Plain text plus

[mmcirvin]

Brad DeLong's lament about Word leads to a bunch of people piling on modern computer interfaces and longing for simpler days.

I say what I've said before (particularly in the comments to that post): it seems to me that the ideal document-writing interface is not plain text and not WYSIWYG, but something in between that is character-based but lets you insert simple markup like bold, italics, superscripts, etc. and see some visual representation of that if you want. Something, in short, like an early 1980s word processor, or a modern blogging client's editor.

What I don't know is whether this strikes me as obviously superior because it is logically superior, or because I was introduced to writing on a computer in the age of Wordstar.

Comments

[cheryln.livejournal.com]

I often really miss WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" command in Word. But that's usually because Word has decided to do some kind of irritating autoformatting that I can't figure out how to turn off. I'm not enough of a geek-power-user to want to hand-code all my own formatting, but I'm enough of one to want to see what the program thinks it should do for me and how it's doing it.

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

Wordperfect 5.1 with reveal codes open in a split screen. I used it to begin with for when I'd done something and couldn't figure out what I'd done, or where the bold mark was. But I ended up pretty much keeping it open for mark up, not that I knew what that was then.

I guess what I miss is the two open at once, you can preview in the wiki stuff, but not see what the marking is doing while you edit.

And that's WP for DOS, not windows, in the ideal world.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I pretty much swore by DOS WordPerfect's Reveal Codes for a while there. But I think I liked Wordstar even more.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...I've noticed that some blog comment boards now do some sort of fancy auto-preview that updates while you type; I don't know if it's entirely client-side JavaScript or some sort of AJAX thing. It's very nice, in any event.

XJournal's HTML Preview window auto-updates while the HTML codes remain visible in the actual edit window. But HTML, while OK for many purposes, isn't ideal as a human-readable code display; something more succinct like wikitext or Markdown would be better. (NOT phpBB's weird markup, which is about as verbose as HTML but harder to use because of the editor's "helpful" interventions.)