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Comment by krrrh | Hacker News Reader

I was at a conference last year where @patio11 performed a rap trying to persuade people to do all their writing in markdown. I wish I could simply link to it as an argument from authority, but consider the value of doing your writing in plaintext. You will benefit from editor choice, flexible tooling, version control, and forward compatibility. There are a lot of tools out there for "compiling" from markdown to a nicely formatted pdf, rtf, docx, or odt file.

I've got a pile of inaccessibile old university papers that for some reason are in Aldus Pagemaker format.

Edit: typo

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Aldus Pagemaker? Wow. Even back then that was pretty fancy for University work.

I keep all my notes in markdown: Daily journal entries and templates, schedules, collections of code snippets; even a book which is just about ready to publish. I find that I rarely use any of the conversion tools, but they are nice when needed. Overall I'm really glad that text editing keeps evolving and find it a sort of foundation of computer use with which you can't go wrong.

curious: what kind of txt editor(s) would make sense for non-code writing, say a novel, say w markdown or something similar? Especially if the person writing is non-technical so stuff like emacs, vim, atom don't seem like a great fit? I'm thinking something non-obtrusive and with limited options, so that UI is not getting in the way of writing, but with very litte learning curve?

And, given the example of GeorgeRRMartin, perhaps something WordStar-like would fit the bill? If so, are there good free editors in the style of WordStar?

I have this friend, and I've seen the mess of unintended font changes, sizes, styles, bulleted lists, indentation changes. and all kinds of horrible stuff in his manuscripts when I had to repair some of that damage because it was getting unusable - think he'd appreciate a more focused alternative..

I use Geany and really like it. Customizable. Even easy to e.g. type something in, press tab, and it inserts the output of your shell script or program. I use that to put the day's weather in my journal.

For serious book writing, with proper chaptering and everything, I would probably use GitBooks.

For anything else, even though it is not open source, Typora is to me the best visual markdown editor. It even makes me tolerate it being an Electron app, so it's pretty good.

https://www.gitbook.com/

https://typora.io/

I know it's extreme, but Notepad. Literally and unironically; write in markdown, and it should work.

No. If for absolutely no other reason, through Windows 7 at least, Notepad allows you to undo only the last thing you've done. That's a perfect, one ingredient recipe for inevitably losing work.

Notepad++, PSPad, AkelPad, Notepad2, and SciTE are all free & good replacements for stock Notepad.

I keep my notes in LaTeX. It's like Markdown, but with math.

> Aldus Pagemaker?

It was strange to use a desktop publishing tool to write papers, but I fell in love with its story editor[1], which looked like a plain text editor with a left column that indicated the applied style for that paragraph or heading. I would do all my writing in the story editor for a distraction-free experience, before I got handy with text editors.

I guess it was obvious even then that I would gravitate toward plaintext markup.

[1] InDesign ended up incorporating the story editor concept from Pagemaker: https://rockymountaintraining.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02...

I will happily use Markdown for my own writing. But I would never use Word for that anyway.

What I use Word for is at Work, mainly for sending back and forth specs with an update history and annotations. I do not even read documents in Word. I “check out“ the version of a spec that I need, save it as a PDF and open it in Sumatra.

I am sure there are better tools for this. There must be, because the process sucks. But customers do it this way and I am sure it makes them jizz their pants, because if you are not enthusiastic about tools in general and know very few tools other than MS Office, it must actually seem cool and pro to be able to do it like that.

I would push better tools on customers if I would have to spend more time on reading specs. But I do not, so I will not. And Libre would not make for a improvement.

git + markdown could be an interesting combo for back and forth written revisions (we do it at work with latex and git for research papers). But to someone outside of the tech community, it looks 100% alien of a workflow.

Much much too awkward to use. Word processors show changes of different authors in different colors, allow dynamic history, discussing proposed changes etc etc. All in an intuitive, graphical interface.

So they finally managed to reinvent git blame?

Yet, no two people manages to edit the same version of the file.

Current change integration tools each lack on their own way.

If we're trying to get people to "upgrade", why not steer them to LaTeX?

Yes, it is harder to use than markdown, and it is mostly geared toward academia, but LaTeX is also orders of magnitude more powerful.

LaTeX and TeX excel when the final form of a manuscript is to be printed or be delivered as a PDF. It's possible, but not easy, to convert LaTeX to HTML, doc, or other formats. It's even harder, bordering on impossible, to convert other formats to LaTeX with high fidelity.

I believe AsciiDoc is a happy medium between Markdown and LaTeX. AsciiDoc is as powerful as DocBook, and as easy to write as Markdown.

And can read files from 20+ years ago without having the formatting messed up

LyX is an excellent GUI editor for LaTeX. Saves you from having to bother with the document preamble, and by keeping the source view pane open you can still learn the underlying LaTeX. And on the rare occasions when something can't be done through the GUI there's still the ability to add code manually.

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