I almost switched to a Mac for the slightly-too-in-love-with-itself Scrivener but then decided all the options would distract as much as help. JDarkRoom doesn’t have the typewriter scrolling mode. Can I justify an expensive new laptop to run a piece of software to turn it into a DEC VT102?

Possibly.

Are there internerd social rules for a first post on a friend’s new website? I should say ‘Great site, BTW!’ or something but it seems a bit crass. Perhaps something that shows I’ve done my research like, ‘It’s way better than StevenPoole.com, seriously, well done.’

It might interest you to know that WriteRoom is available as part of the MacToSchool bundle. The bundle includes a number of programs with a total value of over $300, but is available at the MacToSchool.org site for only $50. The bundle will be available until the middle of September.

I’ve been writing prose almost exclusively in BBEdit for years. YMMV! :-)

Ste: I know that as a comrade in writing, you need Scrivener. Also, a black MacBook just looks so much cooler in the coffee shop, don’t you think?

pudge: okay, you win the hardcore prize. ;)

Steven,

I completely relate. I haven’t been able to bring myself to uninstall but using Pages 08 and Scrivener, I’ve not booted it in quite some time. Maybe it is time for me to remove it as well.

http://www.macsparky.com

Mellel: Word + WriteRoom packed together. Mellel can do the same (hidden icons, black screen with text only).

I wrote my dissertation in WriteRoom for much the same reasons. That with some somafm in the background and a zero distraction environment was reached. It’s good stuff and I’m glad to see it getting attention.

I do all my fiction writing in Avenir:

http://returnself.com/

It has a very nice distraction-free fullscreen mode like WriteRoom, but lots of other goodies especially for fiction writers like word frequency counting, daily goals, and annotations.

Mandy

If you like the Writeroom experience but don’t own a Mac or don’t want to install anything, there’s a free online equivalent called Writer.

I can’t say I blame you Steven, Word is pretty horrendous now, although PowerPoint takes badness to a whole new level.

I’ve been a Nisus Express user for years now, but I think even it is beginning to acquire more baggage than I really want, I seem to spend more and more of my time with the toolbar hidden and the draw just showing me a word count. I might try downgrading to Scrivener and see how I get on with that.

I identify with your writing experience on the Brother, my version being a Smith-Corona (single-line LCD) which I still have in my closet.

I’ve never really liked Word (after 1990) for the Mac, and gravitated to WordPerfect. In terms of wordprocessing, I have been suffering since the end of Mac OS 9.

I’ve given Scrivener two half-hearted tries, and your article will get me to try again. My current solution, is a program called Tinderbox by Eastgate Systems.

The program has a long learning curve (took me a year to really figure out up from down), but the program is very powerful. While it can be used as a simple typing interface, the value of the program is that it allows you to create a file structure with your own metadata. It is more akin to a database for wordprocessing but even that is a ham-handed description. It’s .tbx files are simple XML.

But my comment isn’t intended as a plug for Tinderbox (of which I am only a satisfied user).

I mainly want to acknowledge that there is something very wrong with the state of the art of wordprocessing programs and I think many technically competent writers (not programmers) wish something existed to fill the gap. I want something very much like WriteRoom but that has a footnote mechanism that allows you to write note text with the context in full view.

So, thank you for the thoughtful write up. I look forward to checking out _Unspeak_.

Johnnie Wilcox
aka mistersquid

Just another “hard line” Microsoft basher who criticizes MS Word because he doesn’t understand and/or appreciate its advanced features and design.

“I don’t understand this and I’m too lazy to learn it! Let’s bash it!”

Nevermind the fact that ANY printed document can be generated in MS Word…

The original Scrivener website seems to be dead at the moment (”grubered”? “fireballed”?), but you can still get a lot of technical info about Scrivener via macupdate.com:

http://www.macupdate.com/info....../scrivener

Good for you and good luck. While I spend a lot of my time writing, (reports, proposals, etc) I have never understood what is so distracting about a word processor in general. The blank screen with just words does exactly the opposite for me. I feel trapped in the words, almost claustrophobic.

With the last version of Pages, I have now pretty much dumped Word although I still use it because our company uses nothing else. They don’t have to know about my Pages affliction.

For those of you who are reading this article looking for alternatives to Word, I’ve gotta plug Mellel (http://www.redlers.com). It’s got a full-screen mode like WriteRoom, and is entirely styles driven. I’ve been using it for the last two years, and I’m definitely hooked.

