The race to reinvent document editing | Hacker News Reader

The race to reinvent document editing

fastcompany.com

2 pointseggy3 comments

No love for Scrivener[1], though? It's been around since 2007 and it was really the first tool that showed me document editing using a computer can reflect what writing is really about: collecting, creating, and organizing a lot of chunks of information and ideas that come from different sources and formats.

Of course, all these tools are really finally realizing the ideas that are as old as "As We May Think" (1945)[2] and "Complex information processing: a file structure for the complex, the changing and the indeterminate" (1965)[3]. I don't think we are just now getting to the point where computers are powerful enough, but I do believe that we've reached a tipping point where computers have outgrown the metaphor of file, folder, and the printed page.

I do have one criticism of the tools mentioned in the article: proprietary, closed formats. I think we should have learned enough by now to be wary of vendor lock-in, but I acknowledge that standardization efforts these days are likely to be years-long efforts in omphaloskepsis that squeeze out things like SAML, COBRA, and WS-anything.

1 https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview

2 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

3 https://doi.org/10.1145/800197.806036

I owned Scrivener on my old 2011 iMac. I loved it, and it did everything it said, but I got bogged down in the OCD of organizing, so I tried minimalist editors like Ulysses[1] and WriteMonkey[2]. Even timeline, video-editing-esque editor like Causality[3]. I had used Celtx[4] many moons ago with a subscription to collaborate with others. All have their strengths and they are all good depending on what it is you're writing. I have settled on just using OneNote for work, writing, scratchpad, and list making, or collecting information. I think it was ahead of its time since 2003 and now. It is quick, intuitive, and you can minimize it to the workspace, and you can search throughout it. I would like a DB interface of some sort... Sometimes plain markdown and a simple text editor stored in a database is probably good enough for most projects not involving mixed media. OneNote does it all.

[1] https://ulysses.app/ [2] https://writemonkey.com/ [3] https://www.hollywoodcamerawork.com/causality.html [4] https://www.celtx.com/index.html

For certain, most of these documents-as-organized-chunks applications can lead to a lot of yak-shaving. I don't know, though, that it's any worse than getting bogged down in trying to make Word format a document to look like it needs to look and dealing with it unexpected reformatting everything because of a small change.

> Sometimes plain markdown and a simple text editor stored in a database is probably good enough for most projects not involving mixed media.

Even when you have mixed media, there are plenty of tools out there now that can take markdown and other files and generate a document in rich format, and those are the ones I gravitate towards now.

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