People use word processors besides vi and emacs?
Just kidding. While I do use vim, most of the time I use TextWrangler.app on my Mac, and occasionally gEdit on Linux. They're not about fancy editing, they're about getting words (or code) on the page with less distractions. And they both have a form of tabbed editing so I can easily refer to multiple notes files. If I want to do fancy markup, I just add it at the end in HTML -- probably not the best for non-coders, but it works for me. I think that there are plenty of tools out there for writing other than M$ word, but that people are convinced it's the only viable format.
Also, about that that link to a Mac program: No screenshots? No download. Storing text in SGML (in this case HTML) isn't actually a new idea, but it's not a bad idea either.
The second issue addressed is metadata. While there many not be simple way to keep the metadata associated with what you're writing, git is a very useful tool. While it's designed for software, it works with any kind of text. It tracks versions, keep a detailed history, and keeps everything in your project associated and portable.
Keeping the ability to read older documents is known concern in the tech community, because we have already lost some of our history this way. But just look at the range of document types supplied by Project Gutenberg. People are working to make sure our data can be read, packaged for analysis, and not locked into one format.
So my thoughts -- it's an okay blog entry, but mostly random musings and not a fully developed or researched idea. I don't see the same dichotomies (business vs. philosophy; global web vs. splinternet) as the author, I just see problems to be solved. And so do the people developing the next-gen crypto tools.
-- ∇×V
Just kidding. While I do use vim, most of the time I use TextWrangler.app on my Mac, and occasionally gEdit on Linux. They're not about fancy editing, they're about getting words (or code) on the page with less distractions. And they both have a form of tabbed editing so I can easily refer to multiple notes files. If I want to do fancy markup, I just add it at the end in HTML -- probably not the best for non-coders, but it works for me. I think that there are plenty of tools out there for writing other than M$ word, but that people are convinced it's the only viable format.
Also, about that that link to a Mac program: No screenshots? No download. Storing text in SGML (in this case HTML) isn't actually a new idea, but it's not a bad idea either.
The second issue addressed is metadata. While there many not be simple way to keep the metadata associated with what you're writing, git is a very useful tool. While it's designed for software, it works with any kind of text. It tracks versions, keep a detailed history, and keeps everything in your project associated and portable.
Keeping the ability to read older documents is known concern in the tech community, because we have already lost some of our history this way. But just look at the range of document types supplied by Project Gutenberg. People are working to make sure our data can be read, packaged for analysis, and not locked into one format.
So my thoughts -- it's an okay blog entry, but mostly random musings and not a fully developed or researched idea. I don't see the same dichotomies (business vs. philosophy; global web vs. splinternet) as the author, I just see problems to be solved. And so do the people developing the next-gen crypto tools.
-- ∇×V