It’s got a bit of a learning curve at first, but once you get going with it, you’ll wonder how you ever survived in Word. Plus it integrates with bibliographic software (Bookends) and its format is XML so you can apply XSLTs to convert it to other formats (LaTeX, for example.)

I switched away from Word after almost 10 years when Pages was released. It wasn’t always easy in the early days with Pages, but it’s grown into a very sweet word processor for my needs, which often include diagram layout with words.

2 years without Office, and now Numbers lets me abandon Google Docs as well. Things keep looking brighter :)

Ulysses is somewhat sleeker than Scrivener, but otherwise similar:
(http://www.blue-tec.com/ulysses/)
It also features full screen mode, chapter management, word count etc., however no footnotes, no PDF/image/web page storage, and no screenplay mode, as it is aimed more at the “literary” writer. Sometimes I miss these things, but in general I find it pretty versatile.
Ulysses exports as RTF, DOC, LaTeX, or PDF, while internally files are saved as TXT (an important matter, if you wonder, whether the software will still run – or the company still exist – after the next major OS upgrade).

“although PowerPoint takes badness to a whole new level” - WOPR

Amen, brother (or sister). I really thought Microsoft would do the typical Microsoft thing with PowerPoint 2007 and lift some of the beauty from Apple’s Keynote (in addition to adding a bunch of new, useless features, another “Microsoft thing”).

Nope. Same crappy-looking presentations with a frustrating new interface. Nice work as always, MS!

I am encouraged that people are starting to reject the “More is More!” philosophy that is Microsoft and choosing more “elegant” (dare I use the word?) apps to get the job done.

I uninstalled Office when iWork ‘08 was announced.

Microsoft’s stranglehold on the planet will soon be but a bad memory…

The last two comments mention it in passing and I’m surprised no one else mentioned it before them: How about (La)TeX? Plain text, small sizes, able to open it 30 years from now, separates markup from content, handles footnotes extremely well (BibTeX), etc. And nothing really around today can touch it if you need to insert a formula, though I guess that last feature isn’t such a big deal to many.

Nobody has mentioned Jer’s Novel Writer so far (www.jerssoftwarehut.com).

JNW is using the endless paper metaphor that Steven mentioned above, has tweakable full screen mode, a useful if somewhat rudimentary database, a multi-page notes drawer AND – a perfect implementation of margin notes.

It’s fired my inspiration like nothing else. No wonder I never got far on my novel using W-d…

How about Bean ?

http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html

The last time I used Word it was because a publisher demanded that I turn in book chapters using their Word template. Ironically, the book was about a Web publishing system that gracefully handled text, HTML, XML, and more, and even in beta it did not crash like Word and I was left wondering why I wasn’t just writing the book in the app I was writing about. At one point a Word document became “corrupted” and we had to go back to a previous version and redo the work since. The experience was draining, it felt like fighting with Word, there was never a time where it was supportive of my work. It is not a writing tool, it is not even a good typewriter replacement and that’s Microsoft’s core business (replacing the Selectric in offices worldwide).

I use BBEdit now to write text, as well as write HTML, CSS, JS and a little PHP. In all cases every character is important and BBEdit treats it that way. I set the font to Monaco 14 and get big smooth letters with accurate spacing so I never guess about one or two spaces, it is easy to write, easy to edit, easy to store, easy to share. Plain Unicode text with Unix line breaks is as close to universal text as you will find. And BBEdit has never crashed on me in 10 years which I still find to be incredible. I’ve never lost a single character of text. There is a visceral feeling of reliability that contributes to writing-focus not computer-focus.

Also BBEdit is very scriptable, you can write a short AppleScript for tasks you do again and again, like say you routinely find-and-replace 10 phrases you can make a single script that does all of them as one step on any document or folder of documents or selection of documents. It’s a power tool for text, a Photoshop for text.

There is a free version called TextWrangler that is quite good also, you are better there than in Word. TextWrangler is a great addition to the built-in iLife in a Mac. Anyone who is using TextEdit owes themselves a look at TextWrangler, it’s much, much better.

The fact is, Microsoft’s software is not professional grade. They use an experimental, radical form of software development that is more akin to a game of telephone than a collaborative project and has never produced anything with any quality. The people who create Word are as helpless to improve it as their miserable users. Text-editing is such a simple technical matter at this point in computer history that what separates good text-editing apps from bad is a little art, the features we love in BBEdit or WriteRoom or Scrivener are artistic touches that Microsoft is not capable of.

