GIVEAWAY: Will is generously giving away a Kindle copy of his latest ebook,, to the person who leaves his favourite comment. Bonus points if you make him laugh! Comment within one week to enter. (Update: Martina won!) Many writers struggle with MSW addiction. They tell themselves they’re not addicted. They tell themselves they need MSW.
They tell themselves they can quit whenever they want. But they can’t.
Basic Text Editors. If you don’t need all the power of the apps in the previous section but aren’t quite ready to go the featureless full-screen route, here’s the middle ground: a selection of basic but useful text editors for writers. In this article, we’ve gathered links to many different text editors used for different purposes. You can use text editors for basic text editing and taking notes, writing programming code, producing LaTeX documents, writing a book, among many other uses.
No matter how much they hate it, no matter how much they wish they could stop, no matter how much it affects their professional and personal lives, they keep using MSW. I, for one, will no longer enable the use of Microsoft Word. I know all the excuses. “I’ve been using it forever.” “I have to use it. It‘s the only way to get my work done.” “I just need it for one more project. After that, I quit.” Does any of these excuses sound familiar?
Well, I’m here to tell you there’s a way out. No more fighting with frustrating and convoluted menu systems. No more deciphering mysterious formatting and layout quirks. Why does a word doc for mac 2011 always open with the markups showing. No more emailing Word files to your friends and colleagues with your fingers crossed, hoping your document appears correctly. Word processing beyond Word To start, you might try another, better word processor. Apple’s and are the heavy hitters and is a long-time writer favorite.
There are also new entrants, such as, who hope to modernize word processing. Adobe acrobat pro dc 2018. Each of these programs is superior to Word, but you can go even further.
Be bold: quit word processing altogether. Or at the very least, quit using word processors for composition.
You see, word processors, especially ones like Microsoft Word, aren’t actually good tools for composition. The act of composing is about ordering and structuring thoughts. It’s not about setting your margins or choosing fonts or italicizing phrases. But word processors are notoriously bad at letting you just compose. Word processors conflate composition with typesetting. Making stylistic decisions about your work is a separate mental process from penning your thoughts.
When writing software forces you to deal with presentational elements, it only distracts from composition. Even if you try to ignore the stylistic decisions, Word will be typesetting your text anyway. And you’re still stuck looking at a bloated interface built for formatting, not composing. So during your composition process, skip the apps that want you to make stylistic decisions. Instead, use a plain text editor.
Editing in plain text Plain text editors let you compose in plain, unformatted text. Notepad for Windows and TextEdit for Mac OS X are the standards, but they’re nothing compared to more robust editors. There are fantastic plain text apps that provide a heavenly writing environment, especially compared to the hell of Microsoft Word. Here are a few options to get you started: • and are beloved by Mac users. They also have iOS counterparts, so you can use them on your iPhone and iPad. • and are Windows-only options.