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Comment from: Tangent posted at April 14, 2005 7:08 PM

Heh. Wordpad is my /friend/! *grin* In fact, I do more of my writing on that than any other platform (including StarOffice, which was created to compete with MSOffice but whom the creators decided to allow to be downloaded for free by normal people and for pay only for businesses).

But then I also prefer it because it uses up so little system information compared to the bulky and memory-hungry Microsoft Word. If only it had its own spellchecker it would be perfect. ;)

Rob

Comment from: JoeFF85 posted at April 14, 2005 7:13 PM

To be honest, I use Microsoft Word. Why? I'm not a writer. When I write, it is to create character sheets (I have a very nice custom character sheet template for Rifts that is in the third iteration by now from a friend of mine) or to pull text out of a .pdf before posting it online. Or to write papers for school.

Thats it. I don't put things on the intarweb, or create webpages, or write poetry, or novels, or whatnot. Just papers for school, and stuff that is either only for me, or going to be re-formatted for a forum anyway. Word does this all for me fine, with the font, font size, alignment, bold, underline, itallics buttons right there where I need them.

And my Dad got a copy of Microsoft Office XP through his office for cheap, so I don't need to shell out. Its all gravy.

Comment from: Kate Sith posted at April 14, 2005 7:40 PM

I'm a Notepad nee Simpletext gal.

(Especially since I seem to have accidentally permanently borked the default margins on my Mac copy of Word whilst formatting a piece for forensics one time... I have to open a ghetto-rigged "template" document every time I want to write a normal paper. Whee.)

Comment from: Christopher B. Wright posted at April 14, 2005 7:44 PM

whatever I use must have a real-time, running word count. I don't know why. I just want it there and up and all the time.

Though to be honest, OpenOffice is just fine. I'm using the 2.0 beta to work on a new script for something. The running spellchecker is useful.

My favorite writing program is a windows application called "Power Writer," which was designed to be a simple word processor for novelists. Very easy to write something in standard manuscript format, allows you to put all kinds of invisible anchors and tags for things you need to go back to later. Very useful for on-the-fly organization (which is about the only kind of organization I can manage).

Comment from: Tangent posted at April 14, 2005 7:49 PM

Heh. Thing is, I /am/ a writer. I've done a bunch of fanfics, from the Fleet Intel Personal Logs for Homeworld to fics for several web comics (mostly CRfH, I'll admit). I've also done regular fiction and even an 80K word novel.

Microsoft Word is nice enough... I mean, I used its word counter and spellchecker... but 95% of its functions go unused by me. WordPad literally does just about everything I need. Now if I'm a writer and find WordPad sufficient... then that suggests that Microsoft Word and other such applications suffer tremendous bloat, this bloat added so that each new "edition" of word processor can be sold for yet more money because it has "new" features that to be honest are rarely needed.

How many people have honestly used the editing feature (e-mailing the document to a person, letting them edit it ON Word and then sent to the next, and on down the line)? How many people even KNOW how to use that editing function? Hell, I'm sure there are quite a few office workers who use Word everyday and yet are unaware of 90% of what Word can do because while Word /can/ do this... we don't need it.

Problem is, if you go with the KISS principle and create a working and fully functional word processor... then you've just written your deathknell. Why get a new version of the word processor when the previous works just fine?

Robert A. Howard

Rob

Comment from: Grumblin posted at April 14, 2005 8:08 PM

You don't really need to defend Word as a word processor for "creative purposes", at least, not in the context Eric sets them.

Word is designed as the paper presentation end of the programs bundled in the Office suite. It is purely designed as an (surprise) office tool.

It was never meant as a tool for creative writing.

You can, easily. 5 minutes of opening menus, and shutting down things will reduce it to the lean meanness of.... wordpad.. Only with a better graphic interface, and a spell checker.. ;)

Save it as a template, and you're set to go..

