The Markdown Book: On Writing ⭐️
On writing
I returned to college in the early 1990s with the goal of learning software development, a way to transform my love of personal computing into a career. But I was sidetracked by Gary Brent, a computer science professor I admired and adored, who was working on a book about Visual Basic: Would I be interested in performing a technical review of the book?
Of course. But that technical review quickly turned into some writing. And then into an offer to formally become a co-author of the book. And then I ended up almost writing the entire book myself, based on handouts that Gary had created for his classes. In what I still regard as one of the most out-of-character moves of my life, I somehow summoned the courage to ask Gary if I could be listed as the main author of the book, given the scope of my contribution. To my surprise, he agreed.
Gary and I went on to write several more books together, and then I wrote some myself. And then many more. At the time of this writing, I have written, co-written, and contributed to well over 30 books in roughly as many years. And while I never did realize my original dream of becoming a software developer, I am fluent in several programming and scripting languages, and have often written about those topics.
But I have also written far more books about other technical topics, most often about Microsoft Windows. And, more recently, I am co-authoring a Mexico City guidebook with my wife Stephanie called Eternal Spring: Our Guide to Mexico City, which is updated annually.
Over the past 30+ years, some things haven’t changed. I still sit in front of a computer screen, tapping away on the keyboard, creating words today just as I did in the early 1990s. But some things have changed quite a bit. Computers, for example, are a lot more sophisticated today. But more to the point of this discussion, the tools and other technologies that I use to write have changed dramatically.
I am old enough that I learned to type on a mechanical, non-electric typewriter. But I am also lucky enough to be part of the first generation of humans to have experienced the first waves of arcade video games, home video games, and then personal computers, which were often called home computers back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I distinctly remember seeing a Commodore computer and some related peripherals in a Sears department store as a child and how my mind immediately went to what I might create with such a tool. (Videogames, of course.) And over the next decade I owned various Commodore computers, including a C64, a C64C, and then, a after a brief detour with an Apple IIGS, an Amiga 500.
I loved playing videogames and still do. But I was always just as fascinated by how I might program these computers, first in various versions of BASIC and later with more powerful tools, and create my own software. Oddly, as I had no plans to become a writer until that possibility was suddenly thrust on me, I had been creating stories, comic books, and even faux radio shows, sometimes with friends and sometimes alone throughout this period. But it wasn’t until the Amiga that I owned a computer powerful enough to be used to create graphics. Until then, the only real work I did on computers was related to writing. Either for schoolwork or just for recreation.
My memory is hazy here, but I believe the first word processor I owned was Paper Clip for the C64. I do know that the first graphical word processor I owned, an app that provided Mac-like WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) capabilities was GeoWrite, part of the GEOS graphical environment for that computer. I had used MacWrite but never owned a Mac in that era. But then there was Apple Writer on the IIGS, and finally a series of Amiga word processor apps that included Final Copy, Final Writer, and, for a brief shining moment, WordPerfect.
Oh, WordPerfect.
This was the very early 1990s. Stephanie and I were married in may 1990 and my wife used WordPerfect at work. As an Amiga snob, I considered the PC to be primitive as a platform, but Word Perfect, even in text-based MS-DOS form, was the holy grail, the apex of word processing. Using this application required the user to remember and then master numerous keyboard shortcuts and arcane formatting codes that could be revealed and hidden with a toggle. I loved it.
Stephanie wanted a computer for herself at home, and it made sense that this computer would run the same software she used at work, meaning MS-DOS WordPerfect. I was impressed by the gorgeous IBM PS/2 computers that had started shipping a few years ago, but they were far too expensive. But then IBM briefly re-entered the home market with its low-cost PS/1 line. And so we bought one, at Sears. Of course.
Stephanie’s IBM PS/1 also fascinated me. It was the antithesis of my Amiga, with a black and white display (that could output 64 shades of gray for graphics). It was the cheapest, lowest-end version, with just 512 KB of RAM and a single floppy drive. The interface, MS-DOS, was text-based, not graphical. And its barely beating heart was an Intel 80286 processor, so the system couldn’t multitask like my Amiga, play stereo sound like my Amiga, or do anything fun at all, really. But it ran WordPerfect. And I wanted WordPerfect.
Three years later, we had moved from the Boston area to Phoenix, Arizona so I could return to college. The career I pursued would require me to get a PC of my own, as many of the classes I would take would use PC-based programming tools like Borland Turbo Pascal. (Not all, though; my first classes used the C programming language on the school’s VAX minicomputer system.) This time period coincided with the rise of Microsoft Windows, of course, and this platform was clearly the way forward. But my wife’s puny PS/1 wasn’t powereful enough to run Windows. And so I would build my first PC, a more muscular 80386SX-based system with more RAM.
I would need it. These years also coincided with the rise of Microsoft Office, a bundle of productivity apps built around the Excel spreadsheet and Word, the word processor. By the early 1990s, Microsoft Word had started to overtake WordPerfect because of a strategic mistake that the makers of WordPerfect, like so many others, had made in ignoring Windows until it was too late. WordPerfect did belatedly arrive in a native Windows version, but by then the world was moving on. The future of computing would be graphical, prettier but more resource intensive, and it would be led by Windows and Word. The latter of which, by that time, had become quite impressive.
