On Text and Its Tools

Writing is surely the greatest thing that man has ever created. Without writing, we have little philosophy; tradition is harder to maintain and advance; culture is difficult to improve; technology is harder to spread; history in all but its greatest details is forgotten.

Indeed, writing is such an amazing yet simple thing that those unfamiliar with it often mistake it for magic. In Black Robe, for example, there is a compelling scene in which the Jesuit priest, Father LaForgue, is seen writing in a journal. One of the Indians asks him why he is sitting around doodling, and he responds that he is writing, and decides to give the Indians a demonstration. Father LaForgue asks the Indian, Chomina, to tell him something that Daniel, the other Frenchman in the party, wouldn’t know; Chomina responds that his wife’s mother died the previous winter in the snow. Father LaForgue writes it down and then carries it over to Daniel, who had been busy with other chores. Daniel reads it aloud, and the Indians were shocked and amazed; how had Daniel learned this? No one had told him about it. Never having experienced writing, it was difficult for them to understand how words could be put on paper, where no one actually speaks them. Indeed, they began at that moment to suspect the Black Robe, as they called Father LaForgue, of being a demon, because he was able to pass knowledge without speaking.

The stuff of writing, the spoken word made permanent without speech, is called text. You are reading text right now. Every book we have ever picked up, every letter we have ever written, every sign with letters on it is full of text. Text is speech unspoken; it is a great thing, an amazing thing. Too often, we take it for granted; but it is one of the greatest things man has ever produced.

The advent of computers has enabled us to deal with text in many very interesting and exciting ways, and it has greatly multiplied the amount of text we have at our disposal. It has also made it much easier to produce text; we have lots of tools which allow us to type things, which is a faster and easier way of producing text than writing. (Not always better; but certainly faster and easier, once the learning curve of typing has been surmounted.) Unfortunately, these tools have often been the cause of a decrease in the quality of our writing. Part of this is due simply to the volume; when it’s so easy to write and publish, one is bound to get more low-quality writing and publishing. However, some of this is due to the tools we use; the vast majority of us use the wrong tools, tools which make our writing worse, and the experience of writing more difficulty and less enjoyable than it has to be.

Marshall McLuhan famously stated that “the medium is the message,” and in this context the medium is also the messenger. The way we write is affected by the medium with which we write. This relates to computers to the great divide in producing text: the word processor and the text editor. This distinction bears a little discussion.

The modern word processor has two primary characteristics:

1. WYSIWYG: Word processors are all so-called “What You See Is What You Get” editors of text. That is, the text is entered and displayed to the user in precisely the same format that the user expects to see in the finished document. The fonts, font families, characteristics, sizes, formatting, and so on are all applied right there on the screen, and they are applied in real-time, while the user is typing.
2. Binary data formats: Most word processors utilize binary data formats. That is, the content of the writings that are produced with these programs is encoded in a binary format that is not directly readable by human beings or by any other program. Microsoft Word and Corel Wordperfect both use formats of this type; LibreOffice does not.

Text editors, on the other hand, are simply what they sound like: text editors. They are much more akin to sitting down and writing in longhand than word processors are. Those of us old enough to remember writing stories and documents in longhand—even if barely old enough—will know that one simply sits down and starts writing. One marks the logical structure of the document—where chapter breaks are located, for example—by writing “Chapter 1.” One does not carefully format this in a particular font, or ensure that the spacing above and below is appropriate, or adjust the margins in a certain way. One simply writes it, then proceeds with the text. There is no option for significantly altering the style of the document, because it’s all just text. When one wants the document styled in a certain way, one sends it to a typesetter, who looks at the logical structure one has put in the work—chapters, sections, underlines, and so on—and turns them into stylistic formatting. He is the one who bothers with making sure that all the chapter headings are fourteen points high and in small caps; the author writes text, he doesn’t typeset it.

In a text editor, the situation is similar. All the text is in the same font, and all the text is in the same size. There is no option for italics or boldface. Structure can be indicated by special punctuation marks, spacing, and similar devices, but not by visual formatting. It’s just text; formatting is a different job.

When someone is writing in a word processor, he isn’t thinking as much about the text because the formatting is constantly before him. He can’t type and not see things come up the way they’ll eventually look. It’s difficult to write in this context and not think about that appearance, sometimes even more than the text. But should this really be the concern of the author? Shouldn’t an author be thinking about what he’s writing, and think about its appearance at a later time, or even leave its appearance to someone else entirely?

The text editor makes this a reality, just as writing in longhand does. Visual formatting can be done by other programs, and should be done by other programs, which do it better; TeX and LaTeX are the best choices for this job, though there are others. They do this the same way that a manual typesetters formatted a document in the days of longhand writing; the author puts little clues in his document about its logical structure---that is, where the chapter and section breaks are, which text is more emphatic, and so on---and the typesetter converts those into visual realities. Indeed, with computers, the author can be in complete control of this visual formatting, informing TeX and LaTeX exactly how he wants his document to be formatted---and still keep that formatting entirely separate from the production of the actual text of the document, allowing him to focus on writing while he is writing and formatting at some other time, so as not to distract himself with pretties when he should be focusing on content.

So what text editor should you use? There are lots of choices here, but my recommendation is vim. vi is a text editor written by Bill Joy for Berkeley Unix decades ago, and vim is vi-improved. It’s got lots of features such as syntax coloring to help you keep your documents markup even further separated from your text, and its command mode is immensely powerful.

The learning curve is a bit steep; however, once that’s been surmounted you’ll feel hopelessly crippled anytime you use anything else. That includes when typing quick email messages into a webmail window; my primary impetus in installing and using mutt was precisely to allow me to type my content in vim rather than have to use one of these silly text windows (such as the one most blog software provides), which doesn’t have half the interface or a tenth of the power of a real text editor. vim, like most text editors, can be used with a mouse and menus if you wish; but once you’ve gotten past that learning curve, you won’t want to, as moving your hand from the keyboard to the mouse will be an intolerable waste of energy. The keyboard commands are so quick, so easy, and so powerful that doing anything else is simply a waste.

So please, forget about your word processor; it’s stupid and inefficient. Adopt a text editor, learn it, master it, and focus on your content rather than its appearance again. The world will be a better place for it.

Praise be to Christ the King!