But in the end, to process words, you just need simplicity. Word still offers that, you simply need to shut down all the stuff designed to allow thumb-fingered Managers to turn out their daily volume of bovine extrement, with fancy graphs.. ;)

Comment from: Grumblin posted at April 14, 2005 8:12 PM

Oh, and never, ever, ever use it to generate HTML..

There's a special place on the Ninth Circle reserved for those Sinners..

Conveniently placed to receive what they put out during their lives from the Master of the realm himself..

Comment from: Bill Gates posted at April 14, 2005 8:50 PM

All right, I'll throw myself on the pyre: I like Word. I know that "Clippy" or whatever the hell it's called is annoying, but what's the big deal? It has features I won't use, but so what? I'm not running the program on a Blackberry or a phone or something, and if it takes an extra two seconds to load on my computer, I'm not crying about it. Like Grumblin said, I don't use it for HTML and can't fathom why anyone would, but for creative writing it's served me well. I don't have to open up ten different programs for spell check and thesaurus and whatnot, and I don't have to hand over my first born to the Germans (at least not yet :) ).

This search for a "decent" word processor seems to have taken on Quest for the Holy Grail type proportions, and I'm just not sure exactly why. I'm not trying to be contrary here, just curious.

Comment from: Michael21 posted at April 14, 2005 8:53 PM

Okay, I was kidding with the signature. ;)

The curiousity is still quite genuine, however.

Comment from: Eric Burns posted at April 14, 2005 9:08 PM

Oh, hardly quest for the holy grail. I just like trying out new systems, and when I find one that really fits me, I get excited. And then I want to make it work better.

I've done plenty of writing in Word. I don't prefer it because it has way too much overhead, but Word is infinitely easier to create in than, say, Pages.

In other words, I'm a geek.

Comment from: John Bankert posted at April 14, 2005 9:33 PM

The problem with MSWord, on the windows end of things at least, is there has been no compelling reason to upgrade since the release of Office97.

MS pushes because they need the release cycle to generate income, and add more fluff since anything that can be construed as a useful feature to 95% of the user base has been there forever and year.

I still use notepad for a great many things, including my simple lists of stuff and editing XML on occasion.

I'd still use Word Perfect 5.1, if I had a copy.

Comment from: Alexander "SquidLord" Williams posted at April 14, 2005 10:06 PM

Actually, when I'm writing something for publication, I often compose directly into InDesign. Its a lot easier to write directly to the frame using its Story Mode (very much like Ulyssys, in its way) than edit elsewhere, import, and tinker. One tool and no swap time.

On the other hand, when writing for the web, I find myself composing in SEmagic, of all things, using its WYSIWYG interface, then shifting to HTML to c-n-p. But I'm a loon.

Comment from: kirabug posted at April 14, 2005 10:07 PM

At work, it's got to be Word. There's the Track Changes feature, which is critical, and the configurable Styles for formatting, and spellcheck and grammar check and all that other crap that says, "Hey, promote me! I can commuicate in the written word and make it look nice!"

At home, well, it's mostly Dreamweaver because most of the time I'm writing these days it's on the blog. But when it's not Dreamweaver, it's Word for class and ClarisWorks 6 (Appleworks, whatever) for fiction because I'm still working on stuff I started in 1990 and I'm too lazy to convert to Word.

And there's an expectation at Penn State that everyone has Word and Powerpoint and Access and Excel - professors literally have no idea how to handle it when you tell them you can't read their Visio diagrams, they'd go off the deep end if you couldn't read their Powerpoint slides.

When I'm writing fiction, though, I need every possible distraction stripped away from me or I'll spend all my time tweaking the table of contents instead of actually drafting content. Word doesn't cut it there.

Comment from: kirabug posted at April 14, 2005 10:10 PM

Heh.

"Hey, promote me! I can commuicate in the written word..."

Communicate, but apparently not spell. *sigh*

Comment from: Tangent posted at April 14, 2005 11:02 PM

Heh. I actually like using CuteHTML for programming in HTML. But then again, I basically use it like a slightly fancier version of Notepad, and got it with my purchase of CuteFTP so... *shrug*

Heh. It's years old too. No idea what they've done with it since.

