[CLUE-Tech] Reliable writing editors?

[Matt Gushee]

Coming into this thread late, and taking it in order, so I'm sorry if
this is redundant. Anyway:

On Sun, Feb 02, 2003 at 02:41:28PM -0700, Sean LeBlanc wrote:
> 
> I know it can't be easy to make a word processor to meet this criteria
> because no one has done it, to my knowledge, and the "standard" one fails
> miserably, IMHO. I can't help but wonder what might have been accomplished
> if, instead of writing things like the dreaded paperclip, MS had focused on
> more important issues.  

WordPerfect might have been accomplished ;-) Seriously, I don't doubt
that it's very hard to create a good word processor, but if you care
about things like footnotes, tables of contents, graceful handling of
inserted objects, numbered lists that behave themselves, and the program
generally doing what you tell it to, WordPerfect had MS Word soundly
beat 10 years ago. Sadly, it fell victim to repeated corporate
reorganizations and inability to keep current with the Windows API (no
doubt partly due to undocumented features).

> I hear folks (usually MS fans) claiming that MS does all these usability
> studies, but some (most?) of their tools don't give me much incentive to
> believe it. 

Sure they do, but usability studies are of limited value because it's
almost impossible to simulate real-world usage conditions. And they're
often used in a futile attempt to reckon precisely "how usable" a
program is, rather than sensibly, as a means to identify critical
usability problems. And I suspect that at MS, Marketing still has the
last word.

> > So, I am pleading to my fellow authors / CLUEbies:  Get me a real (GUI) 
> > editor!  Which editors do you use for writing?  Why?  What problems do you 
> > have with them?  How is their presentation within the GUI?  How is stability?  
> > Recovery?
> > 
> > Maybe I should try LyX and stop worrying about formatting.

I like the LyX concept a lot, and find the program very easy to use up
to a point. But for the kind of things I write, the predefined document
styles never seem quite right (I am, admittedly, very picky about that
sort of thing); thus, I would have to learn how to create the right
document styles, or add in various snippets of LaTeX to tweak the
output. If I'm going to go that far I might just as well do raw LaTeX.
The only other complaint I have is that the LyX developers chose a
really shitty GUI toolkit (XForms). The next generation of LyX will work
with QT or GTK, but that doesn't help you right now.

> I grew so frustrated with Word that I moved to this solution. Unfortunately,
> since some HR/recruiters still *insist* on Word, I have to take the HTML
> version into Word and clean it up a bit.
> 
> 
> ...in any case, do let us know what you find overall. I find this issue to
> be a constant thorn in the side. I notice you left out Emacs...what, you
> don't think Xemacs is a GUI? :) 

Vigorous VIM veterans eschew eclectic Emacs.

-- 
Matt Gushee                 When a nation follows the Way,
Englewood, Colorado, USA    Horses bear manure through
mgushee at havenrock.com           its fields;
http://www.havenrock.com/   When a nation ignores the Way,
                            Horses bear soldiers through
                                its streets.
                                
                            --Lao Tzu (Peter Merel, trans.)