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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

Only the color sensitive part is exclusively related to image and video editing. It's an interesting question, over the past few years I've only sparsely done document editing in anything but Google Docs (which I still find absolutely terrible). Most of the "documents" I write goes into systems such as Confluence or various wikis, rarely do a produce an actual document in a word processor.

I might be completely wrong, but it seems like word processing is becoming a bit niche, something limited to legal and sales teams.

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I tend to prefer Google over other docs tools. Occasionally I hear that people feel it's terrible, but I don't understand why. Would you mind sharing a few things that bug you the most?

+1 the collaboration features of Google docs are so good, does not have feature parity with say MS Word, but I have not missed local apps

Line wrapping is often different between different browsers, so things end up on different pages for different users.

Document management is probably the thing that bothers me the most. Once a document is in Google Docs, it's basically impossible to find again, unless you link to it from somewhere else. Documents is some weird hybrid document/webpage/wiki thing. I hate that it doesn't have save button, completely breaks my workflow that it saves everything all the time. Sure I can make a copy, but how to I replace the original document afterward?

Finally, person preference, I don't like browser based apps. I get lost if I have more than two browser windows and five tabs open, why would I want yet another thing running in the browser then?

I generally like Google Docs and find it does a good job of implementing the feature set that most people actually need without a lot of the cruft you find in something like Microsoft Office. And I'm minimally organized enough I can usually find my own documents without much trouble.

I'll sort of agree with a couple of your points though.

Better version control would be appreciated. I had a problem just this past week because I was extensively rewriting someone else's doc and I felt I needed to work on a copy to straightforwardly preserve the original. And this ended up causing confusion.

Searching for the right "shared with me" document out of the hundreds that get shared on a regular basis--many of them routine meeting agendas and that sort of thing--is really hard and I regularly have to try to figure out who the owner is and other characteristics that will let me track it down.

Funny how even the term "word processing" has gone out of common use. Yesterday I was reading Becker's Writing for Social Scientists, 2nd ed. This is a 2007 revision of a book originally published in 1986, and includes at chapter titled "Writing with Computers" which includes much of the chapter "Friction and Word Processors" from the 1986 edition. I recall a moment of bemusement realizing how archaic the term "word processor" sounded to my ear.

>Funny how even the term "word processing" has gone out of common use.

You're probably right. I'd probably just say I'll write something up or I'll share a Google Doc or something along those lines. And we'd just create "some slides" or "a slide deck" and no one would imagine for a second we were going to create actual 35mm slides. We still use "spreadsheet" though.

I just don't understand this kind of comment. I've used Google docs for many years with dozens of collaborators. Could it be better? Sure. But "absolutely terrible"? That sort of comment makes it hard to take any other part of the comment seriously.

Could you expand on the Google docs comment?

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