Comment from: Doc posted at April 14, 2005 11:49 PM

Coming from a slightly different angle to all the writers out there (in here) most of my writing is for my uni work, which is almost all in the form of lab reports and so forth. When I'm writing notes to myself, or the occasional group fiction I'll use wordpad because it opens quickly and does what I want, which is just put the letters I type on the screen and end lines by itself (if I didn't care about this feature I'd just use notepad).

My problem is that when I'm writing a lab report or assignment or whatever I usually need at least a couple of tables or graphs or whatever, which means I need to use Word (maybe I could do it in wordpad, I can do it slightly better in word).

In retaliation I've been using Star Office and OpenOffice instead (because hey, its free) but they lack the other tool I need for assignment writing. Word count.

If there is a good reason for this I'd appreciate it if someone could explain it to me, because I'm not understanding how word count is so hard to include. I'm not even picky, just sum the number of characters and divide by 5 to give me a rough idea.

Maybe I'll give RoughDraft a whirl...

Comment from: SoulTorn posted at April 15, 2005 12:25 AM

Someone or other recommended UltraEdit to me for text stuff. I haven't actually gotten around to trying it, though.(www.ultraedit.com should you want to poke at it)

My text needs are, however, quite minimal. Using Notepad is usually enough for me.

-Chris

Comment from: Shadowydreamer posted at April 15, 2005 12:25 AM

When I'm writing with someone typically I do it in plain text email. Actually, I had a mailing list once for all my writing so I could write wherever I like, fire it off from my email and have it backup elsewhere and in an easy for to get onto my other machines. I've since simplified the system somewhat. ^_^

But I'd say Eric's right - the average writer is more interested in getting the words DOWN.. we'll make it pretty later. ^_^

Comment from: Aeire posted at April 15, 2005 12:28 AM

..still waiting on a full-screen text editor for Windows, folks. One that looks like THAT. One that will blow up to full screen with no menu bar, and no taskbar at the bottom, just me, black screen, and yellow text. All I need it to do is save, I swear.

My god, I want that program so bad. So, SO BAD you have NO IDEA, I want to jump that damn program and make little story BABIES with it.

I am seriously going through the writer equivalent of blue balls here. Swear to god.

GIVE IT TO ME

Comment from: Tangent posted at April 15, 2005 12:43 AM

*starts edging away from Aeire*

She's scary... 8-o

Comment from: cartoonlad posted at April 15, 2005 1:04 AM

Aeire, it's called Textpad: http://www.textpad.com/

Comment from: Aeire posted at April 15, 2005 1:07 AM

Aeire, it's called Textpad: ">http://www.textpad.com/

...that screenshot doesn't look anything like a plain, simple, full screen full of text.

Comment from: AndrewWade posted at April 15, 2005 1:16 AM

If there is a good reason for this I'd appreciate it if someone could explain it to me, because I'm not understanding how word count is so hard to include.

I as well. I was without Word for a while, so while using OpenOffice, I had to resort to going to this website every time I needed a count-up:

http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/countwords.shtml

Comment from: Shadowydreamer posted at April 15, 2005 1:34 AM

Other than when it comes to having to hand in X word essays what does word count matter..?

Comment from: Eric Burns posted at April 15, 2005 1:39 AM

Shadowydreamer is obviously a woman who's never been paid by the word. ;)

Comment from: Arachnid posted at April 15, 2005 1:41 AM

A suggestion for Aerie: Not ideal, but here we go anyway:

If you have access to a unix box, download PuTTY. It's an excellent SSH client with - get this - fullscreen support. No menu bar, no start bar, nothing. You can then use whatever one of the 20 or more unix text editors you want.

If you don't have access to a unix box, you can download Cygwin and set it up with an SSH server, then SSH into your own machine, and you'll have the next best thing. Kludgy, but who can say no to *nix?

Comment from: gwalla posted at April 15, 2005 2:57 AM

I /am/ a writer. I've done a bunch of fanfics

Pffft. Hehehehehe...

