10 ms·
A writer leaves Microsoft Word
- PeterMcCanney 15y ago...and another starts to use it http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=13077 http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=13077
- mrcharles 15y agoI used Scrivener to write my 2010 Nanowrimo entry. It's a great piece of software, and I can't recommend it enough.
- jseliger 15y agoI'm not sure it will be useful to most people, for reasons tangentially related to this post: http://jseliger.com/2010/11/12/scrivener-or-devonthink-pro-with-a-side-of-james-joyces-ulysses http://jseliger.com/2010/11/12/scrivener-or-devonthink-pro-w... on Scrivener and Joyce. The main reason I say is because I think a lot of people, based on the amateur writing I've seen, don't need a fancier way of arranging words so much as they need to focus on 1) the quality of their sentences and 2) how one event drives another in their plots. I worry especially regarding point 2) that Scrivener lets people work in parallel when they should be working in serial, with one event driving another organically. Too much amateur writing I see is, for lack of a better term, plotless: meandering around feelings, or random encounters, or designed to show how deep the author is—instead of telling a story. Scrivener will help with some things, as I've written elsewhere, but I'm not sure it's really enough for the vast majority of what writers and would-be writers are working on.
- officemonkey 15y agoIn other words: If you want to be a good writer, concentrate on your craft instead of your tools.
- mrcharles 15y agoI'm not sure how your post or the one above it invalidates anything. For writers, managing plot, keeping tidbits and scraps, being able to quickly organize, link, and search, it's pretty damn helpful. Tools don't substitute for skill, but skill with the wrong tools is wasted.
- xyzzyb 15y agoThat's like saying a programmer should just concentrate on programming instead of finding a good text editor.
- officemonkey 15y agoI'm saying that you can have the greatest text editor in the world and still be a crap programmer.
- mrcharles 15y agoSo what are you arguing against then? All we're saying is that Scrivener is a good tool.
- officemonkey 15y agoWho is arguing? I'm summarizing an important fact: the tools are not as important as the craft.
- jseliger 15y agoI would argue that the gap between programming tools, languages, and platforms is vastly, vastly greater than the gap between various ways of processing words.
- InclinedPlane 15y agoThis is a silly dichotomy. A craftsman's skill lies in using his tools, so tool choice is important. it's important for a chef to have a high quality knife that they feel comfortable using, but a high quality knife will no more make a person a good chef than a good text editor, build and language tools, etc. will make someone a good programmer. But good programmers, like good chefs or good writers, will nevertheless spend a goodly amount of money and effort ensuring they have the highest quality tools they feel they need.
- jawngee 15y ago+1 for Scrivener. I just finished a novella using it. I didn't use all it had to offer, but the combination of index cards for simple and quick outlining and the full screen mode make it essential for me.
- fiddly_bits 15y agoThe author really sets his screen to yellow text on a black background? Makes my eyes tired just thinking about it. Anywayz... on a Mac you can flip the colors of your monitor by holding down ctrl-option-command and pressing 8, if you like that sort of thing.
- nkassis 15y agoI write all my code with a black background and green text (well except for syntax that's highlighted). Much better than staring at the sun(white screen) for hours ;p
- electromagnetic 15y agoI used to do this. I could write at 4am with no lights on and I wouldn't get eye strain. Now I'm married and there's much less application for being able to write in the wee hours.
- _frog 15y agoOr even better, use something like Flux[1] to subdue the tones of that glaring white screen just enough to reduce eye strain. [1]: http://stereopsis.com/flux/ http://stereopsis.com/flux/
- airlabam 15y agoOh wow, thanks for this one. Immediately noticed a reduction in eyestrain. If you're found the GUI buggy (as I did), try the command line interface (xflux). The CLI app works fine for me.
- mitchty 15y agoI need to try out the linux version of flux, but the mac version is seriously awesome. Has helped fix me off of getting off the computer at night with the color/gamma changes.
