2008 and becomes the most popular browser five years later in 2013.

One of the most popular transitions to discuss is browser market share because it’s so impactful. The browser popularity has special significance because the browser is an application that runs other applications, and therefore determines a lot about the fate of the web apps that run in the browser.

Additionally, through the very nature of the browser, it’s very easy to collect market share data. The main use of the browser is to access arbitrary remote servers, so all you need to do collect market share numbers is for some of those servers to record which browser is being used to access the site. A number of different sites have done that over the years.

Browser usage data aggregated from the *Usage share of web browsers* Wikipedia page¹³ which includes data from several different sources.

Firefox (released in 2002) once looked like it was on a trajectory to become the market leader. If it had, it would have been the slowest transitions in this piece. But it didn’t, instead it plateaued almost immediately when Google Chrome was released in 2008. An interesting question is if Chrome hadn’t come along, would Firefox eventually have become the market leader? I don’t really have an answer to that question, but the five-year rule would say no, that the transition was happening too slowly, a more likely outcome is that the market opportunity (in this case created by the stagnation of Internet Explorer) would be capitalized on by a more aggressive player that completes the transition over the course of roughly five years, which is exactly what happened.

Chrome’s rise is a textbook example of the five year rule, released in 2008¹⁴ and becoming most popular browser in 2013. Google themselves have a wonderful comic with words from the Chrome team and illustrations by Scott McCloud (of Understanding Comics fame). The overall message is that the browser was originally designed for sharing documents, but that the web had moved towards serving applications, instead of documents, so Chrome is a browser designed from the ground up to serve applications. The features they emphasize are operating-system-style process isolation (an innovation that is now standard across all browsers), a new JavaScript VM (V8) built from the ground-up for web apps (e.g., introducing JIT compilation, a user-interface focused around tabs (e.g., the Omnibox), and incognito mode.

Subversion to Git

git is introduced in 2005 and the total number of repositories using git overtakes Apache Subversion nine years later in 2014. But I’d argue more developers were using git for their work in five years, by 2010.

The total number of repositories using Subversion vs. git. The data was collected by Ohloh, now called Black Duck Open Hub, a site that “aims to index the open-source software development community”. The data was sourced the data from a summary on StackExchange.

Linus Torvalds began developing git in 2005 to manage the source code for the Linux kernel as a replacement for BitKeeper after a messy situation with BitMover, the parent company behind BitKeeper. The key features that have made git successful are it’s distributed nature (history is mirrored on every user’s computer, instead of only being hosted remotely), it’s speed, and the simplicity of its architecture. GitHub, the hosting service for git repositories, launched in 2008, further paving the way for git to become by far the most popular version control system today. According to the 2021 Stack Overflow heDeveloper Survey, git is used by 93% of developers.

The Ohloh data at first appears to illustrate that git took a long time to overtake Subversion (note that the graph starts at 2009 while git was first released in 2005, so there’s really four years missing to the left that we simply don’t have data for). But it’s important to note Ohloh is measuring the total number of repositories using git, whereas the other surveys are measuring which software users report that they’re actually using for their work. In other words, Ohloh is tracking every project that has ever been created in a version control system, when we actually want to track which system is being used more often.

Tracking the number of Stack Overflow questions about different version control systems over time probably maps more closely to which version control system is actually being used. This data shows git overtaking Subversion in 2010, five years after git was first released.

Stack Overflow Trends changes in questions about version control systems over time.

When I first saw Codespaces, I immediately wanted it. With ubiquitous high-speed internet, why not offload more work to the cloud? What could our devices look like if most of their power came from the server? What would their battery life be like?

Seamlessly leveraging remote resources has always felt like an idea that’s just around the corner, but never arrives. Just having a big beefy machine on site usually ends up being the most practical solution (outside of some specialized use cases)¹.

Codespaces is perhaps the biggest play ever to take remote development more mainstream. Development has always been a prime candidate for remote computing, because with time-sharing machines, it’s how the roots of programming itself began².

Visual Studio Online to GitHub Codespaces

GitHub Codespaces began as a different product, called Visual Studio Online. Visual Studio Online was announced on the Visual Studio Blog in November 2019. Then, in April 2020, it was renamed to Visual Studio Codespaces, Nik Molnar described the motivation behind the name change on the same blog:

We learned that developers are finding Visual Studio Online to be much more than just an “editor in the browser”. They are saying that “the capabilities of this cloud-hosted dev environment make it the space where I want to write all my code“.