And Aeire, if you're using MacOSX, you're using Unix. You can run emacs on it. It's a very nice text editor.

Comment from: Doug posted at April 15, 2005 3:04 AM

Kaypro. Olivetti. Brother.

Icon-words from the antideluvian past. They and their brethren seem to have arisen from the depths, reanimated by worshippers at the altar of writing who long for some unknown, mysterious Perfect Wordprocessor. The long-lost functions they performed for writers have somehow wedged themselves into ancestral memory, the ghost of them seen only dimly in the glow of the modern display screen.

They were manufacturers of "smart" typewriters. They were mainly daisy wheel or dotmatrix printers with a keyboard and small LCD display that allowed you to type away into a buffer before being forced to commit to hardcopy. Some came with built-in spellcheck and thesaurus functions. Some could even perform very basic formatting for the writer. However, they were mostly meant to provide the same serice as the time-honored universal word processor and writer's boon; the typewriter.

Of course, they did their job sans the whiteout and/or corrective ribbon of their ancestor. I was _good_ to be able to backspace over that typo and have at it again, no paper sullied by your mistake.

They have watched form their Place of Dreams as others evolved in the realm they'd left. They slumbered, half aware as their replacements become larger, more powerful, more complex, leaving their users perplexed and puzzled with the mysterious workings and powers that grew. Their power has grown manifold as they lay unused and half-forgotten, slumbering and waiting for the dreams of writers to stir them from that comatose sleep. They came to the users, the writers that walk the world of Man in dreams, their subtle calling, urgent and growing in import eventually becoming irresistable.

Now they rise, to walk the world of men again.

"PhÌnglui mglwÌnafh Ulysses RÌlyeh wgahÌnagl fthagn."

Comment from: Shadowydreamer posted at April 15, 2005 3:37 AM

Shadowydreamer is obviously a woman who's never been paid by the word. ;)

I can get *paid* for this shtick..? *gets lost in amazed bliss*

..seriously tho, you're right - I've always been paid by the script or poem. ^_^ But I'm one of those doofy people who would probably trust the publisher's count anyway. (I'm an optimist to the point of stupidity.)

Comment from: masque12 posted at April 15, 2005 3:44 AM

I hear a lot of mention of Emacs, but dammit, what about vi? I use nothing else for writing html. It's so stark, but when I started learning it, I fell in love.

Comment from: Reinder Dijkhuis posted at April 15, 2005 4:25 AM

OpenOffice does have word count. It's under File ->Properties-> Statistics tab.

Come on, you didn't think Sun would make a competitor to Word without word count?

How you count words in a selection or paragraph I have yet to figure out though.

Comment from: Tangent posted at April 15, 2005 4:39 AM

Yes yes, Gwalla, chuckle at the fact I write fanfics. However, I've also written one complete novel and have a second novel half-written. I also intend on getting that 80K word novel published. (Well, closer to 90K, but I figure once I finish editing it I'll eliminate 10% of the excess...)

Besides. Writing fiction isn't easy. Think of all the cartoonists who suffer writer's block... and they're primarily trying to figure out dialog and scenes, which they /draw/. Now try writing that scene out in words instead. (I've done both, and both are equally difficult, I must say.)

Rob

Comment from: JSW posted at April 15, 2005 8:43 AM

You know, I should write a full-screen, cross-platform text editor. I wonder if I could do it in Python...

Comment from: TheNintenGenius posted at April 15, 2005 9:39 AM

Huh. Apparently, the blog ate up an entire post that I wrote without any warning. Stupid blog comment system.

Anyway, to provide a truncated version of what I wrote before (since I have to get to class), I, like Aeire, want Ulysses, since to me it provides the perfect text editing solution (i.e. no distractions, no useless functions poking and prodding you at every turn). Just you and the words. Also like how Ulysses provides very basic formatting, which Notepad (which I love) just doesn't do.

Comment from: fuz posted at April 15, 2005 11:19 AM

I am not a writer, so my opinions on this are suspect. I also don't have access to a Mac, so I can't test CopyWrite, which looks to at least be trying to address some of the same issues.

