A writer leaves Microsoft Word
stevenpoole.net
stevenpoole.net
I've always really liked Word, it's a great product, but for 99% of people it just does way too much and is thus way too expensive. Office is worse...gmail is better than outlook, anything is better than powerpoint or access.
My last two jobs have shown me that Excel is really what you need to kill if you want to break the Office stronghold.
Overall I feel as though the fiddling tax with markdown is only a small increment, maybe say 5 or 10% of total effort on average.
very little markup (high signal to "tag" ratio)
can produce all sorts of output (HTML and PDF, for example)
I use the asciidoc -> docbook -> latex -> pdf chain for the most part.
Very flexible -- you can tweak things at the docbook or latex level if you really want to, but mostly it just works. Good stuff.
This, and the fact that gitit is really good, and has math support (which I desperately need,) are the reasons I'm considering finding a hosting solution for happstack and moving all my stuff there…
I'm thinking of getting a Mac, but can the Mac version of Excel do keyboard shortcuts like on Windows? (E.g. "alt, o, h, r" to rename a sheet, or "alt, i, w" to insert a sheet). From my experience, it doesn't. Losing shortcuts would put a heavy drag on my productivity.
Not a maths error, only a display error.
The worst part is: Excel is the Dogma. If your results do not match with Excel, make it.
http://dssresources.com/history/sshistory.html --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet#History
Not a big issue unless you're doing psychological research or work in finance.
May I ask what specifically you think an Excel-killer would need to do to succeed? And why you think the web-based spreadsheets haven't been able to do it so far?
Go and ask your random analyst friend if they know VBA, and you'd be surprised how many know it (and with it know things like dynamic typing, implicit arguments, event handlers, etc..).
I'm not gonna say "most", because, I really don't know, but I'd bet that most (oopps!) of these companies have firewalls that block google docs and the likes. Their idea of "cloud" is to run virtualization on their own servers in their own data centers and call it a day.
There's huge security (mostly made up), regulatory (mostly made up) reasons for them not to move to the cloud.
It really comes down to being an unknown and it being easier (and perceived as safer) to "just say no". It isn't the regulation that I dislike, it's that said regulations are used to keep large organizations in the stone age. And, to be honest, from what I've observed, it really comes down to people not wanting to learn/work and having a powerful excuse (REGULATIONS!!) to avoid doing so.
A huge number of business and engineering applications integrate with Excel - all the way from supporting easy data import and export (and not just through CSV files, which Excel actually handles really badly) up to fully fledged "live" integration through local web services.
Until a web-based application can reach in through the firewall and pull data from a LOB, ERP or finance app and display it as well as Excel can then web-based spreadsheets aren't going to make that much headway.
There is also the fact that there are an awful lot of "mission critical" spreadsheets out there with huge amounts of VBA in them - I can't see Google supporting that (and you probably couldn't as a lot of these things call client side objects through COM).
To be honest, I don't think users want an Excel killer. Yes it has weaknesses (why it still can't handle Unicode CSV files properly is still a mystery) - but overall most people just see it as part of the standard corporate computing landscape.
You could perhaps make the whole model more interesting (e.g. by having better support for the hierarchical multi-dimensional data that finance people in particular just love) but then you'd probably lose the wonderful simplicity of the basic 2D sheet.
[NB I've spent a lot of time building finance apps that have Oracle Hyperion as a backend - which is a specialized 12 dimensional hierarchical database that is the market leader in its particular niche].
Oddly, I find PowerPoint to be a great app. In fact, if I need to quickly draw something, I'm more likely to do it in PowerPoint than Illustrator or Design or anything. Why do standard drawing programs suck so much at doing quick sketches (at least for people like me who can't draw)?
As such, Markdown is very clean and focused. You can figure out all features of Markdown in a few minutes. As you know, LaTeX can be excruciatingly complex but astonishingly powerful
I use both. I used to use LaTeX for everything, but I realized I didn't really need the power. Now I use Markdown, and have a custom style sheet for the html it creates (for printing, using the awesome Marked.app).