To better align with that sentiment, and the true value of the service, we’re renaming Visual Studio Online to Visual Studio Codespaces.

A few days later, a corresponding announcement appeared on the GitHub blog that Codespaces was coming to GitHub. Then, almost a year later in September 2020, it was announced on the Visual Studio Blog that Visual Studio Codespaces would be consolidated into GitHub Codespaces, and that Visual Studio Codespaces would be retired in February 2021.

Visual Studio Codespaces was similar to GitHub Codespaces, but it did have some key differences. Visual Studio Codespaces wore more of its implementation details on its sleeve, in particular, as being built on top of Microsoft Azure. When you setup a Visual Studio Codespaces, it was linked to an Azure subscription and location, and you chose a “Default Instance Type” for new codespaces³.

The decision to remove these details from GitHub Codespaces, and provide quick access to launch a codespace from a repository, was highlighted in the announcement letter about shutting down Visual Studio Codespaces in favor of GitHub Codespaces:

During the preview we’ve learned that transitioning from a repository to a codespace is the most critical piece of your workflow and the vast majority of you preferred a richly integrated, native, one-click experience.

This is a great example of iterative product design. From a practical perspective, Visual Studio Codespaces is essentially the same product as GitHub Codespaces (and GitHub Codespaces is presumably also running on Azure), but hiding the virtual machine implementation details makes GitHub Codespaces feel different, and a bit more revolutionary⁴.

Tour

Once you’re in the Codespaces beta, a “Codespaces” item appears in the navigation menu when you click your user icon in the upper right⁵. Click it, and you’re brought to a screen where you can manage the Codespaces you’ve already created, including removing them by clicking “Delete” under the three disclosure dots.

Every repository also has an “Open with Codespaces” option, which can either create a new Codespace or open an existing one for that repository.

After opening a codespace, you’re brought to a browser window running Visual Studio Code. It works similarly enough to the desktop version that it’s practically indistinguishable⁶.

Alternatively, you can connect to the codespace directly from the desktop version of VS Code by using the Visual Studio Codespaces extension. The extension adds a “Remote Explorer” icon to the Activity Bar where you can connect to, and manage, your codespaces.

The About Codespaces section of the documentation explains a couple of details about the relationship between codespaces are repositories:

Each codespace is associated with a specific branch of a repository. You can create more than one codespace per repository or even per branch. However, each user account has a two-codespace limit during limited public beta.

Implementation Details

Codespaces uses Docker containers to setup development environments. GitHub and Microsoft calls a running codespace a “development container” presumably after Docker containers, emphasizing their close relationship.

Regarding what’s running locally, and what’s running in the development container, the Remote Development FAQ describes how the user-interface runs locally, i.e., in the browser or VS Code app, while a separate process running on the server (“VS Code Server”) handles the operations that need to happen on the server, such as file system access:

The VS Code Server is quickly installed by VS Code when you connect to a remote endpoint and can host extensions that interact directly with the remote workspace, machine, and file system.

The FAQ also includes this handy diagram illustrating what’s running on the server and what’s running locally:

Whether extensions runs locally or on the development container depends on whether they “contribute to the VS Code user interface”. If they do, they’re called “UI Extensions” and run locally, if they don’t, they’re called “Workspace Extensions” and run on the server.

Whether extensions are UI Extensions or not, they’re all installed on the development container at the path ~/.vscode-remote/extensions/:

% ls ~/.vscode-remote/extensions/
castwide.solargraph-0.21.1
davidanson.vscode-markdownlint-0.37.0
dbaeumer.vscode-eslint-2.1.8
dbankier.vscode-quick-select-0.2.9
eamodio.gitlens-10.2.2
editorconfig.editorconfig-0.15.1
...

The Rise of Virtualization

The story of server-side infrastructure over the last couple of decades is the story of the rise of virtualization, and, its sibling, containerization. Both are ways of abstracting the hardware away from the software running on it, which has some powerful benefits. It makes it easier add or remove hardware at will, for example, which simplifies scaling. It also facilitates automating configuration, which eases deployment. Both of these qualities of virtualization are leveraged by Codespaces.