Norm, thanks for the laughs.

Because you can’t be serious :)

Re. Norm’s comment: “the fact that ANY printed document can be generated in MS Word…”

Wrong, wrong, wrong, and then again wrong. That’s why so many people have used Adobe InDesign, PageMaker (and even Quark XPress from time to time); because Word is so wonderful at page layout.

Personally, what I’ve often found Word likes to do is change a 40-page proposal into a 300-page monstrosity (with, inexplicably, 1 line of text on each page) twenty minutes before it needs to be printed and delivered. This has happened several times.

BBEdit is the answer for writing; then use a real page-layout application for page layout, and then Word can’t ruin your day.

I use Mellel and Pages. I use them because my ideal text processor just doesn’t exist. My ideal would be some sort of mixt of LATEX and VIM with a good deal of friendliness.

When we write, we know what we’re doing. When we type a title, an abstract, a subtitle, a paragraph, when we quote, we know what we’re doing. Applying styles is just a way to show what things are. It’s part of the text processing.

Unfortunately, IMO, our tools have some progress to do in the styling. Presently, either you write all your text, then come back on it, select your title, apply the style, select a quote, apply the style, etc. (yay ! Pages has multiple selections), or you do it while writing, which is a distraction. Or you type the code, like in most LATEX editors, while writing or after you’ve finished. Not really friendly.

My ideal text processor would have a command mode. Command mode, command line, we’ve come to be afraid even of the words. We shouldn’t. A command mode would just make all your keys function keys. You fire your text processor, it opens in command mode (let you chose the kind of document, or open on the default), waiting for you first order. You type T for title, and it goes automatically in edition mode, centered, bold, with the required font-size. You hit Enter, it goes back to command mode. Hit “t”, you have a subtitle. Hit “p”, a paragraph; “l”, a new line, “q”, a quote… No need to write a command, no need to go to the mouse to select some option in a menu, styling in your workflow, without distraction. Plus, it wouyld still be possible to disable the command mode, and work the traditional way.

I wish I was a developper.

As Peter said above, I’m curious what you think about Bean? As a student, who doesn’t have the cash to shell out on WriteRoom or Scrivner, I use bean because it doesn’t try to do everything for all users like Word or OpenOffice/NeoOffice. It’s just a simple yet still nicely featured word processor.

I did the same thing as you last year. I realized that the only thing I used Word for was applying styles. My personal style library hadn’t changed meaningfully in at least five years. Everything else in Word was superfluous. It’s not a bad program in my opinion, but it’s not a good writing environment and it’s not a particularly professional tool either. I spent some time looking at alternatives and eventually settled on LaTeX with TeXShop. LaTeX is plain text where you apply styles textually, which meets my needs perfectly. It has a high learning curve, but once I got my personal styles transferred over from Word I was fine. It handles multiple tables of contents, tables of citations, etc. in a bulletproof fashion, whereas in Word I always had to do a final readthrough and make sure cross-references were properly resolved everywhere (I’ve been burned by Word too many times).

I recall a briefing for a layout job, when the client called the printer to ask how I was supposed to deliver the matter (meaning: as data or as film). The printer must have thought the client was going to do it all by himself, so when he demanded data, he reminded him loudly (I was sitting on the other side of the table, but still could hear him loud and clear on the phone): “NO WORD! NO EXCEL!”
So much for “ANY printed document” …

Thanks to all for the interesting links to alternatives. The more the better.

MrSquid:

I want something very much like WriteRoom but that has a footnote mechanism that allows you to write note text with the context in full view.

If I understand you correctly, Scrivener lets you do exactly that.

Fred: good points about BBEdit and TextWrangler - I used to use the latter, and am now a newly converted user of TextMate (from which my original post was sent directly to the blog). A highly configurable, Rolls Royce text editor like BBEdit or TextMate is extremely handy, but my own preference is not to use it for the intial draft of an extended prose piece. (AFAIK, no true full-screen view in either.)

I set the font to Monaco 14

Monaco FTW!

I think Neal Stephenson wrote Cryptonomicon (and maybe other books since then) using emacs. Available on Mac as well as all other platforms in the world.

Reference:

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/W.....OS-X-Emacs

I’ve read a lot of blog posts like this one over the years. They always seem to enthusiastically advocate reinventing the wheel, and they all evade the point.

Which is:

Why don’t you just run WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS and be done with it?

