WordStar, an early word processing program.
We call them computers because they are great at
calculating numbers, but one of the most common uses for personal
computers has been writing. We've come a long ways from the days of
WordStar and
SpeedScript,
where you had to type special characters to toggle bold or italic on
and off. The IBM PC could show bold and italic, but only in one font
and a single size. The Mac gave us WYSIWYG (what you see is what you
get) word processing with MacWrite, and the rest is history.
SpeedScript, a free C64 word processor.
In this week's Freeware Forum, we're going to talk about the tools
we use for writing, whether that's a full-fledged word processor, a
text processor, a desktop publishing program, a "works" application, or
an HTML editor.
Dan Knight (Mac Musings):
My first Mac project was done in PageMaker on a friend's
Mac, using text files exported from SpeedScript on my Commodore 64.
When I got my own Mac, I used MacWrite, which came
bundled with my Mac Plus.
That's as close to freeware as I came for a long time. One problem with
MacWrite is that it would corrupt files, so when ClarisWorks (now
AppleWorks) came out, I was happy to move to an integrated works
program without those problems. To this day I still use AppleWorks.
After all these years, it amortizes to being nearly free.
MacWrite, the Mac's first word processor.
I have beloved Microsoft Word
5.1a on my Macs, although I rarely use it. I also have Microsoft Office
2004, which I won in a trivia contest at the local Apple Store, but
it's certainly not freeware - and I hate it. I only use it to open
files other people send me that have to be viewed in Word or Excel. I
still prefer AppleWorks for my word processing and spreadsheet needs.
I've tried the demos of Pages and Numbers but been unimpressed.
The most commonly used word processing app on my Macs is Bean, which I use mostly to
open Word .doc files. It's much faster than bloated Word. I also have
freeware NeoOffice and
OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice, but they seem even
slower and more bloated than Microsoft Office, so I only use them when
I have files that require them.
I actually do most of my writing for the Web, and I do it using a
WYSIWYG HTML editor. I've been using Claris Home Page
since 1997, and it's the primary reason I run a Mac with OS X 10.4 Tiger and Classic Mode to
this day. On the freeware side, I use KompoZer 0.7.10 on my G4 Power Macs (I don't
like version 0.8 at all) and BlueGriffon on my Intel Mac mini. Both
are based on Netscape Composer and do the job, but each has some quirks
that I do my best to work around - as I've done with Claris Home Page
for 15 years now.
My primary text editor is freeware TextWrangler 2.3,
the last version that let's me do batch search-and-replaces on the
thousands of pages that make up Low End Mac. That feature disappeared
with version 3.0, undoubtedly to give users a reason to upgrade to
commercial BBEdit.
In between a text editor and a word processor is donationware
Tex-Edit Plus, which I use
mostly to open articles Charles Moore sends in. I'm sure he has a lot
more to tell you about it.
I have to admit that it's kind of strange that my favorite apps come
from the late 1990s - Home Page and AppleWorks - but why mess with
something that works so well?
Alan Zisman (Zis Mac): My
must-have free text tool: KompoZer WYSIWYG web page editor.
The name is a play on Composer and reflects that KompoZer
is a descendent of Composer, the web page editor that was included with
some versions of the Netscape browser. As the old Netscape code was
open sourced and became the basis of the various Mozilla projects, the
web page editor evolved through Mozilla spin-offs - first Nvu (no longer supported) and more recently
KompoZer. The SeaMonkey
project - which (like some Netscape versions) includes a browser, email
software, and a web page editor - includes something similar, but it's
ugly!
Some of what I like:
- It does a reasonable job of creating clean code without needing to
focus on raw HTML code.
- It offers a source view for the times when you do need to look at the code, for instance
to embed a YouTube clip, add a JavaScript script, etc.
- It's cross-platform, with versions for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux,
etc. None need particularly new or high-end hardware or OS
versions.
- It's free.
It doesn't come with a bunch of predesigned templates, like Apple's
iWeb, for instance, but that's not necessarily a bad thing!
I've got well over a thousand pages online in a dozen or so domains
that I've done with KompoZer (on one platform or another) or one or
another of its close cousins. Works for me!
Leaman Crews (Plays Well with
Others): Like many long-time Mac users, I fell in love with Word
5.1 for Mac and never got over its obsolescence. So in looking for a
word processor ever since, the standard is to try to find something
with the look, feel, and functionality of Word 5.1. Over the years,
nothing really came close, hence I mostly stuck with the newer versions
of Word, despite the increasing tendency towards bloat and a sharp
decline in usefulness (unless you count the usefulness of Office for
Windows compatibility).
In the free Bean, I finally found something that sort of hits the
spot. It's far more powerful than TextEdit (the free word processor
that comes with OS X) and far more nimble than any version of Word for
Mac in the last 15 years. It's not quite the same as Word 5.1, but at
least I finally have a no-cost word processor that I actually enjoy
using.
When it comes to coding and scripting text editors, I am a die-hard
BBEdit guy.
It's not free, though. I suppose I should then recommend TextWrangler,
as it is BBEdit's free and slimmer-featured cousin.