AWS, Azure, Docker, Heroku, and Kubernetes are all examples of services or technologies that leverage virtualization or containerization. It’s also the backbone of most CI/CD and serverless systems. While virtualization has revolutionized the server-side, it hasn’t had much impact on development environments outside of specialized use cases.

There are two, equally valid, ways of seeing the origins of Codespaces: one, is as a natural extension of an editor that began as a browse-based version of Visual Studio (formerly called “Visual Studio Online” now “Azure DevOps Services”), the other is as another step in the march of virtualization revolutionizing every aspect of development. These could even be considered the same story: Azure DevOps Services is of course also built on virtualization.

The Promise of Remote Development

Just being able to quickly spin up a remote development machine from git repo to make an open source contribution, or to get a quick development environment to spelunk into a dependency’s implementation details, is already enough benefit to make Codespaces popular. But the ceiling of Codespaces’ success hinges on how useful it is for day-to-day development.

On the VS Code blog, the vision is expressed with admirable restraint, focusing on the benefits for large code bases and data models requiring “massive storage and compute services”:

Because the code bases are so large, we see engineers at shops like Facebook (and Microsoft!) use editors like vim to work remotely against secure and powerful “developer VMs”, using alternative cloud-based search and navigation services that scale beyond what even the best laptop can handle.

Data Scientists building and training data models often need massive storage and compute services to analyze large datasets that can’t be stored or processed even on a robust desktop.

In Facebook’s later announcement of their partnership with Microsoft on remote development, the advantages are expressed in broader terms, suggesting that “any developer can gain” from remote development:

As Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code team stated when they first released the remote extensions, remote development is an emerging trend. While our use cases may be more advanced than most development teams given our scale, any developer can gain the benefits of remote development:

• Work with larger, faster, or more specialized hardware than what’s available on your local machine
• Create tailored, dedicated environments for each project’s specific dependencies, without worrying about errors due to mixed or conflicting configurations
• Support the flexibility of being able to quickly switch between multiple running development environments without impacting local resources or tool performance

Those are compelling advantages that most developers could benefit from. So what are the chances of Codespaces supplanting local development, not just for specialized use cases, but developer’s day-to-day work on their main project?

Remote development isn’t new, it’s been around since the dawn of programming, and VS Code already has best-in-class support for it. But remote development in VS Code, while frequently praised, hasn’t moved the needle much on its own for day-to-day development. Which means we can look at the advantages of remote development that VS Code already had before Codespaces, and note that they probably won’t be enough on their own to make remove development more popular. Here are the often cited advantages of remote development before Codespaces:

1. Developing in the same server environment that production code runs in.
2. Using more powerful hardware.
3. Accessing the same development environment from any machine.

In addition to those advantages, Codespaces has a new trick up it’s sleeve: Automatically setting up development environments when a new codespace is created, by installing dependencies via Docker⁷. In other words, Codespaces brings the same automated configuration advantages to the development side that virtualization and containerization have already brought to the deployment side. Configuring development environments is surprisingly complex, and subtle differences between manually-configured development machines creates its own problems.

It remains to be seen whether reproducible development environments is enough of a draw to move more developers over to remote development, but it’s certainly a compelling solution to a real problem.

Finally, there’s another important trait about Codespaces: It works with locked-down devices, like iPads, which normally can’t download and execute source code due to App Store Review Guideline 2.5.2. It also doesn’t require source code to be checked out locally, which many companies already consider a big security risk. These advantages will likely make some developers uncomfortable, those that see current computing trends as the gradual erosion of user freedoms, but the purpose of this piece is to predict the impact Codespaces will have on the development process, and that it aligns well with both the direction some devices are going, and many company’s security goals, are both important traits to consider.

Remote Development in Practice

Codespaces creates a fairly convincing illusion of working locally⁸. This is especially true when using the VS Code app with the Codespaces extension. Performing tasks like editing text, project-wide find-and-replace, or file management in the Explorer don’t exhibit any major differences from editing files locally.

One of VS Code’s best tricks is automatically forwarding ports for URLs printed in the console when connected to a remote machine. If, for example, a server process prints 127.0.0.1:3000 (because it’s running on port 3000) then port 3000 is automatically be forwarded to your local machine. You can then open that URL in a local browser window (or just ⌘-click the URL in the console), just like you would be able to if the server process were running locally⁹. This is another example of how VS Code creates the illusion of working locally.

