Over at And now it’s all this, Dr Drang has a post on using TextEdit versus using Pages. He’s a Mac user, obviously, but that doesn’t matter so much. The real argument is over whether one should use a word processor or some sort of text based editor.
There can be no doubt on where I stand on the issue. The only time I can remember using a “word processor” of any type in the last 3 decades was when I had to collaborate on another author’s file as a technical editor1. As I’ve said before, whenever I write in anything other than Emacs, I feel like I’m in Bizarro World where nothing works as it should. That includes even things like iMessage which is why I tend to use emacs-everywhere for it and most other things.
Dr Drang is nominally the same. He says he almost never uses a Word Processor but sometimes for a one-off he thinks it makes sense to use a word processor rather than one of his LaTeX or Markdown templates. That seems backwards to me. Sure, maybe you don’t want to use a template for a technical report to write a quick note to your baby sitter but Pages or any other word processor is not the simple alternative. I’d simply use Org and export it to whatever format seems appropriate. Even if Dr Drang is not an Emacs user, he is a Markdown user so surely the easy thing for him to do is to dash off his quick note in Markdown.
Really, unless you have collaboration issues, there’s no reason to subject yourself to the horrors of a word processor.
Footnotes:
That post was so long ago that I was still using Groff instead of Org to typeset documents. I’ve done technical editing since then that also required a Word clone and the experience was no better.