Comments on: A Small Guide to Software You Can Use to Write*

By: Stephen R. Smith

Stephen R. Smith — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:25:19 +0000

Something I forgot about – while BBEdit is an excellent editor that I use all the time, it’s for pay. Text Wrangler http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/ is the little brother to BBEdit, sharing a lot of it’s capabilities and is free.

My personal favourite of the moment though is OmmWriter. Most if not all of my gripes (missing features, not problems) from the first beta have been addressed, and it’s really a wonderful and clean tool to go and write with.

By: phill

phill — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 12:00:42 +0000

@AR: OpenOffice is pretty good for something you can get for free, and with its latest iterations it’s escaping even that qualification. I fucking hate the stupid ‘Ribbon’ thing that MS has introduced with the latest Word, and it drives me from using it overly much.

@Cthulhu: Glad to help one of the Great Old Ones! (though I know it won’t help me that much when you awake :D)

@Estelle: Hi Estelle, thanks for dropping by! Always nice to see fresh faces here (I’ve added your blog [intriguing concept by the way!] to my RSS feeds, so hopefully I’ll return the favour sometime soon).

And I can totally identify with Chris and yourself: for quite a long time I was submitting all my stories to the art website deviantART. Despite the text editor there being completely useless, requiring html code for italics, bold, line-formatting, etc., I still found it much more comforting to compose in than anything else.

By: estelle

estelle — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:35:22 +0000

I can’t believe people can write in notepad! There’s something too confronting about all that white space for me. At least with Word there are lots of little buttons and things to keep me company.

Chris Currie (http://furioushorses.blogspot.com) wrote a short story every day on his blog, and he once joked that he found it hard to write outside of a Blogger window. I can sympathise with that — I think I’m most productive when I’m blogging. Word reminds me of doing university assignments.

By: Cthulhu Ftaghn

Cthulhu Ftaghn — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 14:26:29 +0000

Thanks for reccomending The Guide, it has made my writing so exponentially better.

By: AR

AR — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:40:10 +0000

TextEdit is a RTF editor included in OS X that I use primarily for note-taking or typing text for blog entries. I’m not exactly sure where it would fit, since unlike the barebones editors listed it’s not suited for coding, but it doesn’t have the formatting capability available in Word.

I used Word for most of my writing. I’ve considered trying out OpenOffice, though.

Another layout program you might want to mention is Quark Xpress. It’s what I primarily used for design work prior to the release of InDesign because it was far superior to Adobe’s PageMaker (I won’t even discuss MS Publisher).