I first started using SlickEdit when I started a new job. It was first on a long list of programs that I would need to install to set up my development machine. I was also handed a SlickEdit travel coffee mug and a SlickEdit t-shirt. My first experience with SlickEdit, the editor, was when I started with SlickEdit, the company.

I was excited to start using SlickEdit, because I’d heard about all the fancy features during the interview process. I’d browsed through the forums and seen the kind of devotion the product had garnered. I’d seen some of the SlickTeam coding like mad men, windows opening and closing, text disappearing and appearing somewhere else, all faster than I could follow, all without my favorite crutch, the mouse. But when I actually sat down to start coding my first tasks, it seemed I had two left hands. Using SlickEdit for the first time feels a bit like driving an airplane on the highway. Sure, you can get to work with all the rest of the sedans and minivans, but the whole time, you get the feeling that there’s something more that you’re just not sure how to access. So you try a button, maybe you read the manual a little bit, and slowly you pick up new tricks. All the while you have to force yourself to use those tricks before they fade away into the abyss of That Thing You Learned That One Time.

My coworkers, the SlickTeam, were all too willing to show me the power of their product. The slogan of my first week could have been “Well, that’s one way to do it,” as each person chimed in favorite features and tools and explained why those were better than the ones the previous person had outlined. People outside the coding world would never understand the passion that can be evoked about things like aliases, brace styles, and syntax expansion. At the end of it all, I would have been glad to remember one tip from each person. Still, it’s keep your head down, use the command line, code code code, don’t touch that mouse. It’s harder to learn to fly an airplane than drive a car, but I daresay it’s worth the effort once you’re in the air.

I’m catching on, surely, but too slowly for my tastes. Every time I reach for my old friend the mouse, I feel like I’ve somehow let someone down. Every time I navigate through the extensive codebase that is SlickEdit, I know that there is probably a much easier way to find whatever it is I’m looking for, because this is a product built by impatient programmers. But I will figure it out. And someday I will regard some new member of the SlickTeam as he takes the long way around, then I’ll interrupt and say, “Well, that’s one way to do it.”