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- inflatablenerd 15y agoI do everything besides screenplays in plain text. Compatibility wins here. Between Google Docs, Word 2010, Word for Mac, Pages and Open Office, it seems even basic documents get mangled. RTF is only reasonably better.
- gallerytungsten 15y agore: "Many people agree that revision 5.1a, specifically, was the best version of Word that Microsoft has ever shipped." Fortunately, my Ancient Powerbook still runs version 5.1. Eminently usable, and far less annoying than the Office 2008 version. Among other travesties, the current version will often refuse to select a single word, obstinately selecting another word, next to the word you want to select (and delete) and thus deprecating one's deletion experience to repeated tapping of the Delete key. As a side benefit, the Powerbook won't load almost all web sites, thus removing one obvious procrastination temptation.
- epochwolf 15y agoalt + delete doesn't work?
- gallerytungsten 15y agoAhhh! I wasn't aware of that shortcut, thanks. But the selection snafu remains. Blast you, Office 2008! (Note: that's option + delete for Mac.)
- jseliger 15y agoAh: I wish I could leave Word for good. But my family's business does grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies (see http://blog.seliger.com http://blog.seliger.com if you're curious), which means we routinely have to exchange documents with other people. In that world, Word still rules, especially for complexly formatted documents.
- yariang 15y agoHow so? You can open Word docs in LibreOffice and save them as well...
- russellallen 15y agoEvery day I open, edit and share legal contracts and other Word documents. They're usually up to about 120 pages long, with reasonably simply formatting. They usually have marked up changes from about 2 to a dozen people. Every six months or so I check out OpenOffice/LibreOffice to see whether the documents I'm being sent survive the open/edit/save cycle. Every time so far I end up with a document with widely differing formatting from the original. So at least for me, LibreOffice isn't suitable for my usage patterns. I imagine other people are the same.
- jseliger 15y agoThis. In addition, many funders require that submitted proposals be .doc files. Sure, one could play roulette with other programs, but when thousands to millions of dollars are on the line, it's easier to simply use Word.
- gcb 15y agonot very related, but once i submited a post script resume (renamed as .pdf) for a webdev position, instead of the spify HTML that i usually send. (call it bucket testing:) The hiring manager, who appeared to be clueless to any web technology or coding, complimented me by saying that my resume was the only one 'normal' without a bunch of code garbled in. what a waste of time...
- icebraining 15y agoFor a person working alone, the question of the format is largely irrelevant - Word support saving in plain text too. The problems exists when we need to interact with open people, and most of us can't tell them "What the fuck".
- tomjen3 15y agoMost people wouldn't know what a .doc file is if their lives depended on it. So take advantage of it and send them a .rtf file -- nobody has to know and you get excellent compatibility.
- roel_v 15y agoBut only for very simple documents - no cross references, working image formatting/layouting, watermarking, shabby table support, footnotes, embedded styles, ...
- latch 15y agoI know this is in a different league..but I wrote Foundations of Programming in Word, and then The Little MongoDB Book in Markdown + Textile (in Textmate). Writing in Markdown was a much more liberating experience as it was much quicker and let me focus more on the content rather than the document. I've always really liked Word, it's a great product, but for 99% of people it just does way too much and is thus way too expensive. Office is worse...gmail is better than outlook, anything is better than powerpoint or access. My last two jobs have shown me that Excel is really what you need to kill if you want to break the Office stronghold.
- InclinedPlane 15y agoI really hope markdown is developed enough to take off, or someone develops something similar on firmer ground (since there's a lot of ambiguity in the definition). Whenever I use word or to a lesser extent mediawiki I feel like a lot of my effort is wasted in fiddling around just to get the formatting right. Sometimes this is bad enough to break my flow and significantly affect productivity. Overall I feel as though the fiddling tax with markdown is only a small increment, maybe say 5 or 10% of total effort on average.
