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Books should not be written in a single text file, though. That is asking for trouble.
by jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
Books should not be written in a single text file, though. That is asking for trouble.
- enriquto 7y agoWhy not? Beacuse of bad text editors? Or is there some fundamental reason about that?
- jfkebwjsbx 7y agoBecause it is extremely hard to work with it? Same reason why we do not put programs in a single source file.
- omaranto 7y agoWhy is it extremely hard to work with the whole novel in a single file? Because most software for writing prose is not up to the task?
- omaranto 7y agoA good editor can handle them without any trouble. I just downloaded Moby Dick from Project Gutenberg and opened it in Emacs. It opened instantly, I could immediately go the end (line 22333), scroll around, count the words (there are around 222617), count the ocurrences of the word 'whether' (there are 91, the last of which is on line 21769), make a change somewhere in the middle. All of this is instant. You can do all that instantly in Vim too (... and I just checked to make sure). A megabyte of text is just not a lot of text for a good editor.