Another possibility is to use DosBox or some other DOS emulator and use the original classic, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.

But me, I'm perfectly happy composing in Editplus and using Thunderbird as a spell-checker, distractions and all.

Comment from: cartoonlad posted at April 15, 2005 11:29 AM

...that screenshot doesn't look anything like a plain, simple, full screen full of text.

That's because it's not a screenshot of the program running in full screen no-bars mode.

In Textpad, go to View -> Full Screen, then right click in the now-full screen text editor to Properties -> Colors to give it a black background and yellow type.

Comment from: Chris Anthony posted at April 15, 2005 11:50 AM

Aeire, EditPlus will do what you want it to, with a little modification - all of the extraneous UI elements (file listing, line numbers, etc.) can be turned off, and Alt+Shift+0 puts it into fullscreen mode. (You can even change the text and background colors.)

I tend to use its other features (in particular I like the line numbers and the ruler at the top), but they're all extraneous if you want them to be. :)

Comment from: cartoonlad posted at April 15, 2005 12:40 PM

Hah! Textpad is half the price for a single user license! I win!

Comment from: Pooga posted at April 15, 2005 1:32 PM

Well, cartoonlad, I mentioned TextPad the other day in the first Ulysses entry. I even included a clickable link, so there! :p

To be honest, though, since Full Screen editing was never what I used it for, and they didn't let me keep it at work after the last go of system upgrades :(, and I was responding from work, I wasn't sure it had a full-screen mode. So you win that round. ;)

Actually, Aerie, if all you're looking for is full-screen text entry in Windows, what you do is:

1. Open a Command Prompt window and use Alt-Enter to make it full screen.
2. At the Command Prompt, enter "more < CON > filename.txt" and press <Enter>
3. Type away to your heart's content.
4. When finished, hit <Ctrl>-C to exit input mode.

Nothing to download, no extra features to get in the way. Just plain and simple text entry, one line at a time! :D

Comment from: Jeiel Aranal posted at April 15, 2005 1:54 PM

I've been using word for my own writing project but I do notice that I was getting distracted easily. The thought of full screen editing intrigues me. I'm going to try out roughdraft, I can't be bothered to check out cooledit or ultraedit. I already have a notepad alternative.

Some intriguing finds from google. Jer's Novel Writer for OSX. In development right now but basically free. Some interesting features there, no full screen. Writer's Block is a full fledged word processor designed around creative writing. This one is for windows (yay!) and does do full screen.

Comment from: quiller posted at April 15, 2005 3:18 PM

I'm pretty much wide open with word processors. But for a while, I was a TA for a class on using Word and Excel, so I've wound up knowing those programs better than anything else.

I use Word at work, it is great for editing the technical manuals for our software product. Of course, I still go through them and find spots where someone hit enter 10 times instead of inserting a page break, or hit tab a bunch of times to line up two columns instead of setting a tab or using a table. People really don't make use of what they've got.

I like to program in Emacs when I'm not in an IDE, since it has great features for programmers.

At home I mostly use Open Office, since it is free, and I can open my Word docs in it.

Of course, I've been thinking about writing a play for my theater group. I'm still not sure what the best way to optimize for that is. At the moment, autocomplete or macros seem the best way to do the character names.

Comment from: otter posted at April 15, 2005 3:51 PM

In my last message I totally forgot about Yeah Write. Despite the silly name Windows users would do well to look into it... It was designed by former members of the WordPerfect crew, and it has a similar philosophy to Ulysses, in that you worry about word processing and not typesetting. It also keeps all of your documents together in a convenient sort of way, and auto-saves (which has saved my ass).

It's shareware, but the freeware version is great too -- you might want to use it in conjunction with OpenOffice Writer (also free) and just use that program for layout.

Comment from: eviljim posted at April 15, 2005 4:50 PM

One final textpad question (since the details on how to change the colors/fonts to make it like ulysses were so helpful): is there any way to get rid of the scroll bars, at least the horizontal one, in fullscreen mode?

