Note: This post started out as a standard kvetching about text editors and word processors, but somewhere along the way veered into questions about technology, innovation, and standardization. Caveat lector.
Let’s talk text editors, shall we? It seems like writing software these days has become focused on answering two needs:
- Fullness of features, as epitomized by mainstream word processors like Microsoft Word and Nisus Writer, but also innovative applications like Scrivener; and
- Lack of distractions, as embodied by WriteRoom and its countless imitators — a trend that has come in for some deserved mockery.
These are worthy things to consider in developing writing software, but lately I’ve been obsessed with a third consideration, which most word processors and text editors don’t really address at all: touch-type editing. I don’t just mean typing words from the home row, I mean navigating and manipulating the text without moving your hands from the home row. Standard keyboard layouts tend to stick important keys like Page Up/Down and Home/End, not to mention the Control key, in the corners. Not only does this force someone writing to disrupt their flow to use those keys, it’s ergonomically unsuitable as well.
What’s interesting about this is that the few programs that do allow for touch-type editing all come from the time before IBM’s Model M keyboard became the standard layout for PCs in the late 1980s: Emacs, Vim, and WordStar, to name three. Two of these are old-as-the-hills text editors used almost exclusively by programmers; one is a modal editor that even many programmers don’t understand; and one doesn’t even exist anymore.1
For me, it’s a reminder that technology isn’t just a matter of innovation, but also of standardization: The adoption of USB, for example, was perhaps as big a development in the history of computing as the debut of the iPhone. And while standardization is a good and important thing, it does tend to close off certain paths that could be fruitful. From a writer’s perspective, at least, the WordStar diamond, along with placing the Control key next to the A key, really does make more sense than the current PC layout and keyboard shortcuts; but for various reasons2, that system lost. Competing standards is usually viewed as a problem (for example), but I think there’s a case to be made that some measure of discord or weirdness is inevitable in technology, and perhaps should even be welcomed. After all, if technology is in fact an extension of ourselves, how could we not expect some discord or weirdness to emerge?
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Though WordStar does still have some die-hard fans, such as George R.R. Martin. ↩
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One being MicroPro’s hapless response to the rise of WordPerfect in the mid-1980s, as detailed in this history of WordStar. ↩