I adored Cryptonomicon (and Quicksilver, reviewed here). Arguably WriteRoom offers some of what Stephenson likes about emacs. In WriteRoom you have a .txt document, and you fill it with words. There is pretty much nothing else to do. Afterwards, of course, the editing power of emacs is much superior, but I don’t find I often need to do much more than find/replace after proofing on paper (which I still do for book chapters or long articles).

Joe:

Why don’t you just run WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS and be done with it?

You want me to install DOS on my Mac?

What a great article, very useful for someone like myself who is looking for a new tool for, you know, WRITING. I hate Word, it gets in my way. I want a software tool that keeps all my notes and reference in handy spots. I also want something that gives me a handy quick overview of what I’ve done, to see how it hangs together (or doesn’t) and lets me move blocks of text easily. I didn’t know such an animal existed, so I have been writing in Quark. Quark, at least, lets you insert boxes of text within your existing text, anywhere you want. It also lets me resize text easily and precisely, as well as change colors. (I realize Word does some of these things, but it’s a pain. Not ‘organic’.) That’s how I begin pulling ideas together, discarding redundant or weak ones, reinforcing recurring ones.

If any of the many tools mentioned here do this sort of thing better, I am SO there. Thanks to the author and all the commenters, you made my day!

Ah yes, you are getting old … From now on you’ll spend the years you have left thinking about the olden days.

Worth noting too that WriteRoom supports emacs-style editing keys (as do most Cocoa apps).

Steven, have you read this about Word 5.1?

(Also: Monaco 10pt kicks yr fatty Monaco 14pt’s tubby rear.)

I wrote a book last year, and had made my mind up that I’d try and avoid Word. I think Word has its virtues, but after looking around, I wanted something that “didn’t get into the way,” and would let me write. I also liked the idea of the distraction-free black screen.

I choose Scrivener. I can’t always spell it correctly, but it worked for me. The editor wanted my book in .DOC format, so I simply exported it as RTF, added-in the screenshots, and sent it in from Word.

So, no, I haven’t deleted Word yet. But I find I use it very little for writing, or in my job. In fact, when I get folks who send me something in email as a Word document (instead of simply composing it in the email itself), it drives me nuts.

As an educator, I try and convince our teachers to use something simple like TextEdit rather than Word. The most important thing is the writing, not the ways you can format it for the printer. I find writing in “text editors” rather than layout programs is far more productive.

Incidentally, this is why I dislike Pages. I agree with the other comment… write it up, and pass it to something more capable for output (like InDesign).

Jeff: writing in Quark! Why not? I think you might like Scrivener, though.

Bonaldi:

Steven, have you read this about Word 5.1?

Nice link. I wouldn’t choose to use Word 5.1a today even if I could, but it’s the best version I ever used.

(Also: Monaco 10pt kicks yr fatty Monaco 14pt’s tubby rear.)

Hey, it’s Fred who has it at 14pt. My Monaco is at a very reasonable 12pt. Because 10pt Monaco on my 24″ desktop screen would be well-nigh invisible, see?

Another Scrivener convert here. Pages for the fancy stuff, Final Draft for screenplays, but Scrivener for the writing of pretty much everything else. It’s just so wonderfully simple that I expect MS will try and cop all of its best bits before long.

Speaking of WordPerfect 5.1, it runs great in DOSbox under OSX:

http://weblog.mrbill.net/archi.....d-twisted/

I am an admitted Scrivener fan. What I like about Scrivener that a standard word-processor or text editor does not include is the ability to write in a non-linear manner. Scrivener allows all the separate bits/snippets to be organized however you want. The second bit of magic is temporarily allowing you to group whatever bits you want together. Organization using a standard linear wordprocessor left me befuddled, because I would invariably have a great idea that was important to the piece but not necessarily related to what I was writing. Scrivener allows me to write my thoughts however illogically they appear and then I can work on the correct placement and transitions later. Full screen edits, corkboards, keywords, split views all add a great deal of depth to a well thought product, but the conceptual breakthrough is that this program allows me write what I want, and then to string together my thoughts in an easily organized manner and for what it has done for my writing, the cost is a steal.

http://niransab.wordpress.com/.....r-writing/

Just for reference: Word (on Windows, at least) has a full screen mode accessible from the View menu.

Many people agree that revision 5.1a, specifically, was the best version of Word

These people would be wrong. The best version of Word was 4.0. The unnecessary cruft started with Word 5. It marked the start of the proliferation of ugly toolbars, for one thing.

