Which word processors do geeks use?
There’s an interesting open-thread discussion going on at Web Worker Daily: what word processor or text editor do you use?
This blog attracts an audience with high technical skills. Many write blogs and website code. Some write books.
Anne Zalenka kicked off this intriguing discussion, wondering if our writing habits and the writing tools we use have changed now that we are moving into a more interactive World Wide Web. She thinks they have and briefly spells out her thoughts:
The content we produce as web workers is increasingly:
- Shorter in length — think email
- Provisional and subject to change — think wikis
- Not intended for print — think blog posts
- Text-based, with formatting eliminated or stored separately — think HTML + CSS
And for that, we don’t need MS Word.
Responses have poured in as “comments.” I was particularly struck by how many from this audience are using the new online collaborative writing tools Google Docs and Zoho Writer. Also many, in a display of their code-writing background, prefer to use light-weight text editors, rather than major word processors with heavy-duty formatting capability. Personally, I think these comments are a bell-weather of developments that will touch professional writers as well. They are worth reading.
Even after searching out writing tools for over a year and a half now, the comments on this blog thread uncovered for me new insights and led me to some important software which may in fact affect the way I work personally.
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