#word

I think about this sometimes when I'm writing in Vim at midnight, just me and a blinking cursor and a plain text file that will still be readable when I'm dead. No filesystem-within-a-filesystem. No sector allocation tables. No 5,039-page specification. Just words, a few hash marks, and never having to think about it again.

I hate Microsoft Word. I want Microsoft Word to die. I hate Microsoft Word with a burning, fiery passion. I hate Microsoft Word the way Winston Smith hated Big Brother. Our reasons are, alarmingly, not dissimilar ...

"The word processor is a stupid and grossly inefficient tool for preparing text for communication with others. Preparing printable text using a word processor effectively forces you to conflate two tasks that are conceptually distinct and that, to ensure that people's time is used most effectively and that the final communication is most effective, ought also to be kept practically distinct. The two tasks are The composition of the text itself. TThe typesetting of the document. "

"I am not in a business with a 4-6 year document retention cycle. I am in a business where I hope that what I wrote ten years ago will still be accessible a century hence. Microsoft's policy was deliberately destroying my life's work."

"Sources were unable to say how he got in there or whose child he might be, but he apparently had been living in the code in a feral state for a number of years."

"I was still somehow brainwashed, though, as perhaps many people still are today, into believing that Word was the “serious” word-processor: the professional tool for anyone who did heavy lifting with language."

"If you've ever written a post in Word 2003 or before and then copied and pasted the text into your web browser you know what I'm talking about." I have no idea what he's talking about.

"over the months that I spent writing the book I went from being a Word fan to hating it with a passion."