Another Word tip: Escape the page metaphor by using Outline View (View menu). Use tab and shift+tab for headings and structure, and control+shift+n for body text.

Hmm… how does one prepare to sound like an ass?

Pop open TextEdit, and hit ctrl+option+command+8.
Stretch out the window ’til it’s nice and large.
Start typing.
If you like what you’ve written, go ahead and save as rtf.
Didn’t cost much huh?
I write like this all of the time.
No it doesn’t have some of the bells & whistles of the other packages, but if you truly want simplicity…

Some of these word processors sound wonderful - but what is there out there for the unfortunate writer using Windows (or linux) that’s also tired of Word?

Writer, as mentioned in the comments, is nice - but I wouldn’t trust my documents to an unknown web service(no offense, just being prudent).

Why is Mac getting all the love? I want some Windows authoring love! :-)

PS - your spam karma 2 system seems to be throwing PHP errors.

[sorry about that - SP]

What I found most interesting was the actual example text in the screenshot. Especially the last line of the second paragraph.

Niran:

I would invariably have a great idea that was important to the piece but not necessarily related to what I was writing. Scrivener allows me to write my thoughts however illogically they appear and then I can work on the correct placement and transitions later.

Yes! I find that very useful too.

SteveT:

Pop open TextEdit, and hit ctrl+option+command+8.
Stretch out the window ’til it’s nice and large.

Yes - for me that’s nearly good enough. But you still see all the menu and scrollbar crap. (Also, Apple changed ctrl-opt-cmd-8 at some point, either between 10.2 and 10.3 or 10.3 and 10.4, so it stopped being monochrome and did a fancy reversal of colours as well, which I hated.)

Sorry to anyone who tried to come here last night when the server was borked. Anyone referred from Daring Fireball or Digg (couple of hundred comments over there, some interesting) should now be seeing the Coral Cache page, which hopefully will keep loads reasonable.

For a windows download alternative to online Writer, the freeware Q10 http://baara.com/q10/ is retro-minimalist-cool (if you’re into that sort of thing)

Great article Steve.

Another program that combines a full-screen mode and “projects” of multiple pages is MacJournal. I’ve been using it for years now as my notes and planning tool for my business.

For documents which need better formatting, I use Mellel, which is lightweight yet has a good set of tools.

Yeah I hate word too. Imho wordperfect 5.1 for dos was fantastic. It was lean, powerful and courier new by default, everything word isn’t. There are a few features which are great about word, such as its pseudo regex replace and its ability to copy/paste formatting from web pages which you can then easily edit.

Excel is my real crack tho. VBA + spreadsheets is hard to give up on.

Personally, I like to use NisusWriter Pro in full screen mode for writing. If you set up your styles in advance it will use them to display while writing. I haven’t found a way yet, however, to show a word count while you are in full screen mode.

I think the reason I prefer NWP is because I personally don’t like working with a black background–black on white works best for me.

I’ve often wondered what a word processor from the OmniGroup would look like? More than just about any other software company, they seem to be able to strike the right balance between a great (and extensive) feature set, while making the user experience clean and intuitive.

Yeah, I use Word only when absolutely required. I mainly use LaTeX and Vim these days.

Norm, why should anyone pay for software features they don’t need? Why should anyone learn to use, or avoid, software features they don’t need?

More choice is better than less choice.

As has been previously mentioned, LaTex is a good text-based alternative, particularly in combination with the SFFMS macro package, which supports novel and short story manuscript (typescript) formatting.

Although I’ve been a Word user for many years, I will not willingly do so again, as it’s just too expensive, bloated and feature-ridden for my simple use. As has been said of the dancing bear, the miracle is not that Word works (bear dances) well, the miracle is that Word works (bear dances) at all….

Back in the Word 4.0 days, I preferred Microsoft Write. It had a simple interface, the normal formatting stuff, handled columns, would even do a stupid mail merge. The application itself was relatively small and quick, it saved .doc format files, and was considerably cheaper. Microsoft could have done nothing to that code other than update the document filters and make it a universal binary and people would still use it, I think. That was their best word processor effort. What? Something usable and useful? Kill it.

If Microsoft added columns and mail merge to WordPad in Windows, would people use Word?

I used Nisus Writer in the OS 8 days. I loved it then. I have not tried the new incarnation but the old one had some wonderful writer’s tools. I have Scrivener but mainly use it for organizing my notes. I’ll try it for my writing.

