Briefly, Tools for Writing

Today I wasn't going to write a blog posting, but as a status update this got to be excessively long.

Here is an interesting article in the Atlantic about software for writing. (I.e., the word processor.) Interview with Matthew Kirschenbaum, who wrote the book Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. (Available from Amazon etc.)

(Sidebar: The pricing of the book suggests it's not for a popular audience, otherwise the Kindle version wouldn't be selling for ~$19- $24 (depending on the store, and apparently with Adobe DRM) when the hard-cover sells for as little as $17. Sadly, it's thus a book that I'll buy, if at all, when used hard-cover copies come down to five bucks... Then I'll pick it up and put the author on my list of people to buy coffee for when they come to Santa Banana to claim their due.)

In any case, among other things the article discusses writing tools, from the typewriter through modern software. There are a few nice anecdotes and a couple of pictures...

What tools do people use for writing now?

Basically, given my choice of tools, I'll use EMACS. If not EMACS itself, which despite some modern touches, doesn't integrate perfectly into a modern windowing environment, I use something called Sublime Text 2, but I heavily customize the keymapping to make it look a lot like EMACS.

My primary concern with typing is not just with speed, but with moving around and performing local edits conveniently and quickly, which saves time later... (That's why a tool like FreeWrite, while attractive in some ways, is just too primitive. I'm not quite that macho.)

"Quickly" in typing also means moving the fingers off the home row as little as possible. Most of the ordinary mass-market tools people seem to use require moving your fingers away to function keys and/or arrow keys to do just about anything, like move back and forth just a few letters to fix a minor typo, transpose letters or words, etc. I don't really want my fingers to have to get up from their comfy home row, slither across the room, rummage around in a drawer to find the right tool for moving left/right or up/down, use it briefly, then slither their way back to where they came from. Ugh! That's so antiquated. (Haha, I guess some people would say that EMACS is antiquated, but certainly not for ease-of-editing...)

Also, I dislike WYSIWYG environments for composing and editing prose, and only use MS Word (for example) to actually perform page layout once I'm completely finished with the Nth draft of a thing and am ready to format it for EPUB and/or print. Along the way, I even use semi-automated tools to hand-convert my plain prose into vanilla HTML, but that's a different story...

That's all for today.