Comment by sriram_malhar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sriram_malhar | Hacker News Reader

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I keep two diaries, both MS Word documents. In one, I write summaries of what I read about -- papers, blog posts, books, and articles that interest me, along with the google search term, authors, URL, quotable quotes etc. In the other, I put together a free-form running log of projects I am working on, along with feature ideas, benchmark results (and the parameters used to get it),etc.

Why MS Word, you ask?

I am ordinarily an avowed plaintext person, and I have tried everything from various wiki formats, org-mode, markdown of every shape and stripe (even bought a few markdown editors), but they haven't worked for me. The reason is lack of WYSIWIG

WYSIWIG is a huge efficiency booster. Inline images, doodles of my own, colors, fonts, tables, inline math, greek and other symbols, all of it is right there in the original (not in a separate render), and is searchable.

Having all of it in one file is not really a problem performance-wise; I have had one file for the last 8 years. It is easy to back up and the chronology is clear, and it is easy to generate a table of contents.

Finally, having it on a google drive means that it is available/convertible to google doc if I need to access it from elsewhere. I do not rely on google docs to be the primary copy, because i don't want to rely on a working internet connection all the time. Offline works better for me.

Hey! What do you think of my WritingOutliner (http://writingoutliner.com) then? Basically it turns Microsoft Word into a powerful outliner.

Or the new DocxManager (https://docxmanager.com)

No. Looks interesting, but it looks like it is available only on Windows?

Unfortunately, it's for Windows only

Have you tried notion? Supports a lot of what you like about MS Word.

I have not. The feature set looks impressive. However, I prefer my approach because everything is searchable text in temporal order. I don't wish to impose any further order on it, not just because it takes time, but also because it forces a particular hierarchy ahead of time. I often have mutual references to other articles, for example, or overlapping clusters of references.

Any reason you emphasize MS Word instead of a word processor in general? The "Why MS Word" doesn't mention anything specific to MS I think.

No, any word processor should do. MS Word is quite frictionless because its document format is a defacto standard.

Of the word processors, I like Apple Pages a lot, and its inline math typesetting supports LaTeX. But it didn't at one time, and I already had a ton of stuff in my Word diary.

Typora is mark down based but is WYSIWYG.

ah, thanks. I did not know about this.

I did a quick trial run, and I love it. I'd pay for it. I tried drawing quick sketches on an iPad and pasting it, I tried latex math formulae inside tables; they worked flawlessly. The UI is gorgeous. Lists don't seem to work inside tables though, and most of the keyboard shortcuts don't work for me.

In any case, for the theme at hand, I'd still go for a word processor and a single file combo. It turns out I need more primitives to organise my writing than even typora's markdown gives me, such as colors, formatted paras or lists within tables, tab stops etc. And most importantly, Word has evolved to support really large files, since I have had basically a single diary for many many years.

That said, I will try out typora in earnest for documentation and other things.

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