(If you don't write books for a living, the best metaphor I can give you is this: imagine you've been writing code for years using just a text editor. (If your editor is Emacs, congratulations: that's the MS Word of text editors -- kitchen sink included, but not everything ideally placed unless you do a lot of customization.) Then someone shows you an IDE. That's Scrivener: it's basically an IDE for books.)
That analogy doesn't stand at all. Most of the people whose editor of choice is Emacs(mine is Vim) have known about IDEs all along, have used them at some point of time, or may be still use it for languages which are too verbose to do without IDE code generation. They chose not to use it, or use it sparcely. There is no someone showing you an IDE.
Horses for courses.
As an aside - I think the analogy fails purely in terms of quality, word is a horrible mess and a nightmare to work with, emacs is a (sometimes clunky) thing of beauty.
I won't deny Emacs has everything, but the analogy to Word shows you don't use it. By not being an IDE with all the fluff that comes in IDEs, it allows me to focus on the code I write (I use Eclipse and NetBeans when writing Java code because so much of the work is boilerplate code generation) and nothing else. My hands don't need to leave the keyboard and there are no overlapping windows to shuffle around. And it's endlessly customizable - the "configuration files" are executable programs and, while its dialect of lisp is somewhat anachronistic, it's much better than writing Eclipse plugins in Java (or Word macros in VBA).
But honestly, your comment on IDEs being superior to emacs (vim user here) casts doubt on your other opinion. It's like saying congratulations for using bash, then someone showed you Windows. (That said, being Charles Stross casts confidence on your other opinion.)
I feel like he went from eclipse to textmate.
Every six months or so I check out OpenOffice/LibreOffice to see whether the documents I'm being sent survive the open/edit/save cycle.
Every time so far I end up with a document with widely differing formatting from the original.
So at least for me, LibreOffice isn't suitable for my usage patterns.
I imagine other people are the same.
In addition, many funders require that submitted proposals be .doc files. Sure, one could play roulette with other programs, but when thousands to millions of dollars are on the line, it's easier to simply use Word.
The hiring manager, who appeared to be clueless to any web technology or coding, complimented me by saying that my resume was the only one 'normal' without a bunch of code garbled in.
what a waste of time...
Which version? If they don't specify the version of Word to use for the files you're still playing roulette. The chances of getting an exact formatting match, for even a small document, across versions of Word use to be approaching zero.
Did they fix it?
If I'm submitting something read-only, PDF seems like the obvious choice. If you're going to edit it, maybe .doc is the solution, but really, Google Docs would make collaboration easier.
What does a Word file have that other solutions don't, other than mindshare?
It's one thing to be able to open a foreign doc without an error/exception, be able to edit it, and then save it without an error/exception and even then be able to open it (without error/exception) with the foreign (Word) program. Etc, edit, back and forth, "look Ma, no exceptions."
It even looks really good, in isolation.
It's quite another thing to get exactly the same results from everyone using different programs (or versions of the same program) and then hope that everything matches up.
Above some size, it just doesn't happen, and I don't want to have to be the one that slinks away when the shouting starts.
Both give incentives to the user to highlight every title and select Times new roman, 24pt, click the B button for bold etc.
Files generated with both applications get to you with tabs to simulate left margin! weirdly different fonts on each paragraph and other hellish things.
the whole concept of word is wrong. libreoffice is just a little better on following standards for the internal stuff. the part exposed to the user, is still a version of purgatory.
I'm actually curious - I've heard a lot of people raving about the 'power of MS Word', yet no one was really able to name any meaningful features that would justify calling it 'powerful'.
I agree fully that advanced features in LaTeX are most likely more difficult to learn, but if the argument in the first place is the 'power' of the features, then LaTeX will win out regardless. It's like comparing vim/emacs to nano (in terms of 'power').
"The art of spending 3 hours to complete a 1 hour job in 5 minutes"
And this is after using it for nearly a decade already :)
Because most of the features are useless for writers who only want to write prose where formatting doesn't matter that much (or will be done by people who specialize in that.
As far as "editing power" goes, I don't write much prose (I keep telling myself I should submit an article every once in a while to warrant my press passes) but I am quite sure I don't use much more than what WordStar gave me 25 years ago.
