8 ms·

I also use Word for all my writing too, so wanted to defend you. People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the fact that writing should happen in "word

I also use Word for all my writing too, so wanted to defend you. People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the fact that writing should happen in "word processing software", and Word is the best-in-class. To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly". Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative process. Jack Kerouac used to type using rolls of paper instead of sheets so he didn't have to stop is his process. He "got it". As for pandoc, yes it's amazing, and I have been using it to convert my word documents to markdown so I can publish a technical textbook I'm working on using Quarto. I tried writing directly in Quarto for a while, but as per my point above, it really slowed me down and distracted me from actually writing, so I figured out the pandoc pipeline. My most favoritest feature so far is that it converts tables AND equations to markdown and latex perfectly. It's so seamless that I'd actually recommend Word->pandoc as the best way to write a complicated markdown table.

Tomte 3y ago
> writing should happen in "word processing software", and Word is the best-in-class. Or Scrivener. No Zotero plugin, though.
graemep 3y ago
> Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative process MS Word or markup in an IDE are not the only options. I used to use Lyx quite a lot. The best of both worlds in many ways. There are text editors which give you a simple UI than an IDE without the distractions and complexity of a word processor. I find Kate quite pleasant to write in. There are distraction free writers editors (which will often save in wordprocessor formats) that exist only because a lot of people find wordprocessors are a "disaster for the creative process".
_Algernon_ 3y ago
Most tech people who use Word know how to use it and that is exactly the problem. We don't have the benefit of ignorance. We send off drafts to someone for commenting or editing and get an inconsistently formatted mess back because others don't even know that styles exist and use manual / direct formatting instead. We are the ones that have to suffer because people we are forced to collaborate with do not take 5 minutes out of their day to learn the basics of a tool they use professionally. It is the equivalent of seeing somebody use right-click to copy-paste, except it tangibly makes my day worse.
- subtra3t 3y ago
  So what you're saying is that the problem with Word is that it makes it easy to write unpolished and unprofessional documents? In your opinion, is that the fault of the word processor or the user? [0] [0]: Not a rhetoric question that implies one answer to be the only "right" one.
  - _Algernon_ 3y ago
    I find that question uninteresting, because no matter where the fault lies (it's probably somewhere in the middle) the end consequence is that there is no use case where it makes sense for me to use Word (unless I'm literally held at gunpoint). I'm either working on a document for myself or with collaborators. In the first case I'll use markdown for simple things or LaTeX for bigger things since I can work in a familiar environment where I work most efficiently (VSCode). In the second case, I'll work with collaborators so I will never be able to trust that a document I have sent off for reading is still consistently formatted when I receive it back. This means that any benefits of the collaboration tools (eg. review history or suggesting changes) are wiped off the table. I will have to integrate any suggested changes into my own authoritative version of the document by hand anyways. At that point I may as well work where I fell comfortable and use markdown / latex, and send off Pandoc converted word files for comments by others when it is relevant. This is of course for serious pieces of writing, not throwaway stuff like eg. meeting notes, but for those Google docs is plenty.
  - friendzis 3y ago
    IMO entirely user. Word (and similar text processors) is a toolset. All it gives you are tools. Word lets you define formatting rulesets, lets you apply formatting rules and create rulesets from applied rules. Some evangelists may say that "safe" text processor would only allow application of rulesets, because direct application of rules leads to "spaghetti formatting". However that is one of the powers of WYSIWYG text processors: you apply the rules and extract those to rulesets once you are satisfied with results, in an explorative way. Direct application of rules is a feature that makes Word what it is. Now, if a user takes a document with predefined rulesets and still applies their own rules inconsistently that's simply misuse of the tool.
GrumpySloth 3y ago
> To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly". Or maybe those people just have eyes which can spot the differences in spacing between documents created with different Word versions, the mediocre kerning, and a multitude of other typographical annoyances. Even a website is easier to replicate exactly in another browser than a Word document to be replicated from scratch in a new version of Word. And if by some miracle you manage that, the end result will always look meh.
- queuebert 3y ago
  Yes, anyone who's ever learned LaTeX and why it was invented immediately sees how absolutely awful Word is at its rendering. Funny that a trillion-dollar company can't seem to figure out a better algorithm than Donald Knuth mocked up in Pascal decades ago. I think of this as another version of enshittification -- the acceptance of poor performance as the "standard". And don't get me started on math equations in Word ...
  - themadturk 3y ago
    Seriously, Word (and other word processing software) and TeX come from two separate lines of evolution. Knuth is a computer science guru, and invented TeX to effectively and precisely output technical and scientific documents. Word and other word processors (before and after) came from the creative and business worlds. The two didn't have any influence on each other for many years -- you can write a novel in LaTeX, and you can write a scientific paper in Word, but those aren't what the program was written for, and it shows in the awful editing and rendering of equations in Word. (I can't make a similar assertion for LaTeX...being based on plain, rather than formatted, text, it's easier to separate content in a LaTeX document from the end format, while in Word the content and formatting are inextricably bound together.)
    - globular-toast 3y ago
      To be fair, if you use Word properly you can separate content and formatting. The key is to use styles. The problem is nobody learns this and by default the bold and colour buttons etc are right there and oh so tempting. Everyone thinks they can use Word because you just type and do a few obvious things like change font size etc. It's just not considered something that needs to be learnt.
thworp 3y ago
