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

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

BBEdit's regexps are awesome, almost as powerful as what you can do in Perl. I use emacs at work; it might actually be better than BBEdit as a programmer's editor. Its merge tool is a nearly miraculous thing if you learn how to use all of its features, and can be a lifesaver on large development projects. But BBEdit is much better at handling HTML and CSS.

I haven't used ProjectBuilder all that much-- I messed around with it early on, but since I get paid to program things other than Macs, I don't feel like doing a lot of Mac programming in my spare time. I've heard complaints that it's a little behind the curve of modern IDEs, since it's basically something that was hot shit in the late 1980s on the NeXT. But I remember thinking that Cocoa itself was a pretty nice development framework, certainly much easier to get started with than what existed on the Classic Mac.

I'm a little curious about XCode, and have heard highly mixed things about it.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

What are merge tools for, what is XCode, and why am I so ignorant?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

XCode is the totally new development environment for Panther. A merge tool is something that helps you if one programmer makes a bunch of changes to a file, and another programmer makes another bunch of changes to a different instance of the same file, and you want to fold them all together. The one in emacs is awesome. There are others which are very not awesome.