But there are some situations where the illusion breaks down. Developing offline is obviously no longer an option. Another example is that when developing remotely, VS Code becomes the only easy way to edit files. If you want to edit a bitmap in Photoshop, or open a CSV file in Excel, you’ll have to figure out another way of doing so.

The vastness of VS Code’s ecosystem is an interesting tangent to explore from the limitation of not only being able to edit files with anything besides VS Code. There are extensions for tasks like editing raster graphics, a Draw.io editor for diagrams, and a tabular data viewer. If you squint, VS Code starts to look more like a general purpose platform, rather than just a text editor. The fact that this platform provides in many ways a better experience than say, VNC, is quite powerful¹⁰.

The Draw.io Integration VS Code extension by Henning Dieterichs

Setting up and tearing down development environments at will, which Codespaces encourages, also has its downsides. If your development environment requires installing a lot of additional tools, such as compilers, linters, and other shell tools, then those tools will all need to be installed each time you create a new codespace. While Codespaces’ dotfiles support can automate this, having more dependencies will make it take longer to spin up a new codespace.

Finally, the last issue I observed while using Codespaces is that each project being in its own codespace makes it harder to make changes spanning multiple projects. This comes up when performing maintenance tasks (like updating continuous integration settings for several projects at once), making changes that span multiple projects (like many an API change and then updating consumers of that API), or even just trying to search through several projects to find a piece of code I know I’ve already written, but I don’t know where. These are all problems where organizing projects in the file-system hierarchy makes it easier to work on several related projects at once. But with Codespaces, every project is an island¹¹.

It’s also worth mentioning that there are many types of development that Codespaces isn’t applicable for at all. Anything that needs access to local hardware, like mobile development, is obviously going to be out. The biggest audience for Codespaces is web developers (which not coincidentally, is the biggest audience of VS Code itself). Web development is a natural fit for remote development, since the deployment target of the project is also remote.

Conclusion

Codespaces provides enough utility that I suspect it will find its way into many, if not most, developers’ workflows. Just being able to open a Codespace to quickly explore, or make contributions to, a repository seems like enough to make it popular on its own. Not to mention being able to quickly edit a project from a machine that hasn’t been setup for development¹². But the question I find the most interesting is whether Codespaces also has the potential to replace local development entirely, at least for some kinds of developer (those that aren’t deploying to local hardware).

I don’t expect Codespaces to win over many longtime developers, who already have sophisticated development environments setup, since Codespaces’ biggest gains come from initially setting up those environments¹³. The real benefit from Codespaces comes from never having to setup those local development environments in the first place, ever, over the course of a career. So what will be more interesting to watch is when new developers join projects. Without Codespaces, their first task would be to setup their development environment. With Codespaces, they can just click a button and start coding. Will developers who start working this way ever get around to setting up local development environments?¹⁴

The most important thing I look for when choosing which tools to use is longevity. Learning software is an investment, and if you have to switch to another application later, you lose some of that investment.

In most software categories, choosing the software with longevity is easy, the most popular tools are usually the ones that have been around the longest. Microsoft Excel and Adobe Illustrator were both released in 1987 and, for the most part, they’ve remained the most popular software in their categories since then.

Text editors, on the other hand, are a software category where the most popular options are not the oldest. According to the Stack Overflow Annual Developer Survey, Sublime Text was the most popular text editor available on the Mac from 2015–2017. Sublime Text was released in 2008, a sprightly youth compared to Excel and Illustrator. Text editors have been a category with a lot of movement: In the last 20 years, TextMate, Sublime Text, and Atom have all been the text editor with the most momentum¹. For big complicated desktop software, has any other category ever had so much movement?

I believe the era of new text editors emerging and quickly becoming popular has now ended with Visual Studio Code. VS Code has reached unprecedented levels of popularity and refinement, laying a foundation that could mean decades of market dominance. If, like me, one of your priorities for your tools is longevity², then that means VS Code might be a great text editor to invest in learning today.

