The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps • Hacker News Board

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#81

Post by vxNsr » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 2:22 PM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #14

npunt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, data lock-in is probably the biggest concern I have with any new productivity or note-taking tool. It's tough because innovations in tools generally require some degree of schema or file format customization. I don't know about other tools but at least with Airtable I know I can always hit the API to get my data, though I will miss out on certain business logic around it like data validation, and probably a lo…

New tools need to signal their trustworthiness by exporting to legacy formats. Even if it means losing something in the process. Give me CSV, DOCX, or an SQLite DB. Not exactly rocket science.

Or better yet, give me a native app that I can download to my machine and use forever no matter what happens to your startup.

The reason word is gonna continue to exist long after all these fly-by-night productivity startups have gone under or been bought up and wound down is because it doesn't rely on the cloud to work, though ms seems to be trying to head in that direction unfortunately.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#82

Post by bkanber » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 2:24 PM UTC

Djvacto wrote: post #74

I'd love to have one notebook-type app that works between all my devices, or some combination that lets me have the same or similar content. I loved OneNote back in Uni, though I reached a point where I stopped taking notes (through the fault of the powerpoint teaching method, and my own laziness), and OneNote does seem to be a bit bloat-y when it comes to sync. Stuff like EMACS org-mode (or, preferrably, some kind o…

Try out Notion. Works great on all my devices (MacBook, Chromebook, Android). Free tier is quite generous.

I really like that in Notion you can just spin up quick data tables with rich data objects underneath.

But also -- don't underestimate just having a notebook. For daily todolist type stuff I just use a pocket sized moleskin and the "Bullet journaling" method.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#83

Post by chapium » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 2:35 PM UTC

netcan wrote: post #48

There was a Firefox thread on here yesterday. Interesting one. My take was that 10-15 years ago, FF's feature gap was enourmous. Tabs. Extensions like firebug for web development, adblocking for browsing, various "social add-ons" that were innovative and exciting. IE 6 was a dinosaur. The question for these is.. what more do you/we want from a word processor?

Integration with documemt and version control with anything other than sharepoint. Something that is guaranteed to work without application crashes. Configurable Cloud storage/saving. 100% open document formatting to allow for interoperability.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#84

Post by doctorRetro » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 2:38 PM UTC

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #7

One advantage of Microsoft Office is that I can reasonably expect that in 20 years Word will still be around and will be able to read the files I write today. With these apps, I would be surprised if in 5 years I could read the files created with these apps.

Yep. A few years back I tried out a handful of new apps, or at least new at the time. Two have folded, the third merged with another service and offers very basic backward compatibility. While I'm not a huge fan of Office, and I think Google Docs/Drive is in need of a big update, they're both likely to be here in five years.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#85

Post by c-smile » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 2:47 PM UTC

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #7

One advantage of Microsoft Office is that I can reasonably expect that in 20 years Word will still be around and will be able to read the files I write today. With these apps, I would be surprised if in 5 years I could read the files created with these apps.

Try my HTML-NOTEPAD then (https://html-notepad.com).

Documents there are just HTML files that will be readable for centuries to come.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#86

Post by xte » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 2:49 PM UTC

vxNsr wrote: post #80

xte wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why are you pressing the pause key to do something other than pause something? because I do not use pause key for any purpose and single-key action are super-comfortable. For instance in my setup I open my mail dashboard (notmuch-emacs) with it's saved searches that I can open with a mouse click or a single key action again), tags etc simply hitting F6, shift+F6 open a mail compose buffer (window), F10 open firefox…

I thought emacs is a text editor, it appears here you're using it as an OS? do you boot directly into emacs?

Something like that, Emacs is my windows manager and start at boot with autologin (I use LUKS crypto root so I do not need to type a password on personal systems). So yes, while I'm using GNU/Linux (NixOS) I can say to a certain extent that I boot directly into Emacs.

And it's not a new thing BTW, many years ago (early 2000s) there where already an Emacs WM (http://www.nongnu.org/xwem) and someone already use Emacs even as a login shell instead of bash/zsh (http://www.sxemacs.org)

You can consider Emacs as a text-centric user environment so the "editor" part is of course there :-)

Try looking on YT about "Notmuch: What email should be", "Introduction to org-ref", "literate DevOps", "Emacs reproducible research", "Conquering Your Finances with Emacs and Ledger" etc they are about few use of Emacs and often they are presented in Emacs itself, sometimes as a WM with the modern EXWM :-)

Also GuixSD (guix emacs package) and Arch (arch-packer) have system management tools inside Emacs, other generic tools exits like proced (top/htop inside Emacs), enwc (NetworkManager wrapper), ivy-pass (pass password manager wrapper), screenshot tool, ffmpeg wrappers for screencasts...