For me personally it's the reverse. After 15 years of writing almost exclusively with vim (or vim-like) input scheme using anything else would really break my flow. Can you even do something like ct, (delete everything between current cursor and next comma, then start insert mode) in word? Even if you could, it would be some 5-key monstrosity which makes you move from home row. Now granted, if you're just hammering out words without any editing this doesn't matter, but I think almost every piece of good writing has had 3+ revisions. Of course this is a personal preference, but my friends who do a lot of writing (and never used vim at all) still seem to prefer a distraction-free editor with a lot less features and a much less noisy UI for the actual writing.
- Ringz 3y ago
  He doesn’t understand ct, nor can he grok the beauty of vim and all the muscle memory that doesn’t interrupt the (writing) flow. Since he learned to scroll with the mouse and click at a position to change something every problem is a nail.
michaelrpeskin 3y ago
I agree with your premise of "don't be distracted" when writing, but for me Word often is the distraction. I use a live-preview markdown editor (e.g., Typora, MarkText) to let me get my thoughts onto paper (screen) with low friction. It's easier to just hit "#" rather than drag the mouse to the style bar and select heading. Or more importantly for me, it's so much easier to hit "$" and seamlessly go into LaTeX for math than it is to open the equation editor and start selecting all the template objects. When it's time to collaborate, I use Pandoc to turn it into docx and then I send it around and the final formatting happens in Word because that's the easiest for everyone to work with, but the "get the ideas down" phase works best for me in a more "minimal" editor with little formatting. I love the idea of Quarto, and if I had that when I was in grad school, it would have made my life so much easier. The workflow I see for Quarto is that you can write your paper while you're doing the experimentation because the code is embedded with your thoughts. But in that case, you're mostly slowed down by the research process so it can be a little more clunky to get the writing done because you have time and you're iterating over ideas more than words in that phase. I'd use it now for work in the R&D phase, but I know I won't have a critical mass of collaborators to make it worth while.
- aldanor 3y ago
  Quarts is great. There's also Typst which is the new kid on the block but seemingly very good.
tombert 3y ago
Part of the reason I stopped using Word was that I absolutely abhorred 2007-and-beyond’s equation editor. I was using previous versions of Word with Mathtype for my math homework, but I found the new equation editor really hard to use. Around the same time I had coincidentally to Linux, and OpenOffice has an even worse equation editor. Pandoc was a game changer for me. I picked up LaTeX equation editor pretty quick, and being able to write markdown was so much more pleasant in my mind. It’s not perfect; tables are a pain still, but I have no desire to go back to Word.
- 2cynykyl 3y ago
  You are probably the only person I've heard that liked the old mathtype editor :-) The new editor is terrific because you can use just type the equation in latex format (e.g. A_c = \pi R^2 ). Then you hit the space bar and it converts to wysiwyg style. Most of my equations are on the simpler side I guess.
  - tombert 3y ago
    I didn't know about being able to type the LaTeX stuff; that's pretty neat. I think part of it was that I had basically memorized all the keystrokes for the MathType editor, and most of them didn't work in the MS Equation editor, which annoyed me. Also, I had issues with parentheses formatting correctly but I suspect that's been fixed in the last 15 years. Still, I really do prefer to work with Markdown in general. The Markdown -> Pandoc -> LaTeX rendering just ends up looking prettier in my opinion, and at this point I'm pretty useless in any editor that doesn't have Vim keystrokes. Pandoc irons out the parts of LaTeX that I really hate (the `` vs " being the thing that's given me the most headaches), while letting me drop into raw LaTeX when I need it; not even getting into the fact that there's just math stuff that (as far as I know) doesn't work in Word or MathType's equation editor (e.g. bussproof trees). I do get pretty annoyed when people try and tell me that regular LaTeX is "just as easy" as Word, because even as someone who has a reasonably good handle on LaTeX I can say that is just not true. TeX is arcane and weird and annoying and inconsistent, and I don't blame people for using Word compared to it.
bachmeier 3y ago
> People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the fact that writing should happen in "word processing software", and Word is the best-in-class. It depends on the person. The best way for me to write is on paper, on a desk with lots of empty space, with paper versions of all reference material.
stakhanov 3y ago
> slowed me down and distracted me from actually writing It's a bit of a matter of perspective. The distinction between looking at a document in markdown versus Word is a bit analogous to the distinction between looking at a movie in its textual form as a screenplay versus looking at a movie as a piece of video: Text is capable of abstraction in a way that video is not. In the screenplay, it might say "table", but when the director translates it to video, the director will have to decide: What kind of table? What design? What period? What texture? Is there anything on the table? None of these decisions matter to the construction of the story, so, for a screenwriter, it would be very distracting if they had to make all of those decisions just to be able to get "table" committed to the medium. In Markdown you worry about text and nothing but text. But Word shoves a particular font in your face as soon as you're laying down the first letter, so, if you don't like Word's choice of fonts, you can either let it annoy you throughout the project, or you can start worrying about fonts right then and there, which will be a distraction. If you write Markdown in a code editor, then, presumably, you've already set up the code editor in a way that doesn't annoy you. And then your future self (or someone else entirely) can worry about the font.
- mattl 3y ago
  We collaboratively write screenplays in markdown (actually fountain but its markdown plus some screenwriting stuff) and save them into Dropbox. pandoc and some other tools turn those scenes into a full screenplay.
- chaxor 3y ago
  It's worth noting here (even though I also use vim/markdown/typst, and Word is a thing of the past) that markdown does say something more than "just the text". It puts the header notation and style (like italic, etc) in-line. So does Typst or LaTeX, and I can't think of any typical stand-off examples for headers and such, but it does muddy the text in-line in that sense. It typically doesn't really slow down the writing, but if you're writing \# as comments for code, then don't have those wrapped in \`\`\`, you can get some problems.
- 2cynykyl 3y ago
  I know you're just font as an example, but doesn't your markdown editor also shove a font in your face? You can adjust default behavior in Word just as well as in another editor. Anyway, to work within your analogy, I would say that Word lets the write do a bit of a 'mockup' of the set with nearly 0 effort. Like "I want a table here", so 2-3 clicks and you have it. Then you can "let the director" take your mock up and flesh it out properly later. As a writing, it helps me to see the mock up of the product as a go, but I want that mock up to be effortless. And as I said above, I do some work up front to make sure that Word's mock up looks good (or good enough).
