3 Aug
2014
3 Aug
'14
12:51 a.m.
On Aug 2, 2014, at 9:47 AM, Noel Chiappa wrote:
Does something like Word produce the same reaction for you? I don't
use it
much, but my wife does (she's an engineer, and uses it to write
papers), and
its complexity drives her crazy sometimes.
After writing my general exam in MS-Word, I swore off it unless
forced to use it (i.e. collaborative requirements). When a stupid
but ambitious application program thinks it's smarter than you are
and tries to 'correct' your writing (I now call it 'autocorrupt'),
it's time to change. These days I write in EMACS and format with
LaTeX, printing in PDF. I can't imagine writing my dissertation with
the turd called Word.
Unfortunately, I have to keep MS-Worst on the family computer,
because the public schools require parents to purchase for-profit
software to support our children's education. (There are too many
incompatibilities with Open Office et al. that trip up my less-
computer-savvy family members for the open-source tools to be a
useful alternative in an compulsory MS world.) Fortunately, I get it
for free through *my* school.
For programming, I used to use exclusively vi, but tried EMACS out of
curiosity and found its UI to be a less constrained than vi's modal
approach. I use Gnu, FWIW. -- Ian