wordgrinder, Part 2
Quietly, but with solemn intensity (and maybe a touch of sarcasm), in some far-flung corner of the web, a somewhat facetious debate rages on. This debate is a part of my quest. My quest is part of a greater mission.
My greater mission is to discover the best writing software in existence. And this quest is to determine what makes WordGrinder great; to discern, in fact, if WordGrinder is great at all. Some would claim it is.
Spoiler alert: I don’t think WordGrinder is the best writing software in existence. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t great software. And it has captured my interest enough to write a series of articles about it. At the very least it seems to be a novel concept: a word processor that runs in the Linux terminal. The thing is, it isn’t the only terminal-based software that appeals to authors. There is emacs, there is vim, though these don’t market themselves as “word processors.” I can say conclusively that such software is adequate for the task. It is entirely possible to parse plain text files into fully-formatted word documents in standard manuscript format. It’s not even as difficult as you may think it is. But I’m getting off-topic. The topic is WordGrinder. And WordGrinder, it would seem, purports to render documents in a usable form from the get-go.
From a 2010 article by Dimitri Popov, published in Linux Magazine:
You may think that word processing is all about WYSIWYG and GUI, but WordGrinder is living proof that a word processor that runs in a terminal does make sense.
Probably not all of us, but some of us, have heard the stories of George R. R. Martin writing on an ancient DOS computer in WordStar. This is not the only tale of its kind. Canadian science fiction author, Robert J. Sawyer wrote an article for ars technica in 2017 about how great WordStar is. There are many, many more throughout the interwebs who praise the use of Vim (I am even one of them). Emacs has a huge fan-base, kind-of-a-lot of whom espouse its use for prose. Locus Award-winning author Charles Stross has published screeds, such as Why Microsoft Word Must Die, railing against the conventions of modern word processing software. Here’s a quote:
I use a variety of other tools, from Scrivener (a program designed for managing the structure and editing of large compound documents, which works in a manner analogous to a programmer’s integrated development environment if Word were a basic text editor) to classic text editors such as Vim. But somehow, the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems.
It would seem that some significant sector of the writing community has caught on that the tools they are expected to use may not be the best tools for the task. Enter WordGrinder.
The next installment of The WordGrinder Saga will include a review of the menu (of infamy) and the scrapbook feature.
Read Part 3 here!