TIA

Comment from: Wednesday posted at April 15, 2005 5:15 PM

vi + wc -w = happy wednesday.

That said, Ulysses tempts. Tempts pretty hard. Would tempt more if I could just get over the guilt involved in using something more overspecified than, er, vi.

That and the muscle memory. One of the things which bugs me is not being able to drop into command mode while typing things into a webform...

Comment from: Pooga posted at April 16, 2005 2:59 AM

(posting from home, for a change...)

eviljim: I've played around with the Full Screen mode, but I haven't gotten it to drop either of the scroll bars. Plus, while it might be the font I selected, I noticed that cursor position seems to be off if you're using a proportional font. Other than that, I was able to set up a Document Class with fonts and colors that approached the look and feel of Full-Screen Ulysses, judging by the screen shot. FWIW.

Comment from: otter posted at April 16, 2005 3:25 AM

JSW - I was actually just thinking the same thing. :)

Comment from: andustar posted at April 16, 2005 9:06 AM

Eviljim and Pooga: (and maybe Aire? do you want a screenshot to prove that I made it look exactly like Ulysses? :P)

When not in fullscreen: Configure>Preferences>View> untick Horizontal Scrollbar and Vertical Scrollbar.

Look what you did, I registered to comment all because of you :P

Comment from: andustar posted at April 16, 2005 9:14 AM

Oh, and change the colours/font in that same menu (Config>Prefs>Document Classes>Text) so that all your text files will have that scheme, not just the one you're on, which is what it does when you right click to get to prefs.

Can anyone think of a way to make it wordwrap about 2/3 of the way across the screen? I have a nice high resolution monitor, and reading text in such a wide column is irritating.

I think I'm going to write my HTML in this from now on, too. Wheee.

Comment from: iconoclast posted at April 16, 2005 7:13 PM

Jeiel Aranal: That Jers Novel Writer is AWESOME. completely. totally. i haven't played with it yet, because i'm working on somehting else at the moment: but ^.^. happy ashmanonar.

is it just me or is everything REALLY cool for the mac free (with exceptions, i mean come on, do you expect everything to be free?)? there are some awesome and talented programmers out there.

Comment from: eviljim posted at April 17, 2005 4:09 AM

Thank you so much andustar! I wish it would be an option either based on class, or based on full/non-full screen, but I will take what I can get.

Because I use textpad for editing a lot of other types of files, that I don't want to do fullscreen or in the yellow on black style, I just made my own file extension for its own class, so when I'm doing creative writing, I can have different settings than when I'm doing tweaks to an XML file or something else.

Awesome!

Comment from: Jerry posted at April 23, 2005 8:45 AM

Thanks for saying nice things about my program. Sorry in advance if this is a bit spammy, but it addresses a specific need someone had.

Jer's Novel Writer will have full screen mode in version 0.5.1.0, to be released in about 2 weeks, maybe less. I will be releasing a version in the next few days that allows you to hide the toolbar. Shoulda done that a long time ago. It also include a major upgrade to the margin notes.

It's funny how many people have requested full-screen mode. I guess I'm just hard to distract - I do a lot of my writing in bars.

It will not always be free, unless my novel goes big in the meantime.

Comment from: roninkakuhito posted at May 10, 2005 8:29 PM

I'm not sure what this call for full screen wordprocessing is, or why Word's full screen option won't do. I happen to like working in Word, usually in white on blue instead of black on white. I am not entirely certian why, but I like the feel of working in Office 2000 better than Office 97 (though, and I am sick with shame over this, Office 97 is the only one I leave the helper thing on, and that's just because when i get bored, I like to play with the Origami Cat (which isn't in later office editions.)

As for HTML? Save as plaintext then change then extension.

I eventually set a macro for word count (ctrl alt w,) and when I was still in college, I had macros for all of the symbolic logic symbols. And if it has to be compatable with the dozen folks with nothing to read .doc files, save as an RTF.

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