guyomes 3y ago
> My most favoritest feature so far is that it converts tables AND equations to markdown and latex perfectly. You might be interested in Texmacs [1]. It is has a wysiwyg interface, and it handles nicely tables and mathematical equations. Also you can export documents to the latex format. [1]: https://www.texmacs.org https://www.texmacs.org
azangru 3y ago
> People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the fact that writing should happen in "word processing software" The fact? Should? In "word processing software"? Why shouldn't it happen in "text editing software"? Writing produces text, after all.
- temporarara 3y ago
  This. Text editors automatically give you that exact Jack Kerouac "rolls of paper" experience. It's just text. Formatting comes later, word or tex or some other system you like.
pbhjpbhj 3y ago
Rant ahead: So, as it must be me not knowing, can you tell me why Word won't let me change table column size ~50% of the time (for the same table from the same source). Half the time autofit works (yay!), half the time it won't let me resize columns, neither by typing the number, nor dragging the invisible off-page divider (Microsoft should just make the transparency of off-page content 50%??), nor changing to draft view and dragging the actual dividers ... wtf is going on there? If I paste it into OneNote first then it fits ... sometimes, if I drag a column wider first (which it already rendered 5x the width OneNote did) then it will let me narrow it afterwards, what's that feature called AutoNoNarrowColumnRenderedIncorrectlyFiveTimes ExpectedWidth?? I'll just search the settings to turn that off ... oh wait! These are the times I long for markdown, or 'reveal codes' ... MS Word has a lot of problems they could probably have fixed if they hadn't put so much effort into preventing interoperability. These sorts of issues were around 20 years ago when I stopped using Word, and 5 years ago when I restarted. Same asinine poorly implemented numbering and styles that are unintuitive, opaque, and ungainly ... and don't get me started on search! Multi-highlights? Sorry best I can do is "find next" with no find previous, no regex, ... you can do find in AutoText though, right, right? ... and all the AutoText and AutoCorrect gets saved in a single sensible format that's easily modified? ... Word changes the format of all windows when you open a new one too, just in case you thought the suck was restricted to within the window chrome ... and doesn't have always-on-top, and doesn't open windows in their last position, and ... Doesn't suck ...???! Whilst you're here, any ideas why OneNote eliminates footnotes so you can't cut-paste between Word and OneNote? I'm sure it's not flawed and I'm just holding it wrong, right ...?
- themadturk 3y ago
  It's not you. Things like WordPerfect's "reveal codes" feature were a major reason law practices were so reluctant to give it up. It's far easier to fulfill a court's rules on how to format briefs when you have that kind of control over your document's formatting!
chaxor 3y ago
There are other reasons to not like Word other than 'it six's. One is availability. If you're on Linux all day, your options don't really contain word - it's not free to download and install due to needing a license. You have to go and find some other computer that runs windows, and start it up - just for that one document. Then you have a single use computer, which obviously isn't a great experience. Closest thing that I use is Google docs, sometimes. I (and many others like me) know how to use word (and excel) pretty well due to some life in that world. I still remember most of many of the hotkey combinations to step through the menus. The reason I use vim for everything now is - I use vim for everything. I live in vim/tmux/ssh/tui, so most problems go there first if they can. There are obvious benefits to the vim/git/Typst setup, if plots need to go in a document for example, but it's also strengthened by word not being easily available.
- criddell 3y ago
  There is a free web version of Word that is pretty good.
  - ashton314 3y ago
    You lost me at “web”. Local-first is so much nicer for my workflow—and I am sure this holds for most other people.
    - criddell 3y ago
      The person I responded to uses Google Docs.
      - dredmorbius 3y ago
        Key word, sometimes: Closest thing that I use is Google docs, sometimes.... The reason I use vim for everything now is - I use vim for everything. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39230525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39230525>
  - yashrk 3y ago
Vegenoid 3y ago
If you want to use Word, then that's great, but when you start saying what other people 'should' be doing then they're going to speak up. > writing should happen in "word processing software" Writing should happen where you are comfortable editing text. I am comfortable in same editor where I write code. > To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly". Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative process. To all the people who say "Writing markup in an IDE sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use it properly". I can write in a flow and apply/change formatting easily. I can jump around and rearrange documents with ease. And it is in a format that can be opened and read by native software on almost any computer. If you think that Jack Kerouac would prefer MS Word over a much simpler plain text editor, I don't agree.
- bostik 3y ago
  > Writing should happen where you are comfortable editing text. For that particular context of text. I write my code, notes, text and emails in vim. Some in markdown. But to this day, I still miss the incredible usability of LyX 1.x when writing pure long-form text.[ß] I could force all writing to occur within central 60% of the editable screen height [doable with vim but not as cleanly]. No whitespace or formatting issues, ever - set the document defaults according to my liking and it would feel "just right". Proper rendering and visually correct editing of math formulas as part of text. Oh my. Fond memories of being able to type '<raw latex hotkey>\frac' and continue fitting in the values... If it had had vim's search-powered navigation, it would have been nearly perfect. LyX 2.x was a step up in visual appeal and two steps down in raw usability. I've since picked up writing raw latex where I need good formatting, just because I could not make LyX 2.x bend to my taste anymore. ß: Back on early 2000's, I wrote a book in LyX. As well as all my university course papers, including the master's thesis.
- gertlex 3y ago
  > but when you start saying what other people 'should' be doing then they're going to speak up. That's not a prerequisite for the Latex folks, in my experience :D (I'm also in the "wrote my masters thesis in word, including the fair number of equations" group)
WolfOliver 3y ago
> Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative process. I would like to quote this on a MonsterWriter landing page
kelnos 3y ago
