Yeah, see my priorities are entirely different. For me, an ideal editor for writing looks a lot more like this, and has actual text editing commands as opposed to the basic arrow key and home/end stuff you get.
And yes, that’s what I would write a letter with. In fact I’m writing this post to you right now in something like that. I will copy and paste it over into the forum when I’m done (or to be more precise, I won’t be doing that how you expect, not the agonisingly slow word processor way of doing things, I will hit a macro sequence, \cb that copies the entire buffer to the clipboard in one shot). I use Scrivener’s folder feature to write first drafts using such editors. I understand that for some reason you don’t like using a watch folder, which I don’t entirely understand, but again I think that’s a possible solution for what you’re talking about, if you want to give it a try.
In short I think we both agree that its text editor could be better, but what I’m trying to illustrate here is that we both have extremely different ideas of what it could be, instead. Fact is, it probably won’t change that much, again because we aren’t spending huge amounts of resources on the editor itself but rather the software around it. Changing our focus to become a text editor programming company would mean sacrificing time for any of the things most people associate with what makes Scrivener so good.
I think it is also fair to say that if I had my way, and the Scrivener editor turned into Vim, most people would abandon ship. That’s again why we have integration features though, so that people like yourself and I with strong opinions can have our ideal writing tools for drafting and our ideal encapsulating interface to work with those writings.
Anyway, I hope you receive this in the spirit it is intended, as robust discussion and not tempers flared or defensiveness.
As an example, so that Page View would not affect 500 documents in the project.
And I think that’s a very good example of how changing the software toward that approach would only make it more confusing. People already confuse the page view feature with a print preview, despite the documentation being adamant about it being purely an aesthetic choice for those that enjoy the psychological satisfaction of filling up a page. Giving sections of text “document settings” would be a hard right turn away from what a “document” even is (the text field of a node in an outline).
As for all the young and old people stuff, XKCD has an excellent “comic” on that effect (but then again, XKCD has a comic on every possible topic).