I agree passionately about the horrors of Word. But what’s the matter with Appleworks? Would Scrivener, say, be better?
I’d appreciate device on this. I’m writing long texts- novels. Thanks

Steven:

Also, Apple changed ctrl-opt-cmd-8 at some point, either between 10.2 and 10.3 or 10.3 and 10.4, so it stopped being monochrome and did a fancy reversal of colours as well, which I hated.

Have you checked out Nocturne? It’ll do the white-on-black thing with adjustable colors, from full monochrome to your choice of color tints.

It’s wonderfully useful, especially for a free tool.

I couldn’t agree more, especially with the comment about the mysterious, mind of its own formatting that Word is prone to. Dropping an image or table in seems to unleash inexplicable formatting issues. Making changes and revisions to one part of the document seems to cause inexplicable changes elsewhere - double space converted to single space etc.

I am converting to the new Apple Pages for most of my stuff. Now if it would just work with bibliography software, it would rock.

Diane - try the new Apple Pages that comes with iWorks. Love it. Currently using it for a book and it is a welcome relief from Word.

Diane:

But what’s the matter with Appleworks? Would Scrivener, say, be better?

Well, it’s not really a question of “better”, but what you find more congenial to the creative process. Give Scrivener a demo run and see what you think.

Nat - Nocturne is wonderful! Thanks for the link.

Sorry about the continued outages. Now on alternative hosting, which might help.

Thanks for this post and thanks to everyone who’s trying out WriteRoom. I’ve just created a new discount code ‘poole’ for WriteRoom that will give you a 30% off discount when ordering WriteRoom. Feel free to share the code, it will expire on Sept 8th.

I had a very similar epiphany a while ago… after a long time on Word, I realised I didn’t enjoy it At All….

http://www.tinyplanet.eu/?p=64

I’ve needed a few bits and bobs Writeroom doesn’t have, tables and so on, and Nisus Writer Pro both has a fullscreen mode and the ability to do that only if and when I need it. And it’s default file format is RTF…

Hey, I’ve never had a discount code named after me before. ;)

has never produced anything with any quality.

What about Excel?

Another plug for Mellel from Redlex. It just keeps getting better and better.

I’ve been using it for three years now, and it has *never* crashed, even while handling seventy-odd page documents with multiple note flows, etc., etc. It is much more responsive than Word.

There’s a learning curve, but anyone who has ever styled a webpage using CSS would find it immediately intuitive, and anyone who hasn’t would find it takes about thirty minutes to get moving. Good forums, too.

Thanks to this nice post by Joe Malchow, I learn of another alternative for our Windows brethren: the free DarkRoom. Also Q10, recommended upthread by Sanjay, looks pretty good.

I am loving Nocturne, which I belatedly realise is by the same genius who created the indispensable Quicksilver.

Hi Steven,
I just came over from the Scrivener forum.
This is a great article that took a lot of words right out of my mouth (or from my keypad?). Recently I wrote a bit about Scrivener on my website, but since you dwell deeper into certain aspects I left out, I added a link to your blog on my page.

Another software suggestion: For formatting (whenever it is required) I use Nisus Writer Pro, a very elegant app, that doesn’t scare you with its palettes as Mellel does. With Scrivener and NWP nobody will ever need Word again.

Michael
PS: Beautiful music here too!

http://www.michaelengler.com

Count me as another member of the pro-Scrivener camp. It makes it easy to write without distraction (well, software distraction) and go from a first rough idea to a polished finished product. I like it.

I’ve got a review on my site (which is actually shorter than this post).

I am a WriteRoom user almost exclusively now. Oh, yes, I do copy and paste my text into Word to format the text with headers and footnote’s as demanded by my University, but when it comes to crunching out those papers and exam assignments nothing beats WriteRoom in terms of promoting concentration and productivity. I must honestly say that Word has always baffled me. I used it only for a few years, mainly between 2000 and 2003 in College and I never had anything good come out of these encounters, as I simply couldn’t concentrate. When I started at my current study I just knew I had to do something about it, and even used TextEdit for a while until I found WriteRoom.

Now, I even also use it to take notes while at lectures. The green writing on a black background is perfect for a dark room with my backlight turned down to the lowest setting to save my battery life and the lack of distraction on the screen means that I can concentrate on the lecture at hand.

