I want a word processor that I can swear by. I used to swear by WriteNow, many many moons ago. Ah, the good old days of System 7. Back when applications were lean and mean and did what you needed them to do, without the fluff. I hear people used to swear by Word 6, but later incarnations of M$ Office sucked.

Well, the days of WriteNow were numbered, and eventually T/Maker got bought out and for some unexplainable reason, WriteNow was put into the old folks' home and was never seen again. So I had little to turn to but Nisus Writer. The plus was that Nisus Writer could handle Chinese. Plus, the discontiguous selection and otherworldly find/replace were way cool. But in the end, Nisus just felt like a text editor forced to be a word processor. Its implementation of paragraph styles just didn't make sense, and the formatting was awkward, and--well, it just felt like word processing features that were tacked on, and not very well thought out, at that.

I had a chance to revisit all of this writing my typology paper from hell the last few days. And I thought, wouldn't it be great if there were a word processor out there that made sense? I'm trying out Mellel right now, and it seems like it's a good candidate... but I thought I would write down some of my ideas on my ideal word processor. I always come up with these ideas, but unless I implement them right away, which is rather impossible, or write them down, I know I'll forget the little details.

First of all, styles that make sense. WriteNow's styles made sense. I don't know about Word's they seem sort of horrendous to me. Word just feels like a giant monster, in general.

Then it would be cool to have linguistic examples automatically formatted. And numbered. Like,

keoi5	heoi3-zo2	tou4syu1gun2
3sg	go-PERF	library
'He went to the library.'

All you'd have to do is hit tab in between the items, and it'll automatically align the items in the first two rows, and then the last one will be the translation. And it'll automatically keep everything on one page.

We'd also need an IPA keyboard layout.

Ho hum. Now I'm tired and will go to sleep.