What good tools have in common
Across a hammer, a text editor, and a good kitchen knife, the same three qualities keep showing up.
I keep a mental list of tools I love, and it is a suspiciously varied list: a Japanese pull saw, a plain text editor, a twenty-year-old chef's knife. They have nothing in common except that they have everything in common.
They are honest about what they do. They reward practice. And they get out of the way. That is the whole specification for a good tool, and almost nothing meets it.