Ever since I used a beta of WriteRoom I fell in love with it. I’ve spent too much time worrying about away messages and current iTunes tracks, and being forced into writing “tunnel vision” really helps.

I’ve written seven or eight short stories in it…but I still hold on to Word, like a recovering alcoholic who keeps a bottle of whiskey buried away behind the old rags in the garage.

I’ve gotta kick the habit.

Over the last 8 months I’ve tried most of the writing programs mentioned in the comments. What a rich time it is to be a writer who uses a Mac. Avenir, WriteRoom, Ulysses and Jer’s Novel Writer are all great tools, as is Mellel. But Scrivener was the one I ended up buying. It just works best for the way I write.

A feature that no one has mentioned is that Scrivener lets you mark up text and export it to LaTeX or HTML. It is a bit more involved to write just a page or two in Scrivener than in some of the other editors, so I often dash off text in BBEdit. But for longer documents that require research, extensive notes and re-organizable sections Scrivener’s incredible.

Now that Pages works with Word’s change tracking features, I use that to trade files back and forth with my editor, who doesn’t even know that I’m no longer using Word.

Scrivener for complex documents, Pages for editing and formatting and BBEdit for short text, what a treasure of excellent tools. And with others just as good for those with different writing needs, it’s bye-bye Word. It’s been nice knowin’ ya.

I do love Scrivener’s UI and overall concept, but its LaTeX export is a little underdeveloped at present. I wish you could write custom export plugins directly, rather than having to export to MultiMarkdown and then munge that into LaTeX. Why not just export to XML and let someone write an XSLT to get to LaTeX. That’s much more practical than having to parse MMD. As it’s set up right now, the LaTeX export is really designed more or less just to meet the needs of the MultiMarkdown guy who helped develop it. For instance, only supporting the use of the “memoir” LaTeX class is a strange choice, since that’s not not one of the more common document classes and has an additional learning curve on top of the standard LaTeX classes.

With just a little bit more work in this area, Scrivener could really be a killer tool for scholars as well as writers. It’s almost there now, and still well worth considering. I just wish it had direct XML export.

I don’t use MMD/LaTeX myself but AIUI you can modify the default XLSTs used by Scrivener/MMD or write your own: see eg this post on L&L’s forums.

Michael Engler: thanks!

MattT: haiku reviews are a nice idea, as long as you aren’t getting paid by the word. ;)

I’m with Adam Kotkso in disagreeing with the claim that Microsoft has never produced anything of quality, though i’m not an Excel user so can’t comment on that. Still, Word was quality up until version 6. Also, IE4.5 & 5 on Mac OS 8-9 were pretty slick.

All reasons why I keep my Win 98 machine hanging around: it is the only thing these days that will run Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS. Yes DOS because it provides just the environment you describe: full screen editing, monochrome, and without the distractions of “just a little web surfing” or “a few minutes of solitaire.” Thanks for promoting some viable alternatives to Word.

Before embarking on my master thesis I tried several word processing options. I finally ended up with using VIM, VIM-LaTeX-suite and LaTeX. This way I can concentrate on content and structure, leaving formatting to the TeX engine.

One interesting approach I tired was using HTML and CSS coupled with Prince[1]. Writing HTML was a bit to verbose for my needs compared to LaTeX. LaTeX breaks passages into paragraphs by looking at linebreaks. HTML on the other hand needs a anchor and a closing anchor: .

[1]: http://www.princexml.com/

Thanks for a great article.
Anybody remember Wordstar (horrible thing!)? I could make that product do almost anything I wanted and can do the same with Word. As I get deeper into some serious web development and blogging, all I want is a good text editor, and not the bloated set of word tools which just get in the way.
You have given me some good ideas.

I wish I wrote as eloquently as you on the subject, but Word drives me to distraction, violence and (most worryingly) limited productivity.

As someone who used Word on the Mac since 1.x on his little 512KE, I’ve never understood anyone’s love for Word version 5.

I mean, look at that screen shot. How are all of those tool bars, all of those redundant buttons, “minimalist”?

Word 4 was the last good version.

I used (1984) my first PC with word 1.0 and droped my Olivetti off.
That first computer was a Xerox with 2 floppy disk, and a blackandwhite screen.
But I loved it.
In that time I used MAc aswell, but this is other story.

MyMac

Oh, huh, scrolling back for the first time, I see Chris and I are in agreement. Chris, if we’re ever in the same place at the same time, I’ll buy ya a beer and we’ll mock these Word 5 fans.

