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Comment by justinator | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that they didn't talk to writers that just want to write a novel without all the distractions of a modern MacOs experience.

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Okay, but using an OS without memory protection to achieve this seems dangerous. What if a buggy program accidentally blows up their work? (do they somehow install version control?)

You restore it from a backup.

You became conditioned to the state of the system. You would save before known problematic operations; you would have comprehensive backups. You adapted to the misfeatures of the underlying software. It's not much different, from a UX perspective, than when I was learning Unix and "rm -rf . [A-Z]*" was infuriatingly chalked up as "a learning experience".

MacWrite Pro crashed every single time I opened Tetris. It was a great way of conditioning me out of time-wasting when I was supposed to be writing an article.

> using an OS without memory protection to achieve this seems dangerous

Not more dangerous than back in the day when the old was the new.

What we have now is better, sure, but people back then still wrote books and did good work.

Easy, just dust of the floppy with a recent backup.

Memory protection won't stop corrupted saves. You'd just have to reboot sometimes after programs crash.

I don't use a word processing program much anymore. I just haven't taken the time to learn all the features, or care to.

What I have been using instead is Sublime text. I didn't plan on it, but just found myself using it to write. I know they have writing plug-ins, but haven't had the need to even seek those out. It probally seems crazy, but it just works for me now. Plus, most of my writing these days goes right into HTML markdown?

I do this too! I write most prose in sublime. It gives me spell check, word count, handy text folding features, and tons of other useful features without the distractions of thinking about styling. If necessary, I paste dump it into Pages/gdocs as a last step, but usually I just write markdown.

Not crazy at all. I used to use Notepad with the font set to something proportional. "Word processing" programs have blurred the line between writing and editing, but in a professional publishing pipeline they've always been best done with separate tools. And the tool for writing, should be a tool that offers as few distractions to writing as possible. Definitely no editing or layout tools.

I am of another school of thought. The layouts of my documents are there to make them easier to understand, and I benefit from them while I am writing. So I personally do not like writing in a text editor, even though I spend a lot of time in one when I am completing other tasks. At the same time, I simply create or import styles at the beginning of a project, so I am virtually never doing layout while I am writing.

Even MacOS is a distraction.

-- George R.R. Martin

Sent from WordStar 5

At the pace he writes, he could live in the pre-Gutenberg era and word processing wouldn't be the limiting factor...

I disabled all notifications (except calendar) and am using the pomodoro technique to focus - works for me, with no need to downgrade to OS 9. :-)

I have a Powerbook G3, running Word 5.1 on OS 9. The sole function is "writing machine." It's around 20 years old, and still runs just fine. It's a lot more convenient than an IBM Selectric, although not quite as fast. The Selectric never lagged.

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