- atsaloli 15y agoasciidoc http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/ http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/ very little markup (high signal to "tag" ratio) can produce all sorts of output (HTML and PDF, for example) I use the asciidoc -> docbook -> latex -> pdf chain for the most part. Very flexible -- you can tweak things at the docbook or latex level if you really want to, but mostly it just works. Good stuff.
- mahmud 15y agoThat's excellent! Thanks for the pointer.
- adimitrov 15y agoI love John MacFarlane's extension of Markdown: [pandoc](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) This, and the fact that gitit is really good, and has math support (which I desperately need,) are the reasons I'm considering finding a hosting solution for happstack and moving all my stuff there…
- sixothree 15y ago>WriteRoom has a “typewriter-scrolling mode”, so that the line you are typing is always centered in the screen, not forever threatening to drop off the bottom... That's the one thing I hate most about every modern editor: When I page down, my cursor appears at the bottom of a page I can't even see. What the hell is that?
- jbuzbee 15y agoI too had been using MS Word for years to write the various articles and reviews that I do. But for my last article (http://www.smallcloudbuilder.com/apps/articles/410-crossing-the-chasm-converting-an-iphone-app-to-android http://www.smallcloudbuilder.com/apps/articles/410-crossing-...) I switched over to Google Docs. For my use, it worked fine. The feature I missed most was the live word count that like the author, I had come to depend on when writing articles of a designated length. Google, are you listening? :-)
- redCashion 15y agoYou can extend the functionality of google apps using apps script. I thought it was already in use and there were libraries of extensions, but I don't see any. But I'm guessing they will be coming soon..
- Gaussian 15y agoLove it. He had me at: "Scoured of Word, my computers feel clean, refreshed, relieved of a hideous and malign burden." Could have walked into the sunset right there. But I understand his need to fully skewer MSFT.
- adamokane 15y agoFunny timing for this - a few hours ago, I decided I needed more of a minimal word processor (although I'm not going as far to delete Word.) I stumbled across WriteMonkey (http://writemonkey.com/ http://writemonkey.com/) and so far, I love it. Note: this only runs on Windows
- _frog 15y agoI found parts of WM like the giant context menu with icons for every entry, ability to enable typewriter noises and other little features detracted from the overall experience but it's still a solid app. Since switching to OS X I've used Byword but recently tried out iA Writer and am considering a purchase.
- bahman2000 15y agoiA Writer is great! http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/ia-writer-for-mac/ http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/ia-writer-for-mac/
- starwed 15y agoApparently Steve Brust writes using emacs. http://dreamcafe.com/words/2009/04/11/help-us-dr-internet-emacs-edition/ http://dreamcafe.com/words/2009/04/11/help-us-dr-internet-em...
- yariang 15y agoI was going to suggest this. Religious themes and issues of learning curve aside, I find emacs is the perfect text-editor for my needs. (Emphasis on my needs). I have disabled the scrollbar, menubar, and toolbar. Full screen it and you have black and white. Nothing else. Combine that with some really great text manipulation features/shorcuts and you have an awesome text editor for anything you want. And it can even do spell-checking and all that other fancy stuff. As for the whole "what about sending documents to non techies" issue: It doesn't seem to apply for this article since he can write the whole thing in emacs and then send the final copy to his editor after copying and pasting into Word.
- shabble 15y agocopy & pasting only works if you don't have any markup to transfer. There's usually some intermediate format that you could, say, write in Emacs and use markdown or asciidoc or latex, compile to html or rtf or whatever, and then import into Word.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- yariang 15y agoThat's what I meant. Once you finish writing in Emacs you copy and paste and then do the whole formatting biz.
- jrico 15y agoWord is still a great Word processor. It actually has a full screen mode that eliminates all the distractions just as the programs used by the author. Word's biggest problem is that all its power increases its complexity and there really isn't a good user manual or resource to train people. I find that most people that switch to something like GoogleDocs don't use the advanced features of Word and probably would have been just as happy using WordPad.