You're kinda contradicting yourself there. Kerouac used a typewriter, which is about as minimal as it gets before you drop down to pen and paper. Something like Word is full of distractions: fonts, section headings, various formatting options, etc. If you really want to get into the flow of writing, do it like Kerouac: plain text editor that wraps words at whatever width is reasonable to you. After you're done, then copy it into a word processor and apply your formatting rules. Or just stick with the plain text editor and use anything from markdown to tex. Ultimately, though, use what you're most comfortable with! That's going to be different, sometimes, for different people. The idea that it's a "fact" that everyone should be writing in any particular way using any particular software is just nonsense.
ternaryoperator 3y ago
I tend to agree that most users don't know how to use Word well. I think this is true of IDEs as well. Most users, even technically savvy ones, use a small subset of features and disregard the lesser-used aspects. And then are later surprised when they see someone use a feature that they didn't know existed because it was outside the ambit of their immediate knowledge. However, I'm not sure that even with greater knowledge of Word's features, whether developers in general would come to like it.
cosmojg 3y ago
1. Write prose in plaintext using preferred text editor 2. Add formatting using preferred markup language 3. ??? 4. Profit! Seriously, though, writing prose in a simple text editor and worrying about formatting later is far less distracting than writing prose in a WYSIWYG word processor. Also, adding formatting using a markup language ends up looking far nicer far faster than using a WYSIWYG word processor.
jrm4 3y ago
Word is the worst very popular program for the inverse reason of why Excel is the best; the extent to which a regular user can easily determine and or modify "why something they see on the screen appears the way it does." In Excel, you click on the cell and see either e.g. the number or formula used to get the result you see. In Word, well, it's just difficult to figure out exactly why a thing looks the way it does.
- maxerickson 3y ago
  You have to find it and turn it on, but there is a tool called "Style Inspector" that shows the applied styles and direct formatting of the selected text (or the location of the cursor). Can also use control+space to strip off any direct formatting.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Excel's conditional formatting is pretty damn difficult to inspect, IMO.
dotancohen 3y ago
Not a flamewar, honest question from someone that couldn't stand Word last time I used it (far over a decade ago) but actually likes Open Office (well, LibreOffice, but I still call it Open Office). I'll grant that the Excel equivalent is nowhere near feature competitive with Excel, but the Word equivalent is, in my opinion, better. Have you tried Libre Office? I'd love to hear your opinion.
- cassepipe 3y ago
  A thing I like is that LO writer has a vim editing plugin somewhere on github
einpoklum 3y ago
> People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the fact that writing should happen in "word processing software" Uh, that's just like, your opinion, man.
themadturk 3y ago
If you're going to bring up Kerouac with his rolls of paper, you're better off talking about WordStar than Word. Word divides the document into discrete pages, while WordStar documents were long uninterrupted ribbons of text, just like Kerouac's rolls. Perhaps Kerouac "got it," but so do George R.R. Martin and Robert Sawyer, writers who continue to use WordStar decades after its demise (Sawyer even talks about the benefits of this undivided waterfall of text on his website [0]. Text editors also similarly long ribbons of text, and are just as conducive to putting words down as any bloated word processor that is optimized to produce two page corporate memos or colorful party posters to be posted in the lunch room. I've used Word professionally since the mid-1990s. I do know how to use it properly, and it still sucks. "Writing" isn't meant to be done in a word processor, which was developed as a business tool, not a creative tool. Writing should be done in whatever tool one wants to write in. Word is, be design, both a desktop publishing app and a secretarial tool. For book-length writing, it works poorly with long files, the file format is subject to corruption. The docx format is also proprietary and subject to Microsoft's whim; any conversion scheme is a hack (though Pandoc and many others do work adequately). Unless you learn the ins and outs of Word's style scheme (and sometimes even if you do) and follow it slavishly, formatting is often inconsistent and there's no certainty that the styles you apply to make your document to make it look a certain way ensure it looks that way on someone else's machine. There's no doubt, though, that a Word-compatible word processor needs to be in every writers' toolkit, since it is the standard in the publishing world. [0] https://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm https://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm, scroll down or search for THE LONG-HAND PAGE METAPHOR.
- w0m 3y ago
  I was under the assumption docx was simply an XML wrapper in a well known format. MS can't come in and break it without creating a new extension, invalidating deprecation concerns. That said - I do everything in markdown regardless so I can use a code editor more comfortably.
  - kcartlidge 3y ago
    > I was under the assumption docx was simply an XML wrapper in a well known format. MS can't come in and break it without creating a new extension, invalidating deprecation concerns. Sort of. It's a ZIP containing a collection of XML files. The actual content is a single file, but you need separate ancillary XML files for things like styles, links, headers/footers, numbering schemes and so on. Each with complicated namespacing and nesting rules and each file referencing items in the others. The area where it is most at risk (for me personally in practice) is the lax handling of the file by Word itself. As a specific example there are nested XML elements where sibling child elements define properties on the main element, such as properties that define paragraph styles. Being siblings they should be supported in any order, but in practice generating DOCX files and importing them into Word will fail for no obvious reason, until you reorder them in the raw XML (even though they are still at the same level in the hierarchy). Then they work. In other words, it's less the 'spec' and more the MS implementation that makes it fragile. And different versions of Word can have different behaviour in that regard.
Kamq 3y ago
> To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly". "Word sux" because it takes forever to start up and I forget what I went there to type. It's like opening a jetbrains ide to take a quick note. The only time that's worth it is when I'm sitting down to write for several minutes at a time, which happens (maybe) once a quarter, vs 17 times a day for quick notes. Now, you could argue that I just don't want what word offers, but that's what everyone means when they say something sucks. It doesn't do the thing they want (usually because the implementers made trade-offs for other things).