The case for VS Code’s longevity comes from several points we’ll cover in this piece:

1. Popularity: It’s crossed a popularity threshold that no earlier text editor in recent history has crossed.
2. The Text Editor as Platform: It’s the endgame of a revolution that saw text editors be remade around extensions.
3. Paradigm Transcendence: It’s transcended its paradigm as a desktop app by becoming a hosted web app, and even a reference implementation.
4. Company Management: It’s managed by a powerful tech company, and it’s being developed aggressively.

Popularity

VS Code is the most popular text editor today. It’s so popular, that it could be the most popular GUI programming tool of all time. Since 2015, Stack Overflow has included questions about text editors in their survey³. Back then Notepad++ was the most popular text editor, with 34.7% of respondents saying they were “likely to use it”. In the following years, the popularities of different text editors moved around a bit, but nothing ever broke the 40% mark. That is, until its most recent poll in 2019, when VS Code jumped to 50.7%. This was the second year in a row that VS Code increased by ~45%, this time jumping from 34.9% in 2018, where it had already been the most popular.

Text Editor Popularity 2015–2019

(Note that Stackoverflow started allowing multiple answers between 2015 and 2016, so I’d take the changes between those two years in particular with a grain of salt.)

The Text Editor as Platform

So VS Code is objectively wildly popular; the next point we’re going to look at is more qualitative. For the past couple of decades, text editors have been on a trajectory that I believe VS Code is the final representation of. This is the progression of text editors becoming platforms in their own right by increasing the role and capabilities of extensions. What follows is the history of this progression⁴.

Pre-2004: BBEdit, Emacs, and Vim

BBEdit, Emacs, and Vim are all great text editors in their own right, but they all have idiosyncrasies that (while beloved by people like me) prevent them from ever being the most popular text editor.

Emacs, and Vim’s predecessor Vi, were both first released in 1976, before many of todays user-interface conventions were solidified. Predating conventions like using a modifier key with Z, X, C, and V for undo, cut, copy, and paste (keyboard shortcuts that were popularized by the original Macintosh and Windows 1.0, released in 1984 and 1985 respectively). Neither Emacs⁵ or Vim use these keys, and instead use their own terminology. They both use the term “yank” for example (although to mean different things, it’s copy in Vim, and paste in Emacs).

BBEdit was released in 1992, around the time that some of the first GUI tools emerged that would become dynasties. Note the proximity to Excel (1987), Illustrator (1987), and Photoshop (1990). And just like those apps, BBEdit is still relevant today. But unlike those apps, it’s not the most popular in its category, by a wide margin. The reason seems to be at least partially that it never fully adapted to a world where text editors put so much emphasis on package-driven ecosystems.

2004: TextMate

TextMate, released in 2004, is arguably the most influential text editor ever. Among the numerous features it popularized are abbreviation-based snippets, automatic paired characters, and fuzzy finding by file name. All of these features became staples in every popular text editor that followed. The implementations of Scope Selectors and theming that TextMate pioneered have also formed the basis for themes and syntax highlighting in every subsequent popular text editor.

That’s already a lot to originate from a single app, but it still doesn’t even include TextMate’s most significant innovation; the one that would go on to re-shape text editors, solidify niche status for every text editor that came before it, and pave the way for VS Code to become the most popular text editor in history a decade later. TextMate’s most important innovation was that it was the first popular text editor that was primarily built around extensions.

While TextMate popularized the concept of a text editor built around extensions, in hindsight, it didn’t go far enough. TextMate’s extensions had limitations that later text editors would thrive by removing.

2008: Sublime Text

Sublime Text, released in 2008, popularized the minimap and multiple cursors. And unlike TextMate and BBEdit, it’s cross-platform, running on Linux, MacOS, and Windows, which helped it reach a wider audience than those editors. But Sublime Text’s biggest impact was greatly expanding the capabilities of extensions.

Sublime Text’s extensions run in an embedded Python runtime with an extensive API, unlike TextMate which uses the scripting languages built-in to macOS, and rather than having a proper extension API, mainly centers on processing standard out.

Sublime Text greatly expanded what extensions could do, allowing more sophisticated integrations such as linters that included GUI components. And Package Control, the enormously popular package manager for Sublime Text built by Will Bond⁶, features a centralized source for package management, reducing the friction to browse, install, and update packages; a model that all subsequent popular text editors would also adopt.

