Remember that crazy McBLT or whatever at McDonalds that gave you your burger in two parts that you put together, one part with the meat and one part with all the rabbit food (lettuce, tomato, etc)? They had some slogan like, "Keep the hot side hot and the cool side cool. I'm not a big fan of McD burgers, but the concept is a good one.

While posting to the "Review-Tools" listserv at aspfriends today, I had the following in an email wishing I could find an html editor -- and even better an ASP.NET editor -- that could keep the GUI RAD editing hot, and the text editing cool. Here's a quote from that email, shamelessly cut and pasted here:

Any way you cut it, DreamWeaver, VS.NET, FrontPage, even UltraEdit and HTML-Kit -- when you want to edit the source directly you're back in an editor designed with mouseland in mind, which means your fingers are off the keyboard and not typing. I got real good at using "Alt" to access the menu in UltraEdit (Alt-f-a to save as, Alt-s-p to search and replace in files, etc) before I finally gave in and tried vim (thank heavens), and Alting around the menu simply isn't as good.

I like to point and click in a RAD and use the keyboard sparingly. I like to type like mad and leave the mouse lonely when I'm editing code. I wish I could find a good integrated GUI RAD/text editing combination that allows me to seamlessly do both.

Oh well, keep dreaming, right? If you're wondering how I can slam UltraEdit as a text editing tool, you haven't been keeping up with my newfound appreciation of vim. It's a shame I have this 40 hour/week job and bills to pay or I'd probably try and do something about the lack of vim integration with a good RAD [and make millions, or at least $30, when I buy a copy of my editor].