And how is having the features available (as in, say, Emacs or Vim) cause the user to get distracted? If you don't need fancy commands, you just don't use them. The day you need them, they'll be there waiting for you.
> As far as "editing power" goes, I don't write much prose (I keep telling myself I should submit an article every once in a while to warrant my press passes) but I am quite sure I don't use much more than what WordStar gave me 25 years ago.
Wordstar was much more of a text processor than Writeroom seems to be. I was thinking more about stuff like regex searches and replacements, being able to see different parts of a buffer/file in different windows, etc. Again, having those features available do not make people spend hours pushing buttons, but when you do need them, they're pretty handy to have.
Just as an aside: this is Emacs with darkroom mode enabled. What exactly would be 'distracting' about it? http://i.imgur.com/hWyJJ.png
Oh... And thanks for the darkroom mode tip.
Have a nice day! (and good coffee as well!)
1 - The reason Windows lost it's way was a lack of simplicity. This is a broad comment about software in general. It is tough to be everything for everyone. And most software starts this way.
2 - There was a great line hidden in the footnotes. This speaks to the importance of collaboration amongst great programmers.
"As Scrivener’s creator relates, he emailed Jesse Grosjean, Writeroom’s author, wondering how he did the block-cursor thing; very generously, Grosjean just gave him the code, and even recommends Scrivener on his own website."
Very good read!
So take advantage of it and send them a .rtf file -- nobody has to know and you get excellent compatibility.
That's the one thing I hate most about every modern editor: When I page down, my cursor appears at the bottom of a page I can't even see. What the hell is that?
The main reason I say is because I think a lot of people, based on the amateur writing I've seen, don't need a fancier way of arranging words so much as they need to focus on 1) the quality of their sentences and 2) how one event drives another in their plots. I worry especially regarding point 2) that Scrivener lets people work in parallel when they should be working in serial, with one event driving another organically. Too much amateur writing I see is, for lack of a better term, plotless: meandering around feelings, or random encounters, or designed to show how deep the author is—instead of telling a story.
Scrivener will help with some things, as I've written elsewhere, but I'm not sure it's really enough for the vast majority of what writers and would-be writers are working on.
If you want to be a good writer, concentrate on your craft instead of your tools.
Tools don't substitute for skill, but skill with the wrong tools is wasted.
Still, if you're curious about this sort of thing, I wrote in more depth about it here: http://jseliger.com/2011/08/11/how-to-be-a-faster-writer-don... .
Writers figure out what works for them and stick with it (my wife used AppleWorks forever; George R.R. Martin still uses WordStar on a DOS machine.) Programmers similarly establish their preference (which is why over-30-year old text editors like emacs and vi have such strong adherents).
The original off-topic message in this thread was about how people continue to write poorly, even after they have great tools.
That doesn't surprise me at all. The hard part is learning the craft. For most people, it's also not a lot of fun. It's a lot more fun to "look for the right tool."
So that's why it takes a decade to turn out a new book.
That's 1800 best-selling pages in 11 years. Not too shabby.
You see the same pattern with amateur photographers, who think buying a nicer camera will get them better pictures.
Many good programmers do very well with old, free tools that have been time-tested and improved. You don't need Visual Studio Ultimate-mega-edition, though it will certainly make your life easier in some situations.
To use the chef analogy again, you wouldn't say "sharp knives don't make you a good chef, therefore use dull knives."
You'd say, "focus on learning to cook. Don't spend 4 hours a day looking for the world's sharpest and most durable knives. But yes, do get some reasonably sharp knives. Then carry on with the chopping."
I just finished a novella using it. I didn't use all it had to offer, but the combination of index cards for simple and quick outlining and the full screen mode make it essential for me.
Fortunately, my Ancient Powerbook still runs version 5.1. Eminently usable, and far less annoying than the Office 2008 version. Among other travesties, the current version will often refuse to select a single word, obstinately selecting another word, next to the word you want to select (and delete) and thus deprecating one's deletion experience to repeated tapping of the Delete key.
As a side benefit, the Powerbook won't load almost all web sites, thus removing one obvious procrastination temptation.
