As I mentioned in the previous post, there are a number of different systems I’ve tried to use for my writing, and each has had its ups and downs.
First, I think I’ll start with the elephant in the room: word processors. Don’t get me wrong, I think that LibreOffice has gotten pretty good and it has its uses, but for writing I think word processors are in the “fundamentally and irreparably counterproductive” category. I could spend a lot of time talking about my problems with word processors, but that’s for another time. Right now I’ll just say that they fulfill precisely zero of the criteria I outlined previously.
OK, now on to the things I have made successful use of. First, TomBoy. I made use of it extensively when I first found it a few years back. At the time I didn’t have my Chromebook, and instead used a (now long-gone) Linux laptop. I liked a lot of what it provides. The real “killer feature” for me was the wiki nature of it, combined with it being (mostly) plain text. Unfortunately the synchronization between machines just wasn’t fully baked, especially with one machine being a dual-boot box.
The advantages of the wiki nature really come into their own with fiction, especially fantasy or sci-fi, when there are custom terms involved. The ability to take a character’s name, or a concept, and have the notes on the definition, voice, and so on available everywhere is game changing.
That’s really the only editor that I’ve invested in other than a variety of text editors. I do have a beta version of Scrivener for Linux on my desktop, but I haven’t used it enough to really comment on. It’s a big program with a lot of features, which to me is more a curse than a benefit. The tutorial list says it all, really. It’s a series of videos to explain features and interaction with the program. I honestly don’t know if I can make the investment to learn the UI when I just want to write.
That said, it seems to have a lot of interesting ideas, and I no doubt will try to experiment with it more. It seems, however, to make some of the same mistakes that word processors do, in addition to essentially being an IDE.
For synchronization I’ve tried using a few different things. Of the big ‘cloud’ providers I’ve only used Google Drive (because of the Chromebook), and I have to say that I wasn’t terribly impressed. Not only did it not have a Linux version, but the sync did not handle spotty internet well at all. The other cloud service either lack a Linux version or are missing another critical bit of functionality to me.
Right now, I use a self-hosted ownCloud instance for file storage, and do most of my text editing in its built-in editor. This has the advantage of working easily with all of my machines, but is missing on most of the other bits of functionality that I want. Most critically, it does not handle intermittent internet connections well at all in the web editor. Even putting the machine to sleep is enough to break the current session, which breaks the current editor instance. The only solution I’ve found is to open a new instance and copy-paste from the old one. As you can probably imagine, it’s not a sustainable process. (Additionally, it seems almost a nitpick but it winds up being a surprisingly big deal: the editor is clearly written for code, and does not serve prose well aesthetically)
Where does that leave me? If it wasn’t for the Windows side of my box (and to a lesser degree, the Chromebook), I’d probably use a good text editor and git. Unfortunately, it really seems like I need a web interface to get what I want, but I’ve yet to find one that suits my needs.
So I’m writing my own. Right now it’s pretty basic, but I think I see the core of something useful coming out of my flailing. But that’s the topic for next time.