Having had writing aspirations my whole life - started my first big awesome epic novel that's going to be super awesome and everyone will want to read when I was 9 or 10 - I've gone through many writing tools.
First it was notebooks that never got filled beyond the first five pages. Then we got a computer and I used WordPad, which was quickly usurped by MS Word because it was better.
I ended up playing with shiny fonts more than writing. Oh so many shiny fonts! Y'know I used to collect those ...
In high school I went back to notebooks, this time I managed to fill them up with terrible prose and even worse poetry. It was writing utopia.
The thing about a notebook is that there's nothing else. It's just a notebook. Its purpose in life is providing a big surface that you can scribble upon with your favourite pen. There are no toolbars on the side, no chrome up top, it doesn't even care about the font you're using.
A notebook doesn't judge. There's no word count, no reliable page count, no structure.
But notebooks really really really__ suck at editing.
Good writing, on computers
A few years ago I discovered WriteRoom. Oh it was wonderful, finally my writing could cover the whole string and there was nothing to distract me from getting completely lost in the words.
After I got bored of the OMG look at my screen! It's so geeky and just like those old terminals! wow I stopped using WriteRoom and went back to notebooks. Opening it right now almos tmade my eyes bleed. (granted, I have version 2.5.1 and the new one is 3.x.x, things have changed)
For a while I was using Stypi and thought that was the best thing since sliced toast prepared by a wonderful female.
Stypi, again, fell into disuses. Not sure why or how, just did. Then I remembered I had iA Writer installed on my iPad.
iA Writer
iA Writer is one of those tools that is just perfect. It does everything I need and nothing more.
When I started writing on Why programmers work at night I discovered something interesting - writing in Emacs is impossible. It's a wonderful markdown editor, great support, awesome syntax highlighting, distractionless coding because there's no toolbars and crap and so on.
I love you Emacs, you glorious bastard, but you suck for writing prose.
The only place I feel comfortable enough to write is iA Writer. Somewhere between filling up my whole screen with writing, having a super huge font and juuust the perfect kerning and line spacing, iA Writer made me fall in love.
Syncing across devices via iCloud or Dropbox was just icing on the cake.
I think my favourite feature is that once you start typing on a bluetooth keyboard all the controls disappear. Your iPad turns into a blank piece of paper and you're going to town on it. Really wonderful.
Most importantly I can now write in the same environment in a coffee shop, up on a mountain or at my desk.
Continue reading about Cool thing Thursday: iA Writer
Semantically similar articles hand-picked by GPT-4
- Notebook fetishism
- Workflowy is to TODO as git is to svn
- Why you should never write a book in .doc
- Stypi - the perfect blogging tool
- Blogolicious envy
Learned something new?
Read more Software Engineering Lessons from Production
I write articles with real insight into the career and skills of a modern software engineer. "Raw and honest from the heart!" as one reader described them. Fueled by lessons learned over 20 years of building production code for side-projects, small businesses, and hyper growth startups. Both successful and not.
Subscribe below 👇
Software Engineering Lessons from Production
Join Swizec's Newsletter and get insightful emails 💌 on mindsets, tactics, and technical skills for your career. Real lessons from building production software. No bullshit.
"Man, love your simple writing! Yours is the only newsletter I open and only blog that I give a fuck to read & scroll till the end. And wow always take away lessons with me. Inspiring! And very relatable. 👌"
Have a burning question that you think I can answer? Hit me up on twitter and I'll do my best.
Who am I and who do I help? I'm Swizec Teller and I turn coders into engineers with "Raw and honest from the heart!" writing. No bullshit. Real insights into the career and skills of a modern software engineer.
Want to become a true senior engineer? Take ownership, have autonomy, and be a force multiplier on your team. The Senior Engineer Mindset ebook can help 👉 swizec.com/senior-mindset. These are the shifts in mindset that unlocked my career.
Curious about Serverless and the modern backend? Check out Serverless Handbook, for frontend engineers 👉 ServerlessHandbook.dev
Want to Stop copy pasting D3 examples and create data visualizations of your own? Learn how to build scalable dataviz React components your whole team can understand with React for Data Visualization
Want to get my best emails on JavaScript, React, Serverless, Fullstack Web, or Indie Hacking? Check out swizec.com/collections
Did someone amazing share this letter with you? Wonderful! You can sign up for my weekly letters for software engineers on their path to greatness, here: swizec.com/blog
Want to brush up on your modern JavaScript syntax? Check out my interactive cheatsheet: es6cheatsheet.com
By the way, just in case no one has told you it yet today: I love and appreciate you for who you are ❤️