This is the third article in a series titled “There is no magic, there is only awesome.” The first article introduced the “four cardinal rules of awesomeness”. The second article discussed knowing your tools.

The following is the first of a series of articles that I will be posting in the coming weeks, based on the keynote address I gave at the 2009 Ruby Hoedown in Nashville, entitled “There is no magic, there is only awesome.” I originally intended to publish the entire series of articles as a single article, but it got too long. At any rate, I think it’ll be more easily digestible as multiple posts.

Over three years ago, I was faced with a dilemma. I had recently switched to the Mac (from Linux) and was still using my text editor of choice (vim), but at the time, vim’s “integration” with OS X was pretty minimal (and that’s putting it optimistically). I experimented with emacs, but it never clicked for me, and honestly, emacs on OS X wasn’t all that better than vim at the time.