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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Word is a WYSIWYG document editor with built-in version control and annotations. In order to match that feature set with something like Markdown, you'd basically have to reinvent Word in all ways but for file format.

And if you expect Word's current user base to get by with Emacs or Vim or Zed and git, you really are programmer-brained and need to develop more empathy for ordinary people.

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Back in the long-ago times, I saw ordinary people fight tooth-and-nail to keep their WordPerfect on DOS instead of switching to Windows and Word, despite it requiring those overlays kept above their keyboard function keys and being non-WYSIWYG. Ordinary people aren't neophiles, nor is Word especially intuitive. They simply want what that app to which they are familiar.

I have been looking for a simple local only wysiwyg alternative to Onenote and there just.. arent any good ones? Joplin is close but everything is now markdown and I hate it, I've gone back to phyiscally writing down notes.

I'm old, these are notes for me only, I don't care that they arent 'web publishing' ready.

WordPad was good for this on Windows - maybe too good.

AbiWord looked like it might be similar on Linux, but never kept up.

There is a very light weight, free program called "The Guide" which is also good for notes

https://portableapps.com/apps/office/the_guide_portable

https://theguide.sourceforge.net/

It hasn't been updated for about 8 years, but it doesn't require installation and we have found it very useful.

There is value in familiar tools for familiar work. Someone typing letters to send to family is not intrinsically going be interested in, or see any benefit from, some paradigm shift to hypermedia-first document creation.

Nitpick, but I love vim (and to a lesser extent emacs) and am not a programmer (sadly). I don't believe you need to be a programmer to use them. Using vim is "just" using your computer. Personal notes, system configuration (dotfiles), anime playlist management (.m3u files mainly), checking the name of a unicode character I don't recognize (vim-characterize), inverting capitalization (select and hit ~) or making large formatting changes to some text (block select visual mode and multi-line editing, macros) to post elsewhere, bulk renaming of files (vidir), writing emails (aerc), vim is my go-to for all that. That's not even getting into vim-inspired separate programs like ranger and qutebrowser.

> And if you expect Word's current user base to get by with Emacs or Vim or Zed and git

... who said that? Are they in the room now?

I'm baffled when these kinds of responses show up in these threads—every time I've brought this up. Like, it's pure hallucination. And the readiness to go from what is _my_ very clear call for "empathy for ordinary people" to an explicit suggestion that I might be programmer-brained is inexplicable.

Ordinary people don't want to do any of the things uttered someone who's telling them to stop using Google Docs and to go "download" something called "LibreOffice".

Read about RTF.

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