I set out to write a book. I’m building an editor instead.

Let me start with a confession. I was supposed to be writing a book.

I was working on something large — the kind of manuscript that spans many files — and the editor I was using kept getting in the way. The outline never generated properly, so I could never see the shape of what I was writing. The files didn’t feel connected; jumping between a chapter and the parts it pulled in was clumsy, and nothing tied them together the way the document actually fit together. And I couldn’t customize the compile step to run the way I needed it to. “If I just fix this one thing,” I thought, “writing will get so much easier.”

That was how it started.

“Just this one feature, then back to the manuscript.”

I’ve lost count of how many times I said that. I polished the syntax highlighting, added folding, wired up SyncTeX to jump between the PDF and the source, bolted on an AI assistant, and started timing tab switches down to the millisecond. The manuscript stayed open the whole time — in the background, cursor blinking, waiting.

When I finally looked up, the book hadn’t gained a single chapter. What I had instead was texspark, a LaTeX editor for macOS. The tool I built to serve the goal had quietly become the goal itself.

What do you even call this? Productive procrastination? A tool-building addiction? Or maybe I just found coding more fun than writing.

Probably all three.

Still, there’s one consolation: this editor is slowly becoming a little less annoying for people like me — the ones who sit down to write a book and end up fixing their tools first. Someday I’ll finish that book in it. Probably.

For now, though, I’ve got an editor to work on.