(Note: that's option + delete for Mac.)
Has helped fix me off of getting off the computer at night with the color/gamma changes.
Unfortunately I couldn't get it to work* on my Ubuntu box and found another app, Redshift, that seems to jive better with Linux: http://jonls.dk/redshift/
-----
* Ran without errors, but didn't tint my screen. I chalked it up to oddities of video card drivers on Linux.
It's been my standard for well over a decade. Preferable even to green-on-black.
The only downside is that a colorized 'ls' output is typically difficult to read (the blues used for directories are typically too dark).
You need to configure the colors as presented by the terminal, and I haven't mucked with that yet.
You need to configure the colors as presented by the terminal, and I haven't mucked with that yet. Given that you're working with variations based on the ANSI color set, your initial set of values is limited.
There's a similar trick for vim color highlighting, though I've found the different color settings all involve tradeoffs, not all favorable.
A couple of years ago, Apress wanted Word files and I discovered Pages: really pretty good, good Word compatibility, and fun enough to use.
That said, I really prefer Latex for writing because I spend a very small amount of time thinking about formatting compared to writing.
Note: this only runs on Windows
Since switching to OS X I've used Byword but recently tried out iA Writer and am considering a purchase.
I'll let you set your own opinions.
http://dreamcafe.com/words/2009/04/11/help-us-dr-internet-em...
I have disabled the scrollbar, menubar, and toolbar. Full screen it and you have black and white. Nothing else. Combine that with some really great text manipulation features/shorcuts and you have an awesome text editor for anything you want.
And it can even do spell-checking and all that other fancy stuff.
As for the whole "what about sending documents to non techies" issue: It doesn't seem to apply for this article since he can write the whole thing in emacs and then send the final copy to his editor after copying and pasting into Word.
There's usually some intermediate format that you could, say, write in Emacs and use markdown or asciidoc or latex, compile to html or rtf or whatever, and then import into Word.
I haven't seen devices like that in last ten years or so. Undistracted, small, great text input.
Back then I'd connect the Psion with infrared to my cell phone to FTP stuff to our processing system that would eventually convert the document format on the device to HTML and post it online.
There is definitely a market for a device with a Psion quality keyboard and maybe an e-ink based screen (not sure they can react fast enough to feel snappy actually...) It would make a top notch writing platform... Smartphone keyboards are a joke when they have one and e-reader are even worse...
It has a lot of that sort of index-card functionality like in Scrivener.
It's often listed as a competitor for final draft (the screenplay software).
It's been built for Windows, Mac and Linux
It's just relaxing.
Edit: The site makes it look like it's only for iPad at first glance, but it's also available for Mac/PC
Could have walked into the sunset right there. But I understand his need to fully skewer MSFT.
I think it would be great for this kind of apps to auto-save directly to Evernote API or iCloud instead of the file disk.
That being said, the fullscreen mode in Pages actually seems like a pretty nice compromise between features and non-distraction. Apple's obviously been taking some notes. :)
If a "Word Processor" can't even manage such a basic thing, it's lost the plot. I think this was likely Word 6.0 that did this, and was also about where they brought the Mac and PC code-bases into alignment, though others may know better.
Word 2.0 on Windows is for sure my favorite PC version, after the 'just right' Word 5.1 on the Mac.
http://school.anhb.uwa.edu.au/personalpages/kwessen/web/soft...
Guess I'll have to fire my Mac SE (and the Word 5 disks) to be sure...
c'mon, i remember my editors of choice doing that since the late 80s. even under windows. under linux it's not even fair play to mention this.
Those people will have their heads blow away when the find out that /modern/ text-editors not only have full screen but better way to navigate the text and perform auto correction. ...just let them catch up with the progress made on the 90s. heck, vim can have word count on the status bar since what? the 70s?
* i consider the article to be an advertisement for the mac editor, even if unintentional
he is chanting about the progress of default text editors when all that was available from day one of his career.
it's like a developer with 30yr of experience just finding out version control
I still personally think the resemblance (not just the monochrome, but the overall look - the layout, the individual entries, the top nav, the bottom nav) is pushing the limits of good taste, but oh well.