Re: #3 in Guardian Tech today, bare metal editors over Microsoft Word

[Myron Gochnauer goch@xxxxxxxx]

I am no fan of Word, but I remain unconvinced by the bare-bones, no-distractions editors that are proliferating. The “best” editor depends on the purpose and the psychology of the user.

If you are writing a novel, you can probably get along quite nicely with italics as the only bell or
whistle, and even that can be represented by surrounding *’s or _’s. A Ulysses style
organizer for materials may be helpful, but sensibly arranged subdirectories might do just as well.

As an academic (law and philosophy), I cannot get along without some way of marking italics,
footnotes/endnotes, hanging indents, quotation blocks, and various versions of lists. Markup
languages will do this for pure-ASCII editors (LaTeX is the best, but most difficult), but I *think*
better when I can *see* some of this organization on the screen. But that’s just the way *I*
am.

One of the nicest things about XyWrite is that it can be pure-ASCII if you want, but you can add in
the extras that *you* prefer. And without too much effort you can trim down the menus and keyboard
files to the few (or many) features you want, thereby minimizing the oops!-where-did-that-come-from
experience.

Myron