Adventures in Writing — atom editor and Github
I’ve used a bunch of different word processing tools over the years, all of which are Microsoft Word lookalikes, variants and versions. So From MS Word 6, 7 up to 365, and Open Office versions, Libre Office versions, Apple Pages, even Google Docs. All of them had advantages and disadvantages.
But for writing a book, they’re less than perfect. At least, the way I write. I could change my process of course. But call me provincial, I just want to put words down in the correct order, not learn a whole new way of doing it.
I mucked around with distraction-free tools like Hanxwriter on the iPad for a while, but while the experience was enjoyable, getting the writing off the application was problematic. And editing, cut/paste was sub-optimal. The iPad was a neat little toy, but I needed something more robust. The MS Surface Pro is everything I hoped the iPad would be but never was.
I’ve also looked at the big writing applications which help with organization and notes and planning. I made a couple of attempts to use Scrivener, and while it looked feature rich, I couldn’t get the hang of the tool and how to organize myself. Based on a couple of hours experience, I’d say that if I were starting a book, it’d be a good way to get things moving and keep things organized. But after years of edits and rewrites on the novel, it didn’t make sense to me.
Well, this weekend things came to a head. I’ve been rotating through four chapters for the past three months, editing, changing, adding, subtracting, moving information here and there and all over.
I can’t see see how often I’ve hit certain scenes and chapters. I can’t see what isn’t working, what I’ve kept going over. I need a way to rein in my endless tweaks so I can — in IT parlance — just fucking ship the product.
And I can’t do that the way things are, not with 10,000 plus words over multiple scenes in each of twelve chapters, and umpty-thousands of words in alternate versions, documents with cut scenes, and notes all over the place. I’ve got ideas in MS word documents, SMS messages to myself, and OneNote pages. I’ve been trying to keep track of progress, scenes, characters and organizations, and plotlines in an Excel file. It’s a mess and it’s not getting better.
Enter Atom and Github.
I’ve been using Atom Editor for a couple of years on a help system for a company who’s happy to pay me for work. GitHub is our version control tool of choice.
So thinks I, why not see if they’re useful?
GitHub has an additional advantage because it includes a full project management system with every account. And that’s what I really, really needed. So I set myself up a private Github repository and went to work.
First step was to create projects for things I needed to do. Each chapter gets a project. Atom gets one so I can remember the additional stuff I need to do. And there’s one for migrating Word documents to the Markdown files for Atom. There’s also one to keep track of cut scenes, stuff that with a rejig would be useful elsewhere.
Atom is the next step. It uses straight plain text files, so there’s no feature bloat, and they’re unlikely to get corrupted. Basic styling is handled by Markdown which is far easier than mucking around in MS Word templates and fighting with page layouts. You put certain characters in the right place and you’ve got a heading, or italics or bold or whatever. For a novel, this covers the basics. Of course, fighting with styling will come later, when I export to a PDF but there’s tools for that too (Pandoc seems the best way but I haven’t experimented yet. It’s in the list!).
EDIT: Pandoc is a right pain to setup, and the Atom plugin wasn’t any easier. I found an alternative for the short term.
Markdown Preview Plus not only gives a preview of markdown files, but also can export to PDF. It’s a winner.
Atom has a few useful packages (AKA plugins) to make life easier. There’s two I’ve found invaluable.
Atom-Notes creates a folder which you can add notes to with a shortcut. The nice thing about this is that you can create them on the fly and it’ll search on what you’ve got. So if I want to add one, I just Shortcut Key (in my case ctrl+shift+j) enter a name and press Enter. Then add what I want. The same process will give me immediate access to the note so I can add/remove/delete content.
MiniMap is the other, and gives a sidebar zoomed out representation of the file I’m working on. I can see how long it is, and scroll up and down very quickly (quicker than a standard scrollbar).
Atom also integrates with Github, so I can add changes within the application. There’s no need for a command line or another application (though I do own GitKraken)
Too Long, Didn’t Read (TL;DR)
The quick and dirty is that in this writer’s opinion, Microsoft Word and derivative word processors don’t work for large texts. I’m using Atom editor to work on the book, and Github for version control and project management.
This makes me a happier camper than I was.
