My ongoing quest for text-editor bliss
- My Lifehacker comment on CP Notebook
- Tom Morris’s comment
- My objections
- Most outliners have crappy UIs.
- Crappy enough to distract me from what I’m doing, or just off-putting enough to slow me down. A good example of this is the very popular OmniOutliner, which just turns me the hell off. The spartan aspect of the OPML editor turns me on, but also makes me a little uncomfortable. Sort of like your mother.
- Hierarchical organization is still, essentially, chunk-based rather than -string- stream based.
- Admittedly, not to the same extent as CP Notebook. But outliners still operate on nodes, and while of course you’re not going to write a document without including discrete textual units (sentances, paragraphs, etc.), interacting with them in an outliner emphasizes the discrete over the continuous.
- I don’t think containment really has what I’m looking for in terms of applying metadata. This is why modern tagging beats old-school categorization; a thing is frequently not just one thing; it is quite a few things. This is where Ted Nelson’s “Zigzag” file system looms prophetically. How can that guy have so many unimplemented ideas?
- Thus, the ideal editor would have the ability to mark up text diversely in situ, without forcing it into any overall structure. Ironically—for me—this sort of functionality can probably be most closely replicated in, of all things…MS Word, with bookmarks and highlighting and comments. But, of course, I’ve declared a personal proscription against all MS Word use (outside work, of course)..
- Summary:
- The quest for a Nick-compliant text editor continues.
This entry was posted
on Friday, January 27th, 2006 at 11:26 pm and is filed under Internet, Writing.
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