4 ms·

there are benefits of writing in the text files and still people keep going to these shiny editors/systems. Why? Keeping the excitement of using these things a

there are benefits of writing in the text files and still people keep going to these shiny editors/systems. Why? Keeping the excitement of using these things aside, they do make things easier. After using backlinks now, I don't think I can go back. I like how easily I can publish Notion docs. I like how I can use mems[1]-- they have reduced the conginitive load of writing in a sublime doc. So, maybe we should try to find a solution which gives all the benefits of these "innovation" happening in this domain-- I say innovation with a quote cause I know how gimmicky they could look as most of them are but some of the features are actually part of the evolution. logseq, obsidian are the steps in that direction. I wish all these companies start addressing these issues. And in general we start having the culture of "bring your own storage" i.e get all your data in usable way. Not some text/json files which need specific programs to get anything useful out of that. A graceful exportation should be the primary feature. [1] mem.ai

themadturk 5y ago
People keep coming back to shiny editors/systems because their employers demand it. Offices tend to like Word, as do book publishers. Yes, Pandoc, Scrivener, etc. will output your writing in Word format, but not all writers and office workers are tech people. They go with the simplest compatible/allowable option. At my company, we create complex Word documents that are frequently edited. Using a different format (ie, a marked up text file run through Pandoc or LaTex) is far more trouble than its worth. My personal stuff is in Markdown.