But the free text editor I use the most is actually MacVim. Using vi, vim, or any of
its GUI variants (of which MacVim is one) involves a steep learning
curve, but a few years ago I took a Christmas break to finally make
myself learn the ins and outs. When you work on Unix-based systems,
especially in remote shells via SSH, you need to know a console-based
text editor to get anything done, and that pretty much means you need
to choose sides and become an Emacs guy or a vi guy. I chose
the latter, because it seems vi and/or vim is included by default in
every Unix-based operating system. Once you get to learn its "command
mode/insert mode" paradigm and formulate a cheat sheet of codes to keep
handy until you memorize those codes, it's not bad at all - and
extremely powerful.
BBEdit is no slouch, but sometimes I can accomplish a massive text
transformation with a single command in MacVim, whereas the same
operation in BBEdit would mean a lot of pointing, clicking, and dialog
boxes.
Charles Moore (several columns): My first "computer" word
processor was just that - WangWriter II - in an eponymous "floor model"
dedicated word processor whose operating system had to be loaded off a
5-1/4" floppy disk at every startup. WangWriter II was entirely
menu-based and keyboard driven, with a monochrome green
alphanumerics-only 10" monitor. The keyboard was excellent, and the
built-in daisy wheel
printer was slow and amazingly noisy, but it did a very creditable
job with the right font (involved changing daisy-wheels) and a carbon
ribbon. The machine was a gift from my cousin, who snagged it as
surplus when the telco he worked for replaced the hulking Wang machines
with Intel 386 PCs. He thought it was time I moved on from my old
Remington typewriter, and I owe him a big debt of gratitude for giving
me a gentle shove into the digital age.
The big WangWriter quickly convinced me that computers were the
future of writing platforms, and a year later I got my first PC - a
used Mac Plus that had belonged to a University English professor
friend and which came loaded up with Microsoft Word 4. I really liked
that primitive version of Word, and I upgraded to Word 5.1 when it was
released several months later. I loved Word 5.1 - and still do. It
remains the benchmark by which I measure word processing software. I
haven't used it as a production application for many years now, but my
ancient copy still runs on my Pismo PowerBooks under OS X
10.4 Tiger Classic Mode.
Unfortunately, Word
6 (a.k.a. "Word for Windows for the Mac") was as awful as Word 5.1
was excellent, and in protest I switched to the somewhat quirky, but
interesting and powerful, Nisus
Writer. The latter was actually a pretty capable text editor as
well as a word processor, and it was partly instrumental in persuading
me that for most of the stuff I was doing, I really didn't need a full-
featured word processor at all, and that in turn led me to Tom Bender's
$15 shareware Tex-Edit Plus, a styled
text editor that still supported enough formatting features to meet
most needs I had for printing out hard copy documents, and was
well-suited to supporting the vast majority of my work, which is
plain-text based. TE+ also has powerful text cleaning tools, the best
AppleScript integration I've encountered in any application at any
price, and it even supports inline graphics and audio if one is so
inclined.
Consequently, Tex-Edit Plus has been my primary writing tool for
some 15 years now, and with Tom having recently upgraded it for
OS X 10.7 Lion compatibility,
its future seems assured for the foreseeable future. The latest
version, 4.9.11, also still supports OS X 10.4 Tiger and PowerPC Macs,
so I have seamless document compatibility across all three of my
production Macs.
When I do need the greater power of a word processor, I use either
the sublime Bean, LibreOffice, or Google Docs - all of which are free. I do
also use OS X's bundled TextEdit app for some utilitarian tasks, and
also the freeware TextWrangler for certain functions it supports that
TE+ and Bean don't.
Of course for the past seven months, I've also been working on an
iPad, and while I consider the iOS experience second class computing
compared to a Mac - and worse than second-class when it comes to
working with text - I get reasonably satisfactory performance with the
freeware version of
PlainText, which supports Dropbox seamlessly and automatically once
configured, and the trifecta of text processor apps from German
developer Infovole - their $7.99 flagship program
TextKraft, the multilingual-oriented $2.99
SchreibKraft, and the friendly-priced but still very capable
99¢
1a Easy Writer. All three feature welcome enhancements to the
default iOS text entry and editing user interface, as well as manual
Dropbox synchronization.
The future? Who knows? Tom Bender tells me that worrisomely at
version 10.7.3, Apple still hasn't fixed some serious AppleScript bugs
in OS X Lion, and there's conjecture that Apple is simply losing
interest in the Mac OS, with its central focus now on the iOS. If I end
up migrating to Linux or even Windows 8, I'll have to find some new
text tools.
Simon Royal (Mac
Spectrum): I don't use any heavy word processing apps; I don't need
the advanced features of Microsoft Office. For the past few years I
have used the fantastic Bean as it can read and write .doc files. If I
need anything heavier, I use OpenOffice, but that is very rare.
I used NeoOffice for a while, but that was purely because it was the
only app that could open the then-new .docx files from Microsoft when
Microsoft Office for Mac couldn't.
For text editing or web writing, I use TextWrangler. Its free,
simple, and colourises HTML code. It also has the superb multifile
search-and-replace, which I used for the one hundred or so pages of my
web site.
I have yet to find a word processor for the iPhone so I can write
while on the move without my laptop.