Tomte 3y ago

> writing should happen in "word processing software", and Word is the best-in-class. Or Scrivener. No Zotero plugin, though.

graemep 3y ago

> Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative process MS Word or markup in an IDE are not the only options. I used to use Lyx quite a lot. The best of both worlds in many ways. There are text editors which give you a simple UI than an IDE without the distractions and complexity of a word processor. I find Kate quite pleasant to write in. There are distraction free writers editors (which will often save in wordprocessor formats) that exist only because a lot of people find wordprocessors are a "disaster for the creative process".

_Algernon_ 3y ago

Most tech people who use Word know how to use it and that is exactly the problem. We don't have the benefit of ignorance. We send off drafts to someone for commenting or editing and get an inconsistently formatted mess back because others don't even know that styles exist and use manual / direct formatting instead. We are the ones that have to suffer because people we are forced to collaborate with do not take 5 minutes out of their day to learn the basics of a tool they use professionally. It is the equivalent of seeing somebody use right-click to copy-paste, except it tangibly makes my day worse.

subtra3t 3y ago
So what you're saying is that the problem with Word is that it makes it easy to write unpolished and unprofessional documents? In your opinion, is that the fault of the word processor or the user? [0] [0]: Not a rhetoric question that implies one answer to be the only "right" one.
- _Algernon_ 3y ago
  I find that question uninteresting, because no matter where the fault lies (it's probably somewhere in the middle) the end consequence is that there is no use case where it makes sense for me to use Word (unless I'm literally held at gunpoint). I'm either working on a document for myself or with collaborators. In the first case I'll use markdown for simple things or LaTeX for bigger things since I can work in a familiar environment where I work most efficiently (VSCode). In the second case, I'll work with collaborators so I will never be able to trust that a document I have sent off for reading is still consistently formatted when I receive it back. This means that any benefits of the collaboration tools (eg. review history or suggesting changes) are wiped off the table. I will have to integrate any suggested changes into my own authoritative version of the document by hand anyways. At that point I may as well work where I fell comfortable and use markdown / latex, and send off Pandoc converted word files for comments by others when it is relevant. This is of course for serious pieces of writing, not throwaway stuff like eg. meeting notes, but for those Google docs is plenty.
- friendzis 3y ago
  IMO entirely user. Word (and similar text processors) is a toolset. All it gives you are tools. Word lets you define formatting rulesets, lets you apply formatting rules and create rulesets from applied rules. Some evangelists may say that "safe" text processor would only allow application of rulesets, because direct application of rules leads to "spaghetti formatting". However that is one of the powers of WYSIWYG text processors: you apply the rules and extract those to rulesets once you are satisfied with results, in an explorative way. Direct application of rules is a feature that makes Word what it is. Now, if a user takes a document with predefined rulesets and still applies their own rules inconsistently that's simply misuse of the tool.

GrumpySloth 3y ago

> To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly". Or maybe those people just have eyes which can spot the differences in spacing between documents created with different Word versions, the mediocre kerning, and a multitude of other typographical annoyances. Even a website is easier to replicate exactly in another browser than a Word document to be replicated from scratch in a new version of Word. And if by some miracle you manage that, the end result will always look meh.

queuebert 3y ago
Yes, anyone who's ever learned LaTeX and why it was invented immediately sees how absolutely awful Word is at its rendering. Funny that a trillion-dollar company can't seem to figure out a better algorithm than Donald Knuth mocked up in Pascal decades ago. I think of this as another version of enshittification -- the acceptance of poor performance as the "standard". And don't get me started on math equations in Word ...
- themadturk 3y ago
  Seriously, Word (and other word processing software) and TeX come from two separate lines of evolution. Knuth is a computer science guru, and invented TeX to effectively and precisely output technical and scientific documents. Word and other word processors (before and after) came from the creative and business worlds. The two didn't have any influence on each other for many years -- you can write a novel in LaTeX, and you can write a scientific paper in Word, but those aren't what the program was written for, and it shows in the awful editing and rendering of equations in Word. (I can't make a similar assertion for LaTeX...being based on plain, rather than formatted, text, it's easier to separate content in a LaTeX document from the end format, while in Word the content and formatting are inextricably bound together.)
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    To be fair, if you use Word properly you can separate content and formatting. The key is to use styles. The problem is nobody learns this and by default the bold and colour buttons etc are right there and oh so tempting. Everyone thinks they can use Word because you just type and do a few obvious things like change font size etc. It's just not considered something that needs to be learnt.

thworp 3y ago

For me personally it's the reverse. After 15 years of writing almost exclusively with vim (or vim-like) input scheme using anything else would really break my flow. Can you even do something like ct, (delete everything between current cursor and next comma, then start insert mode) in word? Even if you could, it would be some 5-key monstrosity which makes you move from home row. Now granted, if you're just hammering out words without any editing this doesn't matter, but I think almost every piece of good writing has had 3+ revisions. Of course this is a personal preference, but my friends who do a lot of writing (and never used vim at all) still seem to prefer a distraction-free editor with a lot less features and a much less noisy UI for the actual writing.

