I consider myself a pretty nerdy, techy guy. I’ve been around computers for twenty years now. I’ve built computers for friends, worked in tech support, I can edit video and audio with ease. Yesterday, to test the performance of a new hard drive I disassembled this laptop. Twice.

So why the fuck is it that in all my days I have NEVER found a single text editor that doesn’t make me want to throw the computer I’m using out the window? Am I specially-abled or something? Am I fucking retard? 

I’ve tried them all. Microsoft Word is the most vile of the lot, every now and then when I’m stuck on a Windows machine and confronted with doing any writing on it, my scalp tingles. So many years of Word crashing on me after I have slaved over some writing for hours has left me with an instinctual, feral, aversion to it. Oh and by the way, the fine folks at Microsoft that designed the ‘Autosave’ feature in Word? Please mail me for my home address so you can come over here and kiss my arse.  

Even simple stuff like dragging a margin or creating a hanging indent in Word damn near drives me to tears. Word on the Mac is better by an infinitesimally small amount. Geez. 

Open Office sucks too but I’ve always lived by the adage that you get what you pay for and Open Office is free. My point proven.

Apple’s Pages is bearable, until you start getting adventurous with the formatting at which point all bets are off. Also you usually have to export your work into the de-facto Word Format (so the 99% of the world not using a Macintosh can read your opus) which is another crap-shoot.

And now there’s a new joy in my life. WordPress! For the most part I still use the online interface. It’s actually that good, even for an old school ‘apps for everything‘ dude like myself. Except for the text editor.

Now and then when I’m making a post WordPress will decide to totally fuck with me by adding a line-feed where I don’t want it or right justifying something I want left justified. The previous post was an example. After half an hour of trying, I gave up on getting WordPress to format the post the way I wanted. I rewrote the entire post from scratch and this isn’t the first time this has happened. Brought to my goddamn knees by some HTML and some javascript. Pathetic.

So. Can anyone please tell me, why is a self-confessed ubergeek like myself flummoxed by what are essentially fucking text editors on steroids? Anyone?

Rants, Tech apple, I hate MS Word, Microsoft, MS Word Sucks, Open Office, Pages, Text editors suck, Wordpress

Since the time I started doing this site (I hate calling it a blog) I have been searching for a decent way to post without using the online WordPress interface. Call me old school but I hate online apps. I always have. Unlike most people I know I have clients for almost everything I do on the internet. I like using a POP client for e-mail (Mail.app) and iChat for Google Talk. 

WordPress isn’t bad. Really. It has always been very stable and the current version (2.7, I think) is a huge improvement over its predecessor in terms of its user interface. It’s speedy too if you have Google Gears (Something that lets websites cache content to your computer to be more desktop app-like) installed. My problem is that Gears doesn’t work in my browser of choice, Opera and more importantly I don’t trust web based editors.

I was thinking about this the other day and have figured out what this habit (or preference) stems from. A lot of people I know who grew up in the same era I did, have the same preference for desktop apps and it stems from a word that brings up really, really bad memories.

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Tech Blogo, Dial-up, Google Gears, indie app, Internet Exploder, Mac, Mail.app, Mantra Online, Opera, Outlook Express, Wordpress