Text editors

[mmcirvin]

In recent years I have come to realize that I never got the hang of WYSIWYG word processors. I've never really used them for anything other than short snail-mail correspondence.

I first became enamored of writing stuff on a computer back in the eighties. I didn't have a word processor for my Atari (though I did correspond with a friend for a while by mailing back and forth cassettes of Atari BASIC programs, the first of which would always be a string of PRINT statements that displayed a letter). But my father eventually got a first-generation Compaq, the 34-pound computer that stretched the definition of the word "portable" and may have done even more than the IBM PC to plant the seeds of the modern Wintel duopoly. The first word processor he got for it was actually a plain text editor/postprocessor combo called Edix/Wordix, which was what he used most of the time, kind of like using vi and troff to write everything. Then he bought Wordstar, but he couldn't see the advantage of it until I pointed out to him that in Wordstar you could leave off the return at the end of every line and re-flow paragraphs.

I went crazy for Wordstar, though, and started pounding out not just school papers, but a huge amount of amateur science fiction that I printed out on his dot-matrix Epson and handed around to my friends at school, one of whom started a zine many years later (that's him holding somebody else's Hugo). Some of the basic storylines really weren't bad. That I was writing for a tiny audience of buddies was a great disinhibitor, kind of like writing for a.r.k or a weblog. Later on my father got WordPerfect, which was much fancier, and I started using that, but I think I liked Wordstar more.

When I got my Atari ST in college, it had a GUI of sorts but came with a very simple character-based word processor called 1st Word. The best thing about 1st Word was that the entire available character set (including the quarter-Dobbsheads) was always there in a big box on the screen background, and you could type characters into the front window just by clicking on them, sort of like the Mac OS X Character Palette. Later on I bought the legendarily disastrous WordPerfect for the ST, which kept me in floppy disks for years just from all the patches they had to mail to get it up to barely working. I eventually ended up going back to 1st Word.

These were all old-school word processors designed around an 80-column character-based display and the assumption that you'd probably be printing things out on a dot-matrix printer. Though they weren't programmer's text editors like vi or emacs, you still fundamentally thought of the text as a stream of characters rather than as a paper document in the making. It was all decidedly lo-fi; "letter quality", that is to say output comparable to a typewriter, was the Holy Grail. It's hard to remember now how much the arrival of WYSIWYG desktop publishing and then laser printers changed everything.

But it wasn't entirely for the better. For one thing, on the low-resolution displays they had early on, on a WYSIWYG proportional display it was always difficult to tell things like whether you'd inserted one space or two. But beyond that, I never really became fond of thinking of the document I was working on as being pieces of paper that I was laying out while writing. The early word processors had taught me to think about a story or paper in the abstract as a stream of characters and words. Having freed myself from the tyranny of the typewriter, such considerations as margins and fonts were best left to the end of the project, rather than allowed to clutter up my thought processes early on by being there on the screen.

I got ClarisWorks for my first Mac in 1995, which had a MacWrite-like word processor, but I never really warmed to using it. For one thing, the scientific writing that I did in graduate school was much better handled using TeX markup and a text editor, and that was what I did. For another, I was starting to mess around on Usenet a lot, and plain ASCII is the lingua franca of Usenet; e-mail and Usenet tools have something like a plain text editor in them, or use an external one. And, of course, the Web is a similar situation to TeX. We're back in the Edix/Wordix world, and in some ways it's better.

Nowadays, the first writing tool I reach for when I need to compose a long document is usually BBEdit.

Comments

[jecook]

Amen.

I'm thinking of figuring out just how to port ee over to the Win32 enviroment. it's what I use to do up my admittedly benign web pages.

Content first, then the formatting. I like that idea.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think it took a while for me to admit this because in the early days, the desirability of WYSIWYG word processing was tied up in the ideological dispute over whether graphical user interfaces were good or bad, which was also part of the foundation of the Mac/PC rivalry. I had no dog in the Mac/PC fight, being an Atari person. But I decided early on that GUIs were basically good, since they opened up possibilities that had not existed before (you can't really have a paint program without one), and the main argument against them seemed to be an elitist one that they allowed the wrong kind of people to use computers, or were somehow unserious. (Of course there is another counterargument that a GUI doesn't allow you to do the kinds of complicated hackish things that a command line can, but I figured that was an engineering problem.)

Of course it's easier to see today that text editor/WYSIWYG DTP, command line/GUI, and Mac/PC are three completely different dichotomies—and that command lines and GUIs can easily coexist in the same box. And I should have been able to see it to some extent even back then, given that my Atari ST had a GUI (if a clunky and unsophisticated one) but the word processors I used on it were character-based.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Actually, there are small ways in which the "content first, then formatting" rule breaks down, which are often the same things people argue about in the holy wars about the boundary between structure and style in HTML/CSS/XML. For instance, one nice thing that a plain ASCII text editor doesn't have is an easy way to put in simple text styling like italics and boldface and superscripts on the fly, without worrying too much about the distinction between italics and some semantic distinction that happens to be represented as italics, as in Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe painting. When you're writing, you often want to worry a little bit about inline styling, which is really just an extension of punctuation, but not any styling beyond that. Inline styling is part of the text; it's something that affects your voice when you read aloud, which was the original purpose of punctuation.

(An aside: The pointless holy war over <em> versus <.i> was enough to convince Jorn Barger that HTML structuralists were crazy and wrong about everything. I think they were just overreaching a little bit. Note that they later actually tried to extend semantic markup a little way into the world of punctuation with the <q> tag, which would have nicely solved the problem of bringing smart quotes and localized quotation styles into the world of HTML, but it didn't work because of a lack of backward compatibility with existing browsers.)

I tend to think that some basic user interface similar to an early-1980s character-based word processor is really the sweet spot for rapid writing in volume. But that might just be a function of what I grew up with. Note, though, that the user interface of a LiveJournal client tends to be something kind of similar to that.