Ringz 3y ago
He doesn’t understand ct, nor can he grok the beauty of vim and all the muscle memory that doesn’t interrupt the (writing) flow. Since he learned to scroll with the mouse and click at a position to change something every problem is a nail.

michaelrpeskin 3y ago

I agree with your premise of "don't be distracted" when writing, but for me Word often is the distraction. I use a live-preview markdown editor (e.g., Typora, MarkText) to let me get my thoughts onto paper (screen) with low friction. It's easier to just hit "#" rather than drag the mouse to the style bar and select heading. Or more importantly for me, it's so much easier to hit "$" and seamlessly go into LaTeX for math than it is to open the equation editor and start selecting all the template objects. When it's time to collaborate, I use Pandoc to turn it into docx and then I send it around and the final formatting happens in Word because that's the easiest for everyone to work with, but the "get the ideas down" phase works best for me in a more "minimal" editor with little formatting. I love the idea of Quarto, and if I had that when I was in grad school, it would have made my life so much easier. The workflow I see for Quarto is that you can write your paper while you're doing the experimentation because the code is embedded with your thoughts. But in that case, you're mostly slowed down by the research process so it can be a little more clunky to get the writing done because you have time and you're iterating over ideas more than words in that phase. I'd use it now for work in the R&D phase, but I know I won't have a critical mass of collaborators to make it worth while.

aldanor 3y ago
Quarts is great. There's also Typst which is the new kid on the block but seemingly very good.

tombert 3y ago

Part of the reason I stopped using Word was that I absolutely abhorred 2007-and-beyond’s equation editor. I was using previous versions of Word with Mathtype for my math homework, but I found the new equation editor really hard to use. Around the same time I had coincidentally to Linux, and OpenOffice has an even worse equation editor. Pandoc was a game changer for me. I picked up LaTeX equation editor pretty quick, and being able to write markdown was so much more pleasant in my mind. It’s not perfect; tables are a pain still, but I have no desire to go back to Word.

2cynykyl 3y ago
You are probably the only person I've heard that liked the old mathtype editor :-) The new editor is terrific because you can use just type the equation in latex format (e.g. A_c = \pi R^2 ). Then you hit the space bar and it converts to wysiwyg style. Most of my equations are on the simpler side I guess.
- tombert 3y ago
  I didn't know about being able to type the LaTeX stuff; that's pretty neat. I think part of it was that I had basically memorized all the keystrokes for the MathType editor, and most of them didn't work in the MS Equation editor, which annoyed me. Also, I had issues with parentheses formatting correctly but I suspect that's been fixed in the last 15 years. Still, I really do prefer to work with Markdown in general. The Markdown -> Pandoc -> LaTeX rendering just ends up looking prettier in my opinion, and at this point I'm pretty useless in any editor that doesn't have Vim keystrokes. Pandoc irons out the parts of LaTeX that I really hate (the `` vs " being the thing that's given me the most headaches), while letting me drop into raw LaTeX when I need it; not even getting into the fact that there's just math stuff that (as far as I know) doesn't work in Word or MathType's equation editor (e.g. bussproof trees). I do get pretty annoyed when people try and tell me that regular LaTeX is "just as easy" as Word, because even as someone who has a reasonably good handle on LaTeX I can say that is just not true. TeX is arcane and weird and annoying and inconsistent, and I don't blame people for using Word compared to it.

bachmeier 3y ago

> People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the fact that writing should happen in "word processing software", and Word is the best-in-class. It depends on the person. The best way for me to write is on paper, on a desk with lots of empty space, with paper versions of all reference material.

stakhanov 3y ago

> slowed me down and distracted me from actually writing It's a bit of a matter of perspective. The distinction between looking at a document in markdown versus Word is a bit analogous to the distinction between looking at a movie in its textual form as a screenplay versus looking at a movie as a piece of video: Text is capable of abstraction in a way that video is not. In the screenplay, it might say "table", but when the director translates it to video, the director will have to decide: What kind of table? What design? What period? What texture? Is there anything on the table? None of these decisions matter to the construction of the story, so, for a screenwriter, it would be very distracting if they had to make all of those decisions just to be able to get "table" committed to the medium. In Markdown you worry about text and nothing but text. But Word shoves a particular font in your face as soon as you're laying down the first letter, so, if you don't like Word's choice of fonts, you can either let it annoy you throughout the project, or you can start worrying about fonts right then and there, which will be a distraction. If you write Markdown in a code editor, then, presumably, you've already set up the code editor in a way that doesn't annoy you. And then your future self (or someone else entirely) can worry about the font.

mattl 3y ago
We collaboratively write screenplays in markdown (actually fountain but its markdown plus some screenwriting stuff) and save them into Dropbox. pandoc and some other tools turn those scenes into a full screenplay.
chaxor 3y ago
It's worth noting here (even though I also use vim/markdown/typst, and Word is a thing of the past) that markdown does say something more than "just the text". It puts the header notation and style (like italic, etc) in-line. So does Typst or LaTeX, and I can't think of any typical stand-off examples for headers and such, but it does muddy the text in-line in that sense. It typically doesn't really slow down the writing, but if you're writing \# as comments for code, then don't have those wrapped in \`\`\`, you can get some problems.
2cynykyl 3y ago
I know you're just font as an example, but doesn't your markdown editor also shove a font in your face? You can adjust default behavior in Word just as well as in another editor. Anyway, to work within your analogy, I would say that Word lets the write do a bit of a 'mockup' of the set with nearly 0 effort. Like "I want a table here", so 2-3 clicks and you have it. Then you can "let the director" take your mock up and flesh it out properly later. As a writing, it helps me to see the mock up of the product as a go, but I want that mock up to be effortless. And as I said above, I do some work up front to make sure that Word's mock up looks good (or good enough).

