How I Write: Tools (Premium)

As you know, I am constantly evaluating and reevaluating the software tools that I use. This is especially true for writing.

Like most people, I have extensive Microsoft Word experience, and I used this application for many years. About 20 years, by my rough reckoning.

But unlike most people, I spent much of that time trying to replace Microsoft Word. Well, that’s not completely fair. I wasn’t “trying” to replace Word. But I was always looking at alternatives to determine whether I was using the best tool for my most crucial work.

In the early days, that meant WordPerfect, which was acquired by Corel in 1996. Back then, the firm was trying to wrest the word processing market back from Word, and it offered several innovative features—like real-time format changes as you moused-over choices in menus—that Word lacked. (Until, of course, Microsoft simply copied them.)

It also meant open source office productivity suites like OpenOffice and its many offspring, and AbiWord. These products were usually a few versions behind Microsoft Office from a functionality perspective. And several versions behind from a user experience perspective. But they did work, and they embraced open document formats. (Until, of course, Microsoft simply copied them.)

I’m not morally beholden to open source or “open” to any degree. And I don’t feel that the Microsoft Word document formats, no matter how open you believe them to be, will ever be made inaccessible. They’re too popular for that.

But Word is, in many ways, a mess. It is the end result of decades of steady improvements. And the number of commands that are now available in this application—whether in the old-fashioned menus and toolbars versions or in more recent ribbon incarnations—is almost uncountable.

I am a professional writer. I probably need less than 5 percent of the features that are available in Microsoft Word, and this has been true for years. That’s why I figured, early on, that some open source word processor would do the trick. After all, I reasoned, literally 20 years ago, how could Microsoft fight back against products that provided the features that people expected but were free?

Well, Linux, OpenOffice, and their ilk never really did take off, regardless of my opinions. And I never felt comfortable using any of them, anyway. They just always seemed off. So, too, did some other options I tried, like Evernote and Microsoft OneNote.

But with the personal computing market switching to mobile and web app models, the word processing market has changed yet again. And in an interesting twist, it has simplified to more of a text processing mode, if you will, where the documents we create aren’t just open, they’re also basically plain text. That’s about as open as it gets.

I wrote “we” there like we’re all doing it. The truth is, in the Windows world, Word and the formats it uses still rule. But if you look past Windows, to the Mac and Chromebook, and, more important, to mobile platforms like Android and iOS, you see that things are changing. Text editing—or rich text editing, perhaps—is making a nice comeback.

I’ve always been fascinated by the differences in the software you see on different platforms. On the Mac, for example, you see a lot more word or text processing apps that are labeled as “distraction free”. You don’t see as much of this on the PC. But Microsoft has fought back in classic form by adding this functionality, sort of, to Word. Today, Microsoft Word lets you remove UI and document distractions by collapsing the ribbon, and supporting dedicated Read Mode and Draft views.

Anyway, in a confluence of timing, I was working on the Windows 10 Field Guide a few years back and found, to my horror (and, OK, delight), that the publishing system we were using, Leanpub, didn’t natively support Microsoft Word format. I’d never heard of such a thing. Instead, it supported a text markup language called Markdown that is loosely modeled on XML/HTML. I could convert my writing from Word to Markdown, poorly, or I could just write the book in Markdown.

I decided that writing the book in Markdown format made more sense. But that meant I’d be dividing my time between some Markdown editor and Word; the former for the book and the latter for everything else. What if I could just write in Markdown? Would that make any sense?

I think it does makes sense … for me.

To be clear, I’m not necessarily recommending that writers generally switch to Markdown or to the editor, called MarkdownPad, that I use. This is just something that made sense for me.

Instead, what I recommend is that you use the tools that you are most comfortable with. You should never have to fight the tools. If that means using Microsoft Word because you like it or are just used to it, great.

For me, the workflows are simple.

I write in Markdown using MarkdownPad 2, though I am constantly reevaluating this choice because MardownPad is no longer supported and it requires a particular older version of a third-party developer library. I keep the installers for both in OneDrive so that I will always have them.

I publish my web articles to Thurrott.com using WordPress. I use and strongly recommend Grammarly—a web browser plug-in—because it does a great job of catching spelling and grammar errors. (MarkdownPad has spelling but not grammar checking.) Oddly, my recent conversion to Firefox screwed this up because Grammarly isn’t yet working correctly this new Firefox version. So I’ve reverted to using Chrome for posting to the site for now.

I publish my book files to Leanpub using a cloud-based system that is not really worth discussing. Other than that it is Git-based and requires me to use a command line interface. I know. The less said about that, the better.

Going forward, I will continue my quest for a MarkdownPad replacement. Like MetroTwit (long my preferred Twitter client) before it, this could be a long haul, though. Regardless of the issues, I still very much prefer it to other options. The one tool I’ve found that comes pretty close is called Write!; it’s not free, but it is half off right now, and it is a decent, distraction-free text editor that supports both rich text and Markdown. You could do worse.