Text editors

[Paul Martin]

I've moaned before about Publisher lacking a built-in text editor, but as I am going to try to use this programme for real in 2021, I'm looking for solutions.

I Googled to find simple, preferably free or cheap, text editors and have come up with Rough Draft. What has impressed me so far about it is that, although it looks a bit old-fashioned, it does seem to have the features an Editor might want and not be just a poor-man's Word. It also works natively in RTF file format, which is a match.

Does anyone else have experience of this programme or alternatives? Also, if there are any tips on exporting OUT of Publisher back to RTF, I would be obliged.

Hope you are all getting by OK or better in 2020.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Paul Martin said:

. It also works natively in RTF file format, which is a match.

I think that Publisher might have better support for importing DOCX than RTF.

Are there specific features you want that you can't get in LibreOffice, for example?

Also, for getting information out of Publisher into RTF I think you're limited to Select, Copy, and Paste into an editor.

[Paul Martin]

Thanks, Walt. I might use LibreOffice, though loading a complex Office suite for this purpose seems a bit over the top. Rough Draft also has some good features like making it easy to have a subset of files e.g. "current issue stories" in a window of their own. It does all the usual text characteristics, which you wouldn't get in more basic text editors. It is fundamentally a writers' tool, which is what I need. Still not as handy as a built-in text editor and that's why I was checking to see how you could get text back out of Publisher to re-edit in RD.

[sfriedberg]

Text editors are a highly personal choice.  There have been red-vs-blue partisan arguments over vi-vs-emacs for at least 35 years, and the same arguments continue today with a 3rd or 4th generation of participants.

For a pure keystroke editor, no styling at all, no rich text support, no built-in tagging support, I like vim, which is the modern extension of vi.  It's free and there are probably ports to all major OS environments.  I have had the command set embedded in my muscle memory since the early 1980's.  But see the 1st sentence of this posting.

[fde101]

On the Mac you might consider using Nisus Writer Pro, which uses RTF as its native file format.  It is a fairly complete word processor, but is easily much lighter-weight than something like LibreOffice.

There is also Nisus Writer Express, with fewer features and a correspondingly lower price.

[Paul Martin]

16 hours ago, sfriedberg said:

Text editors are a highly personal choice.  There have been red-vs-blue partisan arguments over vi-vs-emacs for at least 35 years, and the same arguments continue today with a 3rd or 4th generation of participants.

For a pure keystroke editor, no styling at all, no rich text support, no built-in tagging support, I like vim, which is the modern extension of vi.  It's free and there are probably ports to all major OS environments.  I have had the command set embedded in my muscle memory since the early 1980's.  But see the 1st sentence of this posting.

I agree about text editors being a personal choice, but I would guess that the largest market is for coders. I'm from the rather smaller one of editors. I commission, edit, provide DTP layout including artwork for two voluntary organisations' journals.

My irritation about not having a built-in text editor is because I frequently receive content that a) needs more editing b) arrives late c) is altered futher by the "editorial board" d) has errors subsequently revised by the original contributor! As for most editors, there is a deadline set by others. (This was the market that Serif PagePlus had come to dominate over decades.)

Being able to dive into the layout you've set previously to change two words or rewrite several paragraphs is an everyday occurrence.

Rough Draft is aimed at writers including journalists, novelists, playwrights etc with some neat features. It seems to have been last updated in 2005, which either make it "old-fashioned", like me, or "classic" (ditto, naturally).

[Rick G]

Old school isn't nessisarily bad.I use metapad as a notepad replacement which has a lot of features I need in the course of a day and it hasn't been updated in years

Might I suggest wordpad for a light text editor? That might do it. I use Libre office personally but in either you can set up templates to sut your needs

Merry Christmas!

[Wosven]

Same as you @Rick G

I'm used to old TextPad editor version 4.7 (faster than last version 5.x), and wouldn't change since I'm using it for long and can write regexp without thinking. It also provide iteration in the replacements, and that's usually missing in all the other apps.

On OS X, I was fond of TextWrangler that had interesting options too.

At some point, I wanted to switch to Linux, but unable to find a suitable remplacement for it, I never did.

[Jowday]

On 12/15/2020 at 3:52 PM, Paul Martin said:

I've moaned before about Publisher lacking a built-in text editor, but as I am going to try to use this programme for real in 2021, I'm looking for solutions.

I Googled to find simple, preferably free or cheap, text editors and have come up with Rough Draft. What has impressed me so far about it is that, although it looks a bit old-fashioned, it does seem to have the features an Editor might want and not be just a poor-man's Word. It also works natively in RTF file format, which is a match.

Does anyone else have experience of this programme or alternatives? Also, if there are any tips on exporting OUT of Publisher back to RTF, I would be obliged.

Hope you are all getting by OK or better in 2020.

This program is an underrated editor with a minimum of features. I am not sure it meets your requirements - but I had to mention it.

https://gottcode.org/focuswriter/

Stay safe.

[v_kyr]

Ah yes a good text editor, well these are usually the tools developers have grown up (...before programming IDEs nowadays took those language specific some steps further). - Though as a coder and developer I might have other much higher demands and preferences/needs here, in terms of the overall functionality an editor has to offer, than common users or plain text writers.

Personally I like OS independent high customizable/flexible tools here, so tools which work and are available for either OS, since I often have to switch between environments. Another point is then ideally also it's usability and support from inside a shell/terminal (CLI) and GUI then. Those I still use mostly are ...

• vi (vim)
• Emacs
• Sublime Text
• VS Code (for specific coding and debugging, though due to it's Electron base it's big, much slower and also needs a bunch of memory in contrast to the others named)