- slowpoke 15y agoWhat would be 'advanced features' of Word that are neither completely unnecessary nor could be replaced by (more or less) simple LaTeX macros? I'm actually curious - I've heard a lot of people raving about the 'power of MS Word', yet no one was really able to name any meaningful features that would justify calling it 'powerful'.
- tincholio 15y agoI use LaTeX for most of my writing, and I'm not a big fan of Word. That being said, I think the advantage probably is that it significantly lowers the barrier of entry to those advanced features. Hence, you'll get 'secretaries' doing fancy stuff, who might not be otherwise inclined to learn LaTeX (and let's admit it, writing TeX macros is not particularly nice).
- slowpoke 15y agoI have to admit I haven't learned LaTeX myself yet, but I've been using LyX for a while now, which basically spits out compilable TeX. Processors like LyX (are there even any processors like it?) take care of exactly that barrier of entry. I agree fully that advanced features in LaTeX are most likely more difficult to learn, but if the argument in the first place is the 'power' of the features, then LaTeX will win out regardless. It's like comparing vim/emacs to nano (in terms of 'power').
- jarin 15y agoThis might be taking a step back toward fluff from programs like WriteRoom, but I really like typing up blog posts with OmmWriter: http://www.ommwriter.com/en/ http://www.ommwriter.com/en/ It's just relaxing. Edit: The site makes it look like it's only for iPad at first glance, but it's also available for Mac/PC
- AlexC04 15y agohttp://celtx.com/index.html http://celtx.com/index.html is a very good, free and open source writing package that may be of interest to anyone who wants good writing software. It has a lot of that sort of index-card functionality like in Scrivener. It's often listed as a competitor for final draft (the screenplay software). It's been built for Windows, Mac and Linux
- snoozer 15y agoNumber one deterrent to me using Word: no support for emacs navigation keystrokes, which are near-universal on the Mac. I don't use actual emacs, but I've come to rely heavily on those keystrokes.
- ordinary 15y agoI have never tried this, but apparently you can set key binds in Word. See: http://emacsblog.org/2007/02/18/emacs-key-bindings-in-ms-word/ http://emacsblog.org/2007/02/18/emacs-key-bindings-in-ms-wor...
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- hammock 15y agoI'm surprised he mentions Word 5.x as the "best" version of Word, because back in the day Word Perfect was where it was at. Nobody used Word because WP was so much better. Then something happened, WP went away or Word got better or both, and I made the switch to Word.
- onedognight 15y agoEmacs users intrigued by the idea of an always centered cursor might like to try this mode out. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/centered-cursor-mode.el http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/centered-cursor-mode.el
- kleiba 15y agoOn a similar note, I'm always a bit amused whenever WriteRoom gets lots of praise, because it's actually not so much different from good old Emacs running in a terminal (no X). Back to the future!
- shabble 15y agoI've not used WriteRoom, so I don't know just how configurable it is, but I often find myself in Emacs getting distracted from my original task by accidentally discovering new features, or deciding to automate something in elisp. "The art of spending 3 hours to complete a 1 hour job in 5 minutes" And this is after using it for nearly a decade already :)
- tincholio 15y agoDon't worry... it'll pay off in only three times using it :)
- tincholio 15y agoIf you want the same "distraction free" environment, there's also darkroom mode, which gives you a similar look. I really cannot understand why would writers get so distracted by using an editor with more features and vastly more editing power. It's not like you have to hack complex elisp functions to open up a text file, write some text, and save it.
- rbanffy 15y ago> why would writers get so distracted by using an editor with more features and vastly more editing power. Because most of the features are useless for writers who only want to write prose where formatting doesn't matter that much (or will be done by people who specialize in that. As far as "editing power" goes, I don't write much prose (I keep telling myself I should submit an article every once in a while to warrant my press passes) but I am quite sure I don't use much more than what WordStar gave me 25 years ago.