Even with Sublime Text’s expanded extensions, it still didn’t go far enough. Package Control wasn’t built-in, and, while Sublime Text does have an API, its use of Python with custom calls for GUI components still left room for future text editors to make extensions more accessible to build.

2014: Atom

Atom, released by GitHub in 2014, finally brings extensions to their final form. Atom’s package manager is built in⁷, displays extension READMEs complete with inline images (and early extensions made by GitHub themselves popularized the convention of using animated GIFs to illustrate functionality), creating an extension experience reminiscent of an app store.

Then there’s the matter of HTML and CSS⁸. Atom is built on Electron⁹, which means the editor itself is written in JavaScript and runs on Node¹⁰. Compared to Sublime Text’s Python API; HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are some of most widely-known languages in existence, which greatly lowers the barrier of entry for creating extensions.

Atom had essentially perfected the extension-based editor, there was just one problem: It’s slow. Performance complaints have plagued Atom since its release, and market ended up split with Sublime Text, which is lightning fast by comparison.

2015: Visual Studio Code

VS Code was released in 2015, based on the Monaco Editor that Microsoft had first released in 2013 that could be embedded into websites. When GitHub released Electron along with Atom. Microsoft used it to create a desktop version of the Monaco Editor called Visual Studio Code.

VS Code takes the same formula as Atom¹¹—a local web-based text editor written in Electron with an emphasis on extensions—and makes it more performant. VS Code makes extensions even more visible, by putting them in the sidebar, raising to the same level as file browsing, searching, source control, and debugging. VS Code extensions can have rich user-interfaces, being written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and with full-access to Node, they can essentially do anything any other application can do. And indeed, some extensions start to look like apps in and of themselves.

With VS Code, the extension-based text editor has seemingly reached its final form. Ever since TextMate, extensions have increased in prominence and capabilities, and with VS Code, that progression appears to have culminated. There just isn’t anywhere else to go. Correspondingly, there isn’t a way a new text editor can leapfrog VS Code the same way previous text editors have been leapfrogging each other by improving extensions.

Paradigm Transcendence

So far we’ve looked at VS Code’s popularity, and its extensions implementation, as indicators of longevity. The third indicator we’ll look at is how VS Code has moved beyond the confines of the desktop. The code-server project runs VS Code as a regular web app, in other words, hosted on a server and accessed through the browser. GitHub’s Codespaces also run VS Code as a web app, this time by spinning up an ad hoc development environment.

Transcending a paradigm, like going from a desktop app to a web app, is a great indicator of longevity. For one, it means it’s more likely to be ported to more paradigms in the future. It takes herculean effort to port to a new paradigm, and expending that effort is a great indicator of value. Emacs and Vim were both ported from the terminal to GUI applications; they were too valuable not to have GUI versions. Photoshop and Excel both run on mobile¹², and Illustrator is coming soon. Excel also has a web version¹³, and there’s a streaming version of Photoshop (although it’s been in closed beta for six years).

Not only has VS Code transcended the parameters of its initial implementation by becoming a web app, it’s also became something of a standard. Version 1.0 of the Theia IDE maintained by the Eclipse Foundation is a re-implementation of VS Code. VS Code is now not only a text editor, but also a model of how a text editor should behave.

Company Management

TextMate is largely the work of one developer, Allan Odgaard, the same with Sublime Text and Jon Skinner. Both of these applications eventually ran into trouble with frustrated users for perceived slow release schedules.

Here’s the history of major releases for these two applications:

• 2004: TextMate 1
• 2008: Sublime Text 1
• 2011: Sublime Text 2 Alpha
• 2012: Sublime Text 2
• 2012: TextMate 2 Alpha
• 2013: Sublime Text 3 Beta
• 2017: Sublime Text 3
• 2019: TextMate 2

Here’s a graph of the number of years between stable major releases (contrasted with the release dates for BBEdit 10–13 for comparison):

A couple things jump out from this graph immediately:

1. TextMate 2 took a long time.
2. Sublime Text has been consistent with their release schedule.

The complaints about Sublime Text seem to center around the gap between the Sublime Text 3 Beta being announced in 2013 and released in 2017, and a perceived lack of sufficient changes during that period. Sublime Text’s release schedule is slow when compared to BBEdit’s which has released three major versions (11, 12, and 13), while Sublime Text 3 has been in beta. Although Coda 2 was released in 2012, and hasn’t been updated since, so it’s unclear whether Sublime Text’s release schedule is really an anomaly for a commercial text editor.