I mean, look at that screen shot. How are all of those tool bars, all of those redundant buttons, “minimalist”?

Mmm, well… ;) IIRC you didn’t have to have that all on that the same time. And it was, ah, at least black-and-white. It’s still minimalist compared to today’s toolbars, especially the atrocity that is the ribbon. (As 16:10ish displays become more popular, vertical screen space becomes more valuable, so wasting it like this is really amazing.)

{Sigh} More interesting commentary on “Journalists” :-)

My introduction to “words on computers” was introducing a new computer system at a wire service agency. That’s when I first realised that many journalists are technically challenged by a typewriter.

Many (probably most…) journalists are so computer-illiterate that the users we help on the newsgroups would run rings around them. But they retain a journalistic hubris that would otherwise be described as “arrogance”.

Journos typically fire off 600 words of misspelled unpunctuated poorly-structured inanity, then grab a copy of the newspaper, look at their article in beautifully-formatted, correctly typeset, flowing prose and think “I did that!”. Not most of it, they didn’t. What they *did* was fire off an ASCII file that may or may not have contained the germ of an idea.

Journalists (and I used to be one…) will tell you with great and portentous arrogance that TextEdit with a word-count is “all you ever need”. Well, yeah: it’s all THEY can ever cope with, because it’s all that THEY ever do.

The rest of us need something a lot more powerful… :-)

Cheers

I’m glad you were able to get that off your chest. But what does it have to do with this post? ;)

I love WriteRoom. I will be checking out Scrivener for sure. I’d rather write on paper and scan than use Word and it’s lovely auto-formatting and screwy interface.♦

I wrote probably 3,000 stories for Aero-News from about 1999 to early 2006. After trying to do them in Word and having weirdness inserted by the program choke the one-off CMS, over and over again, I changed to BBEdit.

I can’t speak for anyone else but I write better prose (not that daily aviation/technical news is a threat to Shakespeare’s reputation) in a plain text editor. I have found all your various suggestions interesting and will try several of them.

Thanks!

Wow, fantastic article indeed, very well weighted.

Here is another voice for Scrivener. I think text editors like BBEdit, Writeroom, Q10 (nice find for my PC using friends!), Textmate are great minimalist enviroments. And BBEdit/Textmate are full on byte wranglers - wrestle that UTF8 into submission. Scrivener gets the magic of writing just right. A simple space that grows to fit your material. The flexibility of research notes, references, pulling in disparate inspiration into a single elegant interface. Feeling structures build. You can use Scrivener as a blank sheet just fine, and if you need deeper layers, it gives them a-plenty. For the more scientific, outlining keeps you in order, bibliographic references can be copy/pasted from your reference manager software, you can keep research PDFs in line. Very neat you can dynamically search through all your research materials (including text of PDFs) in one place!

I can only relate to this on one level: price! Many software programs, including Microsoft Office, are extremely expensive. However, I’ve been using Word 2007 for a few months now and absolutetly love the new features (especially ‘ribbons’)!

Spencer Ferguson

There is no mention of the other OS: Linux and its flavours; Ubuntu specifically. Every feature that has been discussed is available on gedit (http://www.gedit.org). And, its free. In a decade or more that I have repeatedly tried, I have NEVER liked Word. Early on, Amipro was a real neat programme that ended up being swallowed by Lotus, made obese and non-functional as Wordpro, and then lost in the abyss when Lotus disappeared from view in the folds of IBM.

Steve

Thanks for highlighting JDarkroom for windows users, in addition
to Q10 I mentioned earlier.

I reckon Q10 is the most mature of these, (and doesn’t need java, or .net framework for the similar Dark Room). It’s quite customizable, and has an optional live word count, a word count target as a %, and a timer letting you how many words you’ve written in a specified period. Makes one into a writing maching ;-)

I just wrote a book review with it - was truly a liberating experience (compared with bloat-ware Word)

Though with the plethora of writing tools for macs, esp reading the scrivener
accolades, I’m almost tempted to switch to a mac (but have resisted
its proprietary hardware. Time to investigate dual booting OS’s…).

There appear to be some windows alternatives to scrivener such as pagefour or yWriter, but seem to fall short of what scrivener can do.

I’ve decided to pack up my Microsoft life altogether and move over to Linux permanently:
http://haris.tv/2007/08/31/bye.....llo-linux/

Things have changed considerably from a few years ago and there’s pretty much a clone of anything you want in the Open-Source world.

Haris