- aboodman 15y agoThe design of this website is uncomfortably close to Khoi Vinh's subtraction.com.
- spoole 15y agohttp://stevenpoole.net/colophon/ http://stevenpoole.net/colophon/
- aboodman 15y agoThanks. I did actually look for something like this, but I was looking for it under 'about'. I still personally think the resemblance (not just the monochrome, but the overall look - the layout, the individual entries, the top nav, the bottom nav) is pushing the limits of good taste, but oh well.
- flocial 15y agoMS Word's greatest sin is mixing up content and layout into a strange binary format. Whether it was a devious scheme to lock in users or bad design is anyone's guess but it sure crashed a lot when uou mixed tables and diagrams. Formatting was a nightmare too and sometimes the changes were irreversible. I wish I saw the light and went with plaintext/markdown earlier.
- shriphani 15y agoAbout the binary file format : http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html I'll let you set your own opinions.
- gcb 15y agoSo, people are writing adverts* for discovering full screen editors? c'mon, i remember my editors of choice doing that since the late 80s. even under windows. under linux it's not even fair play to mention this. Those people will have their heads blow away when the find out that /modern/ text-editors not only have full screen but better way to navigate the text and perform auto correction. ...just let them catch up with the progress made on the 90s. heck, vim can have word count on the status bar since what? the 70s? * i consider the article to be an advertisement for the mac editor, even if unintentional
- X-Istence 15y agoWriteRoom uses a standard Mac OS X text field IIRC, and as such uses Mac OS X's built-in auto correction and spell check...
- gcb 15y agoexactly my point. the guy makes a living writing, and never bothered to look for better text editors. he is chanting about the progress of default text editors when all that was available from day one of his career. it's like a developer with 30yr of experience just finding out version control
- mark_l_watson 15y agoNice article - I downloaded a trial copy of Scrivener to try tomorrow. A couple of years ago, Apress wanted Word files and I discovered Pages: really pretty good, good Word compatibility, and fun enough to use. That said, I really prefer Latex for writing because I spend a very small amount of time thinking about formatting compared to writing.
- watmough 15y agoI started getting annoyed with Word when it couldn't even force the caret to black when typing. Watch your caret, it's flashing, now type and it stays black. If a "Word Processor" can't even manage such a basic thing, it's lost the plot. I think this was likely Word 6.0 that did this, and was also about where they brought the Mac and PC code-bases into alignment, though others may know better. Word 2.0 on Windows is for sure my favorite PC version, after the 'just right' Word 5.1 on the Mac.
- bergie 15y agoThe mention about the Psion PDA is spot on. I also used to do a lot of writing with those in the 90s. Relatively small device, almost laptop-quality keyboard, and battery life of several days with AAs that you could buy anywhere. I haven't seen devices like that in last ten years or so. Undistracted, small, great text input. Back then I'd connect the Psion with infrared to my cell phone to FTP stuff to our processing system that would eventually convert the document format on the device to HTML and post it online.
- agavin 15y agoScrivener blows the pants off of monolithic WPs like Word for large structured writing (books or longer articles). I have a pretty detailed analysis on my blog as to why: http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/25/scrivener/ http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/25/scrivener/
- vangale 15y agoAnyone else fondly remember Interleaf? I now have a love/hate relationship with OOWriter but expect I would pay a lot for a working clone of Interleaf on Linux. I used it both on Apollo workstations and on PCDOS.
- cicero 15y agoI used Interleaf on a VaxStation in the late 1980s. It was great at handling the huge (thousands of pages) government documents we had to produce.
- cstross 15y agoTL;DR -- another book-writer discovers the thing of beauty that is Scrivener. I've written one book 100% in it, and used it to refactor three others (when their multiple plot threads were threatening to get out of hand). It's not that it does anything magical at the word processing level, but it makes the structure of a book-length work transparent. (If you don't write books for a living, the best metaphor I can give you is this: imagine you've been writing code for years using just a text editor. (If your editor is Emacs, congratulations: that's the MS Word of text editors -- kitchen sink included, but not everything ideally placed unless you do a lot of customization.) Then someone shows you an IDE. That's Scrivener: it's basically an IDE for books.)