The current version of VS Code is 1.49, but VS Code is open source, so it plays by different rules than commercial apps. Major versions exist at least partially as an opportunity for companies to charge for upgrades.

Since VS Code is developed out in the open, we can evaluate its pace of development directly by reviewing its commit history. VS Code’s commit graph on GitHub tells a story of aggressive development, out pacing Atom, and even other large open source project like Facebook’s React (note that these graphs have different scales on the Y-axis).

Visual Studio Code Commit Graph

Atom Commit Graph

React Commit Graph

Aggressive development pulls platforms away from the pack because the combination of forward momentum, and third parties building on the platform, is difficult to compete with¹⁴. This is the same combination that makes it so hard for new entrants to compete with popular browsers or OSes.

Conclusion

The goal of this piece is to determine if VS Code is a good investment in learning if you value longevity. An implication of the Text Editor as Platform, is that since TextMate’s introduction in 2004, every few years the text editor with the most momentum has changed. These would be short reigns by any standard, but they’re positively miniscule compared to apps like Excel and Photoshop. Learning a new text editor is a questionable investment if you expect something new to come along every few years.

VS Code is giving indications that the era of short reigns for text editors is over. It has the potential to maintain its position as the most popular text editor for a much longer time, possibly for decades, if we use examples of popular software in other categories as a guides. As we’ve outlined in this piece, the case for this is following:

1. It’s crossed a popularity threshold that’s eluded other text editors by being used by over 50% of developers.
2. It’s the final form of progression towards maximizing the power and visibility of extensions, making it immune to being leapfrogged by a new text editor with a more capable extension model.
3. It’s moved beyond its origins as a desktop app, it’s also a web app, and it’s even become a model of how a text editor should behave.
4. It’s managed by a company, so it’s unlikely to run into the development stagnation that’s plagued other text editors.

Before VS Code, I expected to never learn another general-purpose text editor that wasn’t Emacs or Vim again, it was just too risky. I’ve found a good way to make predictions is to assume things will stay the same; with text editors, that means expecting a new text editor will emerge every few years that gains most of the momentum. Expecting anything else to happen requires extraordinary evidence.

I believe VS Code has presented extraordinary evidence. I’m hoping it moves into the category with apps like Excel, Illustrator, Photoshop, software that has held the most popular position in its category for decades. These applications are reliably time investments that repay their cost of learning over the course of a career. Emacs and Vim have always been like that, but it’s always good to have more choice.

From 2003 to 2004, O’Reilly Media ran the O’Reilly Mac OS X Innovators Contest, sponsored by Apple via the Apple Developer Connection (now just Apple Developer). I still think of these winners as some of the high watermarks of app innovation. Many concepts we take for granted today were either introduced, or popularized, by apps on this list. Here are a few of my favorite examples:

• NetNewsWire, while not necessarily the first RSS feed reader, was one of the most popular early ones. RSS feed readers are the origin of consuming media through streams of content, now exemplified by Twitter and Facebook’s Newsfeed.
• SubEthaEdit was one of the earliest practical implementations of multiple simultaneous live document editing, a concept later brought to a much wider audience by Google Docs in 2006.
• LaunchBar popularized many features we take for granted in search user interfaces today, such as seeing search results live as you type, fuzzy string matching, and combining search results of various types, such as apps, bookmarks, contacts, events, and files all into one unified interface.

I’ve listed the winners below, and linked to all the ones that are still maintained, so you can see visually just how many these apps are still around. All of these apps are over fifteen years old now.

2003 Round One Winners

• Winner: NetNewsWire
• Runner-up: Spring

2003 Second Round Winners

• First Place, International Category: Hydra (now SubEthaEdit)
• Second Place, International Category: LaunchBar
• First Place, US Category: VoodooPad
• Second Place, US Category: Audio Hijack Pro

2003 O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference Winners

• First Place, US Category: OmniOutliner
• Second Place, US Category: iBlog
• First Place, International Category: iStopMotion
• Second Place, International Category: ACSLogo
• Honorable Mention: F-Script

2004 Winners

• First Place, U.S.: Delicious Library
• First Place, International: FotoMagico
• Second Place, U.S.: Curio
• Second Place, International: iDive
• Honorable Mention, U.S.: Nicecast
• Honorable Mention, International: Process

Apple’s strategy for years has been to trade desktop power for cross-device feature parity. As expected, macOS Big Sur continues this trend, emphasizing a consistent user interface across devices, and focusing on cross-device development technologies like SwiftUI and Catalyst.

