Hi, Jesse!
I know WriteRoom 3.0 is a while yet, since you're currently working hard on TaskPaper.
I've been searching for a text editor with some project handeling features (as opposed to fully fledged organizers, such as Scrivener or Ulysses) and export features. So far I've had no luck, although this mockup fitted my bill almost exactly. I really liked the adaptive approach of it all. Do you think some of Prose's features might find their way into WR 3.0?
/Johan
Copyright © 2008 Jesse Grosjean. All rights reserved.
Johan Larsson - June 11, 2008 11:15 AM
I guess not then...
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jesse - June 11, 2008 11:28 AM
Thanks for the link it certainly looks interesting and I'll give it a good read through when I get back to WriteRoom development. I'm not sure if I'll try to add project level features to WriteRoom or not. On one hand I have a number of ideas that I think would work pretty well and be interesting too. On the other hand WriteRoom already does what I want and I'm hesitant to add "neat" features that I won't necessarily use.
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terceiro - July 10, 2008 11:56 PM
Johan,
Actually, most everything you describe is already available on widely available text editors, and for the time you invested in your mock website, you could have learned much of it.
I'd start out looking at MultiMarkdown in TextMate: it's user-friendly, sticks with plain text, and is exportable to HTML, XML, RTF, and LaTeX. It's like magic, only not so much.
Of course, TextMate costs a couple of bucks (though worth it, I'd say). And I'm no programmer: I speak as a writer of good ole English prose. If you'd rather not spend the money, there's always emacs.
Yes, via emacs (and I'd highly recommend the excellent Aquamacs Emacs on the Mac: it's awesome) you could use muse-mode or org-mode, both of which give you the features you're looking for (outlining, project management, plain text, wide export options). Sure, there's more you could do with emacs in muse-mode, but why? If all you want is plain text markup that can be easily exported, well then, do just (and only) that.
The big upside with emacs is that, once you invest the time, you'll discover that it is the most powerful tool on the planet for working with prose documents. I'm not joking: once you learn how to use emacs to work with sentences (and not just lines or paragraphs) -- real, honest-to-goodness fundamental building-blocks of prose sentences, you'll wonder why no other text editors think that way. As far as I'm concerned, emacs is great for prose and just happens to have a lot of programmer proponents.
I'm a paid owner of licenses of WriteRoom (which I still use), TextMate, Scrivener and more and I'm still an emacs guy. And I'll tell you it's already got everything you want in your dream editor, and it's free. (OK, it is hard to learn. But so is reading. And driving. And typing. And you learned all those skills, right? Was it worth it? Yes. And emacs is, too.)
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Rachel Greenham - July 11, 2008 3:33 AM
MultiMarkDown isn't only in TextMate. For one, I actually discovered it first because it's embedded in Scrivener too. But it's actually a standalone (commandline) program you can download directly from http://fletcherpenney.net/MultiMarkdown. As such you can use it with WriteRoom - as I do - albeit not in a way that's in any way integrated. (As it happens I use WriteRoom for first-draft writing and TextMate for editing and finishing and that's where the MultiMarkDown preview comes in handy.
I'd actually be a bit keen on some MultiMarkDown integration in WriteRoom - an option to pipe the current text through MMD and display the results either in a WebKit widget in WriteRoom itself or just launch it in the current default browser, and Save As options that reflect the output formats supplied by MMD. I'd actually like that. It would mean not having to switch back to TextMate for that part.
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