Gary and I used Microsoft Word to write our books, it was the best tool for that job and our publisher demanded it. And I continued to use Word for decades later across an uncountable number of PCs. I didn’t just write books. In the mid-1990s, I started a website that would now be called a blog, and then others. And before I knew it, I was writing full-time about personal technology, mostly Windows and other Microsoft products and services. My most popular websites were acquired by the publisher of Windows NT Magazine right after our first son was born in 1998. And I spent the next 18 years writing on the web while I kept writing books.
I was blown away by Windows and the Mac as graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and by the capabilities Microsoft built into Word and the other Office apps, which by this time were solely made for GUIs and not MS-DOS. The world had indeed moved on. But even in these early days I realized something about these tools that would go on to haunt me for many years to come: Though I was a professional writer by this point, meaning a published writer, I would only ever use some tiny percentage of the features in Word. What that number was one can never know. 5 percent? 10 percent? I can’t say. But it was a small number.
As a reviewer–by this time, I had started reviewing laptops and other computer hardware in addition to Windows, Office, and other software–and personal computing enthusiast, I’ve always been fascinated by alternatives to the mainstream solutions most use. I was, after all, an Amiga user back in the day. And so I would evaluate various Office and Word alternatives as they appeared.
There were too many to count. But WordPerfect limped along after failed stints being owned by Novel and Corel. Sun Microsystems, a one-time heavyweight in workstations, acquired StarOffice to go after Microsoft Office. And then that spun off into the open source and cross-platform OpenOffice and LibreOffice suites, both of which are still available. And Google went through a period in the mid-2000s in which everything it did seemed specifically designed to copy Microsoft; it released the web-based Google Docs word processor in 2006.
These and other Word alternatives were interesting to some degree, but they all shared the same basic problem: I would only ever need a tiny percentage of the features they offered. And though I was at that time unfamiliar with the term minimalism, I kept searching for tools that embraced that mindset, something that “got out of the way” and let me just write without distractions. But one of the key issues with tools like this that did exist at the time is that they were incompatible with Microsoft Word. They did not support the same document formats.
As Microsoft evolved to focus on businesses and then enterprises instead of individual users, so too did Microsoft Office and Word. This increased the friction for writers like myself who only infrequently needed collaboration capabilities. And it was the source of some dark humor because all the features in Word were promoted via menus and icons on toolbars, and you could enable so many toolbars in the application that the writing area could be as small as a postage stamp. By this point, I was using possibly as little as 1 or 2 percent of Word’s features.
To use an all-too-common complaint, Word had become bloated.
This wasn’t Microsoft’s fault per se. Word was a victim of its own success and most of the features that Microsoft had added to it over the years came from customer requests. But Word’s original GUI, comprised as it was of commands in menus and toolbar icons, became untenable when the number of commands grew from dozens to hundreds and then thousands. At some point, the capabilities of Word simply outgrew that GUI. And to Microsoft’s credit, it invented a new GUI, called the ribbon, that solved this problem to some degree: The ribbon could replace menus and toolbars, and because its views were dynamic, it displayed only the commands one needed at the time. You couldn’t overload it with more screen real estate-stealing interfaces.
The ribbon solved one problem, but it didn’t solve other problems.
Word was still overloaded with functionality that most would never need. And the ribbon, though hideable, was still a busy-looking distraction, more akin to the cockpit of an airplane than a simple tool for writing. This is a big, heavy application, and thanks to its roots in GUI personal computing, it only runs on Windows PCs and Macs in full-featured form, and on the web and mobile in less powerful versions.
As bad, the success of Word was in some ways reinforced by its proprietary document file formats, various versions of DOC and then DOCX, which are as much an industry standard as the application itself. To combat this lock-in, Sun Microsystems, IBM, and the open source community first offered up the rival OpenDocument standard, ODF, in the early 2000s and rival Office suite makers worked to reverse engineer Word’s formats so their apps would be compatible. These efforts and some antitrust worries were enough to force Microsoft’s hand, with the software giant creating its Office Open XML document formats like DOCX in return. Like ODF, DOCX is an open standard, but it was purposefully designed to be “excessively complex and unnecessarily convoluted,” in the words of Wikipedia, to confound interoperability and continue the dominance of Microsoft Office.
No matter. DOCX, like ODF, is too complex and convoluted anyway. And Microsoft Word and its many imitators are likewise too big and complex. Over decades of advances, the makers of these things lost sight of the salient truths of writing and the needs of writers. Like most creators, writers work alone and not in collaboration with others. We want our tools to just work and to get out of our way. In addition to seeking an audience for that work, we want it to persist, to live beyond our lifetimes. And tying that work to a single application, even one as popular as Word, is objectively wrong. We want what we write to be human readable and machine readable, to live forever.
By the 2010s, I had dropped my book publisher to begin self-publishing books, electronic books that could be updated when needed, which happens a lot in the ever-changing world of personal computing. There are different ways to go about this, but thanks to a friend and co-author, I quickly adopted a text-based markup language called Markdown to write and publish my books.
At first, this usage was limited just to my books. But in time I came to see Markdown as the way forward for all of my writing. As it turns out, Markdown solves all the problems with Word and other bloated word processors and the minimalist editors I use to write in Markdown free my brain to focus on the job at hand. Markdown is perfect for writing.
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