plain text zen
It's funny how things work out.
Something about Linux I totally didn't expect is how much better it feels using text now.
Years ago, I would read about certain editors for Mac that bragged about distraction-free writing as a selling point. I was using Windows at the time, and it made no sense to me that the editor itself could somehow be distracting. My thought was why not just get Notepad++ and call it a day?
Yeah, I was wrong there.
Now that I'm 2.5 years into Linux and have tried several text editors both terminal and GUI-based, I understand the need for distraction-free editors. For example, ghostwriter definitely counts as one of them. But I'd argue the same "clean slate" text editing environment can be had with any terminal based editor.
The best text editors have five things. Lightning fast operation, automatic spell checking, tabs, macros, and syntax highlighting. In Linux, Kate, micro and vi can do all that and a whole lot more. Per the syntax highlighting, I appreciate that the most when editing markdown documents and bash scripts. That highlighting comes in handy more than just a little bit.
And then there's the whole email thing. I switched that over to 100% text with NeoMutt and am still using it.
And then there's the universal document converter Pandoc. Convert markdown to DOCX, ODT, RTF, PDF, whatever. The big deal for me there was being able to convert markdown to EPUB for e-books. I am in the process of writing more books, and oh yeah, having an easy way to output EPUB is nice. I still use LibreOffice Writer for when I need to generate things for print books like a table of contents and page numbers, but when actually writing the book, that's all markdown. I used to write everything in Writer first and then did the e-book conversion. Now it's markdown first, a conversion to EPUB for the e-book, then a conversion to ODT for print book stuff in Writer, then output that to PDF out of Writer. It sounds complicated, but it's actually easier having markdown as the source format.
The most impressive thing about all this is that with the exception of some print-specific stuff I need Writer for, everything is done with plain text.
Plain text was my home all along
When I think of all the document and text editors I've used over the years, it's been quite a list.
The three earliest I used was Write, Notepad and EDIT in MS-DOS/Win 3.1. After that it was Microsoft Works 2.0. Then it was Microsoft Word 6.0 that came with Microsoft Office 4.3. After that, Microsoft Word 97 (my favorite one), then Word 2000, and that was the last Word I used.
When I found OpenOffice Writer (which to this day still offers a 32-bit version that will work with Windows XP and possibly older Windows), I jumped ship over to that because I was sick of "borrowing" product keys just to make Word work. It was also around this time I found Notepad++ and stopped using Windows Notepad. I used both of these for a very long time.
I only stopped using OpenOffice and Notepad++ when I switched to Linux. LibreOffice is much better integrated into the Linux desktop environment compared to OO. It doesn't matter if it's GNOME, KDE Plasma, MATE, or whatever. LO simply looks and works better. For a GUI document editor, LO Writer is my go-to. Notepad++ doesn't have a Linux version, so I switched to Kate and micro.
It was this year 2025 specifically where I really started getting into markdown.
Before I get more into that, learning MD gave me a better understanding of why there are still a handful of writers out there that continue to use software such as WordStar 7.0d for DOS from 1992 (especially since Robert J. Sawyer released it for free with full documentation).
This is the understanding I came to know: Editing a document in a fast editor with syntax highlighting, a courier style font in use, and optionally showing bold/italic/underline is the better writing environment compared to WYSIWYG.
The reason? Crap is eliminated in two ways. Nothing in the interface to distract you from writing, and far less chance of choke.
Less distraction is easy to understand, but choke takes a little explanation.
Anybody that has ever edited a long document, such as a book, has experienced Big Pig Document Editor Choke.
You're in the middle of typing, Big Pig decides to pause (most likely due to auto-save), then after the pause your text slams into view. That's choke.
You're in the middle of typing, a pause happens (again, most likely due to auto-save), then Big Pig straight up crashes. Choke.
You're typing away, stop, then scroll up a few pages for whatever reason you need to. Big Pig doesn't redraw correctly, everything looks messed up, you have to save, exit, and restart Big Pig just to get everything looking correct again. Choke.
You stop typing because you need to edit something a few pages back. Scroll up, make your edit, and uh-oh, now the formatting for the ENTIRE DOCUMENT is all jacked up. Choke. Now you're in a panic situation. Do you save and restart Big Pig? Or do you not save, copy the edit you wanted to make to the clipboard, restart Big Pig and hope everything comes back the way you left it, and make your edits then? The answer is the latter, because if you save, the jacked-up document is what you might get back. Copy your edit, don't save, close and restart Big Pig, HOPE everything turns out okay, then redo your edits.
Every single GUI document editor has choke problems like this, even if your document has no images in it. The longer you go, the more paranoid you get, so much to the point where you turn off auto-save and mash CTRL+S every few minutes just to play it safe. Very stressful.
TUI editors don't have choke problems. Redraw is a nonissue since the editor doesn't mess around with multiple fonts and font sizes. Auto-save actually does work and doesn't cause any pausing or stuttering. Both ghostwriter and Kate have auto-save, and both work. Even vim has it.
Plain Text Just Works™
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Published 2025 Dec 24