guyomes 3y ago

> My most favoritest feature so far is that it converts tables AND equations to markdown and latex perfectly. You might be interested in Texmacs [1]. It is has a wysiwyg interface, and it handles nicely tables and mathematical equations. Also you can export documents to the latex format. [1]: https://www.texmacs.org https://www.texmacs.org

azangru 3y ago

> People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the fact that writing should happen in "word processing software" The fact? Should? In "word processing software"? Why shouldn't it happen in "text editing software"? Writing produces text, after all.

temporarara 3y ago
This. Text editors automatically give you that exact Jack Kerouac "rolls of paper" experience. It's just text. Formatting comes later, word or tex or some other system you like.

pbhjpbhj 3y ago

Rant ahead: So, as it must be me not knowing, can you tell me why Word won't let me change table column size ~50% of the time (for the same table from the same source). Half the time autofit works (yay!), half the time it won't let me resize columns, neither by typing the number, nor dragging the invisible off-page divider (Microsoft should just make the transparency of off-page content 50%??), nor changing to draft view and dragging the actual dividers ... wtf is going on there? If I paste it into OneNote first then it fits ... sometimes, if I drag a column wider first (which it already rendered 5x the width OneNote did) then it will let me narrow it afterwards, what's that feature called AutoNoNarrowColumnRenderedIncorrectlyFiveTimes ExpectedWidth?? I'll just search the settings to turn that off ... oh wait! These are the times I long for markdown, or 'reveal codes' ... MS Word has a lot of problems they could probably have fixed if they hadn't put so much effort into preventing interoperability. These sorts of issues were around 20 years ago when I stopped using Word, and 5 years ago when I restarted. Same asinine poorly implemented numbering and styles that are unintuitive, opaque, and ungainly ... and don't get me started on search! Multi-highlights? Sorry best I can do is "find next" with no find previous, no regex, ... you can do find in AutoText though, right, right? ... and all the AutoText and AutoCorrect gets saved in a single sensible format that's easily modified? ... Word changes the format of all windows when you open a new one too, just in case you thought the suck was restricted to within the window chrome ... and doesn't have always-on-top, and doesn't open windows in their last position, and ... Doesn't suck ...???! Whilst you're here, any ideas why OneNote eliminates footnotes so you can't cut-paste between Word and OneNote? I'm sure it's not flawed and I'm just holding it wrong, right ...?

themadturk 3y ago
It's not you. Things like WordPerfect's "reveal codes" feature were a major reason law practices were so reluctant to give it up. It's far easier to fulfill a court's rules on how to format briefs when you have that kind of control over your document's formatting!

chaxor 3y ago

There are other reasons to not like Word other than 'it six's. One is availability. If you're on Linux all day, your options don't really contain word - it's not free to download and install due to needing a license. You have to go and find some other computer that runs windows, and start it up - just for that one document. Then you have a single use computer, which obviously isn't a great experience. Closest thing that I use is Google docs, sometimes. I (and many others like me) know how to use word (and excel) pretty well due to some life in that world. I still remember most of many of the hotkey combinations to step through the menus. The reason I use vim for everything now is - I use vim for everything. I live in vim/tmux/ssh/tui, so most problems go there first if they can. There are obvious benefits to the vim/git/Typst setup, if plots need to go in a document for example, but it's also strengthened by word not being easily available.

criddell 3y ago
There is a free web version of Word that is pretty good.
- ashton314 3y ago
  You lost me at “web”. Local-first is so much nicer for my workflow—and I am sure this holds for most other people.
  - criddell 3y ago
    The person I responded to uses Google Docs.
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      Key word, sometimes: Closest thing that I use is Google docs, sometimes.... The reason I use vim for everything now is - I use vim for everything. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39230525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39230525>
- yashrk 3y ago

Vegenoid 3y ago

If you want to use Word, then that's great, but when you start saying what other people 'should' be doing then they're going to speak up. > writing should happen in "word processing software" Writing should happen where you are comfortable editing text. I am comfortable in same editor where I write code. > To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly". Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative process. To all the people who say "Writing markup in an IDE sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use it properly". I can write in a flow and apply/change formatting easily. I can jump around and rearrange documents with ease. And it is in a format that can be opened and read by native software on almost any computer. If you think that Jack Kerouac would prefer MS Word over a much simpler plain text editor, I don't agree.

bostik 3y ago
> Writing should happen where you are comfortable editing text. For that particular context of text. I write my code, notes, text and emails in vim. Some in markdown. But to this day, I still miss the incredible usability of LyX 1.x when writing pure long-form text.[ß] I could force all writing to occur within central 60% of the editable screen height [doable with vim but not as cleanly]. No whitespace or formatting issues, ever - set the document defaults according to my liking and it would feel "just right". Proper rendering and visually correct editing of math formulas as part of text. Oh my. Fond memories of being able to type '<raw latex hotkey>\frac' and continue fitting in the values... If it had had vim's search-powered navigation, it would have been nearly perfect. LyX 2.x was a step up in visual appeal and two steps down in raw usability. I've since picked up writing raw latex where I need good formatting, just because I could not make LyX 2.x bend to my taste anymore. ß: Back on early 2000's, I wrote a book in LyX. As well as all my university course papers, including the master's thesis.
gertlex 3y ago
> but when you start saying what other people 'should' be doing then they're going to speak up. That's not a prerequisite for the Latex folks, in my experience :D (I'm also in the "wrote my masters thesis in word, including the fair number of equations" group)

