(2011-05-16) Markdown Is The New Word51

Kevin Lipe: Guest Post: Markdown is the new MS-Word 5.1. There were contemporaries to AppleWorks, though. Around the end of the Classic era, Microsoft came out with Office 98, which was an awful abortion, but it was also a direct result of a terrible moment in Macintosh history: the replacement of Word 5 by Word 6. It was at this point that “standard word processors” stopped being minimal and work-oriented and started pandering to mothers making sixth-grade-class newsletters. This is the first point at which word processors started mirroring the increasing complexity and distraction of computing environments in general, and the point at which I started having trouble using them for writing.

Microsoft Word 5.1 came out in October of 1991. It was the culmination of six years of Mac Word versions

a minimalist interface with just enough window chrome to let you align text, pick a font, space your lines

I’ve written an entire novel (seriously!) in this program, and it’s a beautiful experience. I have a PowerBook 180, running System 7.6, literally only for running Word 5.

I’ve tried almost every word processor in existence, and compared to Word 5, and even to the old ClarisWorks (also known as MacWrite II or MacWrite Pro), most of them are terrible.

The Mac is at a weird place right now. We have a lot of tools, like Scrivener and Ulysses and WriteRoom and others I’m sure I’m forgetting, designed to make writing long pieces easier, and designed to do exactly what Word 5.1 does: get out of the writer’s way, and let them worry about making the clackety sound

These tools—“writing environments” or whatever else you want to call them—have an inherent problem: they’re designed around the writing workflows and processes of the people who wrote them. The author of Scrivener really only knows one way to write a book: the way he writes a book.

It’s telling that many of these programs bill themselves as “distraction free,” some of them going to absolutely ridiculous lengths to try to keep the user from being able to get sidetracked while drafting text. It’s ridiculous, really, and the further these programs go in that direction, the less useful they really are for dealing with novel-length material

there’s a solution now that’s most of the way there: Markdown and a good text editor. That’s the new Word 5.1. Think about it: a program like TextMate has almost no window chrome, and opens almost instantly. You start typing, and that’s all you have to do.

Writing environments are nice, if they fit your workflow, but if they don’t, they just get in the way.