Many services have Emacs UIs like Slack (slack and ox-slack emacs packege), ERC (IRC&other chat client discord included), Jira (-mode), Maxima (imaxima), ESS for R development, various on-line wrappers including hackernews, various Google service wrappers, ix pastebin services etc

Try to look for "emacs $something" and you normally get some results, if you develop try to look for "emacs $language" and you'll find many options (also look on YT&c for thing like web-mode, emmet-mode, ...).

In the end I think Emacs is the modern and last living LispM implementation :-)

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#87

Post by rusk » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 3:12 PM UTC

xte wrote: post #67

rusk wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's convenient, and I can share. Not to mention the fact that Excel isn't "just a spreadsheet" . I could go on, but most of the other sibling comments here have expounded enough upon her virtues. EDIT LOL ORM/driver - because life's too short that's why

Mh, for me just because life is too short I never really learned spreadsheet software (and I have seen many disaster made thanks to them, including important institutional and scientific ones) and I'm happy without them... Try to look for some Emacs demos on YT&c, perhaps you'll discover a different world :-)

> Try to look for some Emacs demos on YT&c, perhaps you'll discover a different world :-)

Ouch.

I'm already a fairly proficient Emacs user.

I also use vi.

I find this kind of zealotry tiresome.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#88

Post by Quarrelsome » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 3:18 PM UTC

jen729w wrote: post #22

SllX wrote: post #3

At this point I look at Word and Excel the same way I look at bash, gcc, grep, sed, awk, et cetera: there is so much iniertia that even when different and arguably better tools come along, it still never truly goes away. A lot of people still use emacs, vim, BBEdit and so on, but a lot of people also use IntelliJ, VSCode and Atom or whatever is in vogue this year. Vim and emacs will never truly go away no matter how…

Word, yes. Word is a turd. Word needs to die. Excel, however, is magic. Forget the nasty ribbon interface and the horrid MS window chrome, I'm just talking about what happens inside those cells. Say what you will about Microsoft as a company, about the fact that Excel is possibly over-used and that users should probably get a database. I don't care. Excel, at its core, is a magical product. Nothing else gets close to…

Excel needs to die or find a better means of placing process on top of hideously embedded business logic that lives inside those sheets. Trying to reign in the entropy of VBA macros across an organisation is a _massive_ headache.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#89

Post by jdblair » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 3:44 PM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #31

jdblair wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is especially noteworthy because the older Word formats were essentially memory dumps of the data structures used to store the document.

The binary formats that immediately preceded the current OOXML were OLE compound files (aka "structured storage), which is basically a filesystem-in-a-file that's intended to be used for serialization purposes - to allow files to have arbitrary nesting of COM components. Individual data structures are then binary-serialized into that compound file, but I don't think it's accurate to call it a "memory dump". People of…

That's how the DOC format in the 90s and early 00s worked. I was under the impression that the early formats for Word on DOS, Windows and Macintosh were all different and represented in-memory structures written directly to disk. Unfortunately, I can't find a citation, so I may be mistaken.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#90

Post by xte » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 3:59 PM UTC

rusk wrote: post #87

xte wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mh, for me just because life is too short I never really learned spreadsheet software (and I have seen many disaster made thanks to them, including important institutional and scientific ones) and I'm happy without them... Try to look for some Emacs demos on YT&c, perhaps you'll discover a different world :-)

> Try to look for some Emacs demos on YT&c, perhaps you'll discover a different world :-) Ouch. I'm already a fairly proficient Emacs user. I also use vi. I find this kind of zealotry tiresome.

Mh, so you find more comfortable work in a spreadsheet than an org-mode files with tables and optional org-babel block in your preferred language to manipulate data as native data structure if org table formulas are not enough nor comfortable?

Personally I think there is no comparison, spreadsheets are normally uncomfortable UI to work with datas that even miller+bc&pipes is far superior... Org bring computation to another level...