I know this is in a different league..but I wrote Foundations of Programming in Word, and then The Little MongoDB Book in Markdown + Textile (in Textmate). Writing in Markdown was a much more liberating experience as it was much quicker and let me focus more on the content rather than the document.<p>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.<p>My last two jobs have shown me that Excel is really what you need to kill if you want to break the Office stronghold.
TL;DR -- another book-writer discovers the thing of beauty that is Scrivener. I've written one book 100% in it, and used it to refactor three others (when their multiple plot threads were threatening to get out of hand). It's not that it does anything magical at the <i>word processing</i> level, but it makes the structure of a book-length work transparent.<p>(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.)
Ah: I wish I could leave Word for good. But my family's business does grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies (see <a href="http://blog.seliger.com" rel="nofollow">http://blog.seliger.com</a> if you're curious), which means we routinely have to exchange documents with other people. In that world, Word still rules, especially for complexly formatted documents.
Word is still a great Word processor. It actually has a full screen mode that eliminates all the distractions just as the programs used by the author. Word's biggest problem is that all its power increases its complexity and there really isn't a good user manual or resource to train people. I find that most people that switch to something like GoogleDocs don't use the advanced features of Word and probably would have been just as happy using WordPad.
Emacs users intrigued by the idea of an always centered cursor might like to try this mode out. <a href="http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/centered-cursor-mode.el" rel="nofollow">http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/centered-cursor-mode.el</a>
Two interesting thoughts here, that are general to application development.<p>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.<p>2 - There was a great line hidden in the footnotes. This speaks to the importance of collaboration amongst great programmers.<p>"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."<p>Very good read!
For a person working alone, the question of the format is largely irrelevant - Word support saving in plain text too. The problems exists when we need to interact with open people, and most of us can't tell them "What the fuck".
>WriteRoom has a “typewriter-scrolling mode”, so that the line you are typing is always centered in the screen, not forever threatening to drop off the bottom...<p>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?
I can honestly recommend Scrivener for both technical and non-technical writing. I use that application regularly and have nothing but respect for the developer. From an engineering point of view, it is a great example that demonstrates the developer's understanding of the problem domain. Little things that make all the difference.
re: "Many people agree that revision 5.1a, specifically, was the best version of Word that Microsoft has ever shipped."<p>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.<p>As a side benefit, the Powerbook won't load almost all web sites, thus removing one obvious procrastination temptation.
The author really sets his screen to yellow text on a black background? Makes my eyes tired just thinking about it. Anywayz... on a Mac you can flip the colors of your monitor by holding down ctrl-option-command and pressing 8, if you like that sort of thing.
Nice article - I downloaded a trial copy of Scrivener to try tomorrow.<p>A couple of years ago, Apress wanted Word files and I discovered Pages: really pretty good, good Word compatibility, and fun enough to use.<p>That said, I really prefer Latex for writing because I spend a very small amount of time thinking about formatting compared to writing.
Funny timing for this - a few hours ago, I decided I needed more of a minimal word processor (although I'm not going as far to delete Word.) I stumbled across WriteMonkey (<a href="http://writemonkey.com/" rel="nofollow">http://writemonkey.com/</a>) and so far, I love it.<p>Note: this only runs on Windows
I do everything besides screenplays in plain text. Compatibility wins here. Between Google Docs, Word 2010, Word for Mac, Pages and Open Office, it seems even basic documents get mangled. RTF is only reasonably better.
MS Word's greatest sin is mixing up content and layout into a strange binary format. Whether it was a devious scheme to lock in users or bad design is anyone's guess but it sure crashed a lot when uou mixed tables and diagrams. Formatting was a nightmare too and sometimes the changes were irreversible. I wish I saw the light and went with plaintext/markdown earlier.
Scrivener blows the pants off of monolithic WPs like Word for large structured writing (books or longer articles). I have a pretty detailed analysis on my blog as to why:<p><a href="http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/25/scrivener/" rel="nofollow">http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/25/scrivener/</a>
I too had been using MS Word for years to write the various articles and reviews that I do. But for my last article (<a href="http://www.smallcloudbuilder.com/apps/articles/410-crossing-the-chasm-converting-an-iphone-app-to-android" rel="nofollow">http://www.smallcloudbuilder.com/apps/articles/410-crossing-...</a>) I switched over to Google Docs. For my use, it worked fine. The feature I missed most was the live word count that like the author, I had come to depend on when writing articles of a designated length. Google, are you listening? :-)
Number one deterrent to me using Word: no support for emacs navigation keystrokes, which are near-universal on the Mac. I don't use actual emacs, but I've come to rely heavily on those keystrokes.
Apparently Steve Brust writes using emacs.<p><a href="http://dreamcafe.com/words/2009/04/11/help-us-dr-internet-emacs-edition/" rel="nofollow">http://dreamcafe.com/words/2009/04/11/help-us-dr-internet-em...</a>
The mention about the Psion PDA is spot on. I also used to do a lot of writing with those in the 90s. Relatively small device, almost laptop-quality keyboard, and battery life of several days with AAs that you could buy anywhere.<p>I haven't seen devices like that in last ten years or so. Undistracted, small, great text input.<p>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.
"Eventually the Psion broke, and nothing as good has replaced it as an ultramobile writing tool. So much for progress."<p>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...
<a href="http://celtx.com/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://celtx.com/index.html</a> is a very good, free and open source writing package that may be of interest to anyone who wants good writing software.<p>It has a lot of that sort of index-card functionality like in Scrivener.<p>It's often listed as a competitor for final draft (the screenplay software).<p>It's been built for Windows, Mac and Linux
This might be taking a step back toward fluff from programs like WriteRoom, but I really like typing up blog posts with OmmWriter: <a href="http://www.ommwriter.com/en/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ommwriter.com/en/</a><p>It's just relaxing.<p>Edit: The site makes it look like it's only for iPad at first glance, but it's also available for Mac/PC
Anyone else fondly remember Interleaf? I now have a love/hate relationship with OOWriter but expect I would pay a lot for a working clone of Interleaf on Linux. I used it both on Apollo workstations and on PCDOS.
Love it. He had me at: "Scoured of Word, my computers feel clean, refreshed, relieved of a hideous and malign burden."<p>Could have walked into the sunset right there. But I understand his need to fully skewer MSFT.
I really like the simplicity idea behind WriteRoom.<p>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.
I started getting annoyed with Word when it couldn't even force the caret to black when typing. Watch your caret, it's flashing, now type and it stays black.<p>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.<p>Word 2.0 on Windows is for sure my favorite PC version, after the 'just right' Word 5.1 on the Mac.
So, people are writing adverts* for discovering full screen editors?<p>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.<p>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?<p>* i consider the article to be an advertisement for the mac editor, even if unintentional