Personally, I wish Apple had different priorities. I’d like to see more apps like Sketch, an industry-leading creative app that’s built top to bottom on Apple technologies. But Sketch was released in 2010, and Apple hasn’t created any new frameworks like Core Graphics and Core Image that support these kinds of apps in over a decade. So I wasn’t holding my breath for them to announce anything new for these kinds of apps at WWDC this year.

Since Apple isn’t prioritizing powerful desktop apps with their own technologies, that means supporting these use cases mostly falls on third parties. This is where companies like Adobe, Avid, Maxon, and Microsoft come in. While Apple’s priorities regarding their own technologies have been clear for awhile now, what hasn’t been clear is their priorities for third-party apps, in particular, ones that aren’t sandboxed. The trend for the last few years has been making it harder to develop these kinds of apps for macOS. AEpocalypse (2018), Catalina’s security features (2019), and Notarization (2018) are all examples of this trend.

The overarching reason behind the changes that make developing these kinds of apps harder is “Security”. And unlike cross-device feature parity, it’s unclear exactly where this all ends. Because after all, the most secure system there is is the one that doesn’t run any software at all. That’s why it’s such a pleasant surprise, that, as far as I can tell, Apple has done everything they can to make Big Sur, and the accompanying transition to Apple Silicon, as seamless as possible, even for apps that aren’t sandboxed.

Some were predicting that Macs on Apple Silicon wouldn’t even run apps from outside of the Mac App Store, that didn’t happen. It seemed more likely that Apple would drop OpenCL and OpenGL, but those are sticking along for the ride. No details were known about whether there would be an emulation layer like the original Rosetta from the 2006 Intel transition. Apple appears to have gone above in beyond with Rosetta 2, which even supports plug-ins like VSTis, giving lots of options for migration paths for powerful modular software.

I’m still frustrated that there probably won’t be another Sketch for the foreseeable future, but that ship sailed a long time ago. And no other platform has a Sketch either, an industry defining app that’s a platform exclusive, so while Apple has lost a unique advantage that only they had, they haven’t lost anything that other platforms already have. Other platforms can run powerful modular software that’s distributed outside the Mac App Store, but today, so can new Macs running Big Sur. Here’s to hoping that the dust has settled, and the last of the restrictions on third-party apps are behind us now.

Before I switched to being a full-time developer in 2010, I worked as a user-interface designer for seven years. Something that always bothered me during that time is that so much of what I was learning was just how to use Photoshop really well. After I switched to development, I was hesitant to ever invest that much in just learning a big software package again. “What if I choose wrong? And waste all those years of learning by switching to another software package?” I asked myself. Recently, I’ve re-evaluated that decision, based on my analysis of the market share of major creative applications. It turns out if I’d just chosen which software I want to learn ten years ago, for most categories, it would still be the same today. For some categories, it would still be the same if I’d chosen twenty years ago, and it’s often the first software that was ever introduced to solve a problem, even if that application is over 30 years ago, that’s still the best choice today. So it turns out I was overcorrecting relative to the risk in learning big complex packages, so now I’m investing in doing it again.

This is the list of software I’ve chosen to learn:

• 3D Computer Graphics: Blender, Cinema 4D
• Digital Audio Workstation: Ableton Live, Logic Pro
• Motion Graphics: After Effects
• Non-Linear Editing System: Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro
• Raster Graphics Editor: Photoshop
• Spreadsheet: Excel
• Text Editor: Vim, Visual Studio Code
• Vector Graphics Editor: Illustrator

Some of these I already know quite well (Vim, Photoshop), and some I’ve barely touched (Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro). I’m not happy with the duplication, and frankly, this is probably just too much for one person. Learning any one of these applications is an lifetime of work, let alone all of them. But I can’t decide what to cut, so here we are.