- emehrkay 15y agoI got IDE to simple text editor from the blog post. Am I not comprehending it correctly? You are the top comment... I feel like he went from eclipse to textmate.
- irahul 15y ago> If your editor is Emacs, congratulations: that's the MS Word of text editors -- kitchen sink included, but not everything ideally placed unless you do a lot of customization.) Then someone shows you an IDE. That analogy doesn't stand at all. Most of the people whose editor of choice is Emacs(mine is Vim) have known about IDEs all along, have used them at some point of time, or may be still use it for languages which are too verbose to do without IDE code generation. They chose not to use it, or use it sparcely. There is no someone showing you an IDE.
- singular 15y agoThe beauty of emacs/vim is that they are a. highly optimised to enable quick editing of any text document, not just a specific subset of languages, and b. highly customisable - the customisation isn't an annoying overhead, rather it lets you define exactly how you want the environment to be whereas an ide tends to be harder to customise to that degree. Horses for courses. As an aside - I think the analogy fails purely in terms of quality, word is a horrible mess and a nightmare to work with, emacs is a (sometimes clunky) thing of beauty.
- PelCasandra 15y agoI really like the simplicity idea behind WriteRoom. I think it would be great for this kind of apps to auto-save directly to Evernote API or iCloud instead of the file disk.
- rbanffy 15y agoIt can be totally irrelevant to this discussion, but I think the screenshot is from Word 6. 5, IIRC, had flat controls.
- rbanffy 15y agoThis is how I remember it: http://school.anhb.uwa.edu.au/personalpages/kwessen/web/software/mac/word5.gif http://school.anhb.uwa.edu.au/personalpages/kwessen/web/soft... Guess I'll have to fire my Mac SE (and the Word 5 disks) to be sure...
- siphr 15y agoI can honestly recommend Scrivener for both technical and non-technical writing. I use that application regularly and have nothing but respect for the developer. From an engineering point of view, it is a great example that demonstrates the developer's understanding of the problem domain. Little things that make all the difference.
- mathattack 15y agoTwo interesting thoughts here, that are general to application development. 1 - The reason Windows lost it's way was a lack of simplicity. This is a broad comment about software in general. It is tough to be everything for everyone. And most software starts this way. 2 - There was a great line hidden in the footnotes. This speaks to the importance of collaboration amongst great programmers. "As Scrivener’s creator relates, he emailed Jesse Grosjean, Writeroom’s author, wondering how he did the block-cursor thing; very generously, Grosjean just gave him the code, and even recommends Scrivener on his own website." Very good read!
- nhangen 15y agoPages has full screen writing mode, can open doc, and can export in doc and/or PDF. I never understood why it wasn't more popular than.
- smackfu 15y agoOnly runs on Mac, only runs on Mac, and only runs on Mac.
- nhangen 15y agoIn the context of this article, "only runs on Mac" is just fine, as Write Room also "only runs on Mac."
- andfarm 15y agoPages' full-screen mode is relatively new -- as far as I'm aware, it wasn't added until the Lion update. Scrivener et. al. have had the market to themselves up until now. That being said, the fullscreen mode in Pages actually seems like a pretty nice compromise between features and non-distraction. Apple's obviously been taking some notes. :)
- nhangen 15y agoNot sure when it was introduced, but I know I had it with iWork 2009 on Snow Leopard.
- brohee 15y ago"Eventually the Psion broke, and nothing as good has replaced it as an ultramobile writing tool. So much for progress." There is definitely a market for a device with a Psion quality keyboard and maybe an e-ink based screen (not sure they can react fast enough to feel snappy actually...) It would make a top notch writing platform... Smartphone keyboards are a joke when they have one and e-reader are even worse...