Mircrosofts plain text editor3/11/2023 ![]() ![]() (WYSIWYG formatting requires point-and-click menus.) To get distraction-free writing, I use an old-fashioned text editor. Today, I favor a distraction-free interface - something you can’t really get using a word processor. To me, that seems like unneeded mental effort. But in Word, the top quarter of the screen consists of buttons that, while writing, you have to ignore. Because we read from the top to the bottom of a page, our eyes naturally gravitate to the top. To write something in Word, I have to actively not look at all of the formatting options. But more than that, I find that it distracts from my writing. I find this clutter aesthetically displeasing. Microsoft Word - too much clutter for me. I count 5 rows of buttons (including the ruler) before you get to your actual text. Below, for instance, is a screenshot of Word. One of the reasons that I now dislike word processors is a reason that I initially loved them - you can see all the formatting options in menu bars. Why I abandoned Word Reason 1: Word has a cluttered interface Why have I given up the WYSIWYG formatting that I once found so revelatory? Here’s a list of reasons. Instead, I do almost all of my writing in a simple text editor. (I’m part of the reason all essay assignments now come with the boilerplate request to ‘use Times New Roman font’.)įast forward 3 decades. I remember submitting essays to my Grade 7 teacher in a torturous-to-read cursive font … just because I could. As I typed my essays for school, I spent hours playing with fonts and formatting. The Mac came with ClarisWorks - an office suite (now defunct) that blew my mind. My family had just replaced our Apple IIe with a fancy new Macintosh LC 550. I know the feeling, because I remember when I first tried a WYSIWYG office suite. It’s like leaving your Tesla in the garage and choosing to drive a Model T. To many people, it seems odd that you’d choose to type your formatting semantically when you could just see it. ![]()
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