reply on: Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction \ stacker news ~BooksAndArticles

21 sats \ 5 replies \ @kepford 12 Apr \ on: Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction BooksAndArticles

Kill your word-processor

I forget where I learned this but I never write in these tools. Simple distraction free writing tools are the way. For me, that's Vim.

Also a big fan of txt files. There are things I wrote 15 years ago on a different operating system and I will always be able to open it and read/edit it. Markdown makes this even more powerful. I keep my daily and project notes all in plain text. I can easily sync them to any system and edit them with whatever tool I want.

I love cool tools but interoperability is a huge factor for long term things. You lose that when you opt into a proprietary or even less common open standard.

55 sats \ 4 replies \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears OP 12 Apr

Agreed 100%. TextMate's been my tool of choice recently, but I used VI and later VIM quite a bit. Text should be text.

76 sats \ 1 reply \ @nym 12 Apr

I used to use Notepad++. It is pretty powerful

6 sats \ 0 replies \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears OP 12 Apr

The Windows folks I know all swear by it.

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford 12 Apr

Wild that people are still using TextMate after all these years. I thought it was dead actually. I used it a loooong time ago. Solid editor. Switched to Vim and never looked back.

55 sats \ 0 replies \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears OP 12 Apr

Yeah, it's still going, though it's a couple of years removed from an update. I've got Vim and a few others as backups if I have to pull the trigger on a switch.