Re: LaTeX / Metafont was Re: Arabic transliteration

On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 08:45:06PM +0000, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> Teoh wrote:
> >I definitely do NOT like WYSIAYG editors; recent ones are esp.
> >annoying in assuming they know what you want (and get it wrong, and then
> >you waste time trying to undo what it shouldn't have done in the first
> >place). I hate software that tries to be "smart" when the user knows
> >better.
>
> My present most-hated feature is the Swedish version of Word's stylistics
> checker. It's got a list of words that it marks as grammatical errors, and
> when you check what's "wrong" it tells you that word X sounds formal and
> could better be avoided in non-formal writing. It's bad enough that a such
> unsophisticated piece of software pretends to make stylistic decisions
> better than the user, but when I do write something in Word it's practically
> always rather to highly formal stuff. It's not like I'm in the habit of
> writing personal letters or the like in it.
Ah, yes. I've tried Word a few times, and I got SO fed up with it because
it was just extremely stupid yet tries to be "smart". (General rule of
thumb: if you hear Microsoft calling something "smart", chances are it's
going to be very dumb and annoying. E.g. "smart" formatting, annoying
paperclip, the other equally stupid variants of the paperclip, "smart"
quotes that look idiotic when viewed on non-Windows platforms because it's
a non-standard, non-compliant use of the ASCII charset, etc., etc.)

I ended up turning off just about every feature of Word that MS marketing
boasted about, before it was tolerable enough for normal use. Grrr.  Good
thing I don't have Windows at home...

[snip]
> >Ugh. If you're on Windows, do yourself a favor and install EditPlus
> >(www.editplus.com). It's WAY better than notepad or wordpad or any of the
> >other monstrosities that ships with Windows. You'll love plain text more
> >than you ever imagine you could once you get comfortable using EditPlus.
> >To steal an analogy from a coworker, it's like the difference between
> >refugee camp and a real residence. :-)
>
> What's wrong with notepad? Once you shift to a monospace font, it's almost
> as nice as MS Edit!
[snip]

MS Edit?! Ewww... seriously, you should check out EditPlus. It's really
much better. Has a much cleaner interface, and doesn't act weird when you
get very long text lines, handles line-wrapping in a sane way, etc.. It's
also awesome for programming, does syntax-highlighting and stuff. (But of
course, if you're not a programmer that probably means little.)

Perhaps there's technically nothing *wrong* with notepad... but it's just
like a refugee camp compared to EditPlus. :-P


T

--
EMACS = full(y) crippled operating system