WolfOliver 3y ago

> Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative process. I would like to quote this on a MonsterWriter landing page

kelnos 3y ago

You're kinda contradicting yourself there. Kerouac used a typewriter, which is about as minimal as it gets before you drop down to pen and paper. Something like Word is full of distractions: fonts, section headings, various formatting options, etc. If you really want to get into the flow of writing, do it like Kerouac: plain text editor that wraps words at whatever width is reasonable to you. After you're done, then copy it into a word processor and apply your formatting rules. Or just stick with the plain text editor and use anything from markdown to tex. Ultimately, though, use what you're most comfortable with! That's going to be different, sometimes, for different people. The idea that it's a "fact" that everyone should be writing in any particular way using any particular software is just nonsense.

ternaryoperator 3y ago

I tend to agree that most users don't know how to use Word well. I think this is true of IDEs as well. Most users, even technically savvy ones, use a small subset of features and disregard the lesser-used aspects. And then are later surprised when they see someone use a feature that they didn't know existed because it was outside the ambit of their immediate knowledge. However, I'm not sure that even with greater knowledge of Word's features, whether developers in general would come to like it.

cosmojg 3y ago

1. Write prose in plaintext using preferred text editor 2. Add formatting using preferred markup language 3. ??? 4. Profit! Seriously, though, writing prose in a simple text editor and worrying about formatting later is far less distracting than writing prose in a WYSIWYG word processor. Also, adding formatting using a markup language ends up looking far nicer far faster than using a WYSIWYG word processor.

jrm4 3y ago

Word is the worst very popular program for the inverse reason of why Excel is the best; the extent to which a regular user can easily determine and or modify "why something they see on the screen appears the way it does." In Excel, you click on the cell and see either e.g. the number or formula used to get the result you see. In Word, well, it's just difficult to figure out exactly why a thing looks the way it does.

maxerickson 3y ago
You have to find it and turn it on, but there is a tool called "Style Inspector" that shows the applied styles and direct formatting of the selected text (or the location of the cursor). Can also use control+space to strip off any direct formatting.
sokoloff 3y ago
Excel's conditional formatting is pretty damn difficult to inspect, IMO.

dotancohen 3y ago

Not a flamewar, honest question from someone that couldn't stand Word last time I used it (far over a decade ago) but actually likes Open Office (well, LibreOffice, but I still call it Open Office). I'll grant that the Excel equivalent is nowhere near feature competitive with Excel, but the Word equivalent is, in my opinion, better. Have you tried Libre Office? I'd love to hear your opinion.

cassepipe 3y ago
A thing I like is that LO writer has a vim editing plugin somewhere on github

einpoklum 3y ago

> People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the fact that writing should happen in "word processing software" Uh, that's just like, your opinion, man.

themadturk 3y ago

If you're going to bring up Kerouac with his rolls of paper, you're better off talking about WordStar than Word. Word divides the document into discrete pages, while WordStar documents were long uninterrupted ribbons of text, just like Kerouac's rolls. Perhaps Kerouac "got it," but so do George R.R. Martin and Robert Sawyer, writers who continue to use WordStar decades after its demise (Sawyer even talks about the benefits of this undivided waterfall of text on his website [0]. Text editors also similarly long ribbons of text, and are just as conducive to putting words down as any bloated word processor that is optimized to produce two page corporate memos or colorful party posters to be posted in the lunch room. I've used Word professionally since the mid-1990s. I do know how to use it properly, and it still sucks. "Writing" isn't meant to be done in a word processor, which was developed as a business tool, not a creative tool. Writing should be done in whatever tool one wants to write in. Word is, be design, both a desktop publishing app and a secretarial tool. For book-length writing, it works poorly with long files, the file format is subject to corruption. The docx format is also proprietary and subject to Microsoft's whim; any conversion scheme is a hack (though Pandoc and many others do work adequately). Unless you learn the ins and outs of Word's style scheme (and sometimes even if you do) and follow it slavishly, formatting is often inconsistent and there's no certainty that the styles you apply to make your document to make it look a certain way ensure it looks that way on someone else's machine. There's no doubt, though, that a Word-compatible word processor needs to be in every writers' toolkit, since it is the standard in the publishing world. [0] https://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm https://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm, scroll down or search for THE LONG-HAND PAGE METAPHOR.

w0m 3y ago
I was under the assumption docx was simply an XML wrapper in a well known format. MS can't come in and break it without creating a new extension, invalidating deprecation concerns. That said - I do everything in markdown regardless so I can use a code editor more comfortably.
- kcartlidge 3y ago
  > I was under the assumption docx was simply an XML wrapper in a well known format. MS can't come in and break it without creating a new extension, invalidating deprecation concerns. Sort of. It's a ZIP containing a collection of XML files. The actual content is a single file, but you need separate ancillary XML files for things like styles, links, headers/footers, numbering schemes and so on. Each with complicated namespacing and nesting rules and each file referencing items in the others. The area where it is most at risk (for me personally in practice) is the lax handling of the file by Word itself. As a specific example there are nested XML elements where sibling child elements define properties on the main element, such as properties that define paragraph styles. Being siblings they should be supported in any order, but in practice generating DOCX files and importing them into Word will fail for no obvious reason, until you reorder them in the raw XML (even though they are still at the same level in the hierarchy). Then they work. In other words, it's less the 'spec' and more the MS implementation that makes it fragile. And different versions of Word can have different behaviour in that regard.

Kamq 3y ago

> To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly". "Word sux" because it takes forever to start up and I forget what I went there to type. It's like opening a jetbrains ide to take a quick note. The only time that's worth it is when I'm sitting down to write for several minutes at a time, which happens (maybe) once a quarter, vs 17 times a day for quick notes. Now, you could argue that I just don't want what word offers, but that's what everyone means when they say something sucks. It doesn't do the thing they want (usually because the implementers made trade-offs for other things).