yelyah - “daycare mischief 20111002” piano improv
I’m off on another app tangent.
I’ve been using a combination of VIM and IA Writer for entering notes/writing articles, but I’m increasingly needing something more elegant than a bunch of text files sitting around that aren’t really organized.
I’ve known about Scrivener for ages because of nanowrimo (all these years later and I’ve still yet to actually win a nanowrimo). It’s the current favorite for what I think I need. The problem is, I hate rich text.
The novel that I actually finished was written in Markdown (which is somewhat half true since I wrote a whole big bunch of it by hand).
I haven’t owned a current copy of Word or anything of the sorts for years. The closest I get to writing rich text is the no-no of embedding CSS styles inline in an HTML document (as opposed to the nicer method of using classes or IDs and then styling those).
I know that Scrivener is supposed to support markdown on some level, but as I understand it at the moment, it’s just at compilation time - you’re still stuck with the rich text editor and there’s no built-in preview.
Since I just started looking today, I don’t know if there’s a good compromise on this Scrivener thing. Maybe I can disable the rich text editor. Or disable the automatic paragraph indenting (given that I seldom ever look at something like Word anymore, the autoindenting just feels wrong to me now).
All I know is this feels an awful like the loop I go through:
- decide I need to do X
- but wait, I need to find the perfect software before I can do X
- conclusion: never actually do X
I did break out of this pattern fairly recently when I actually made a decision about what website building toolkit to use. I’m now using Middleman for all of the new sites that I’ve built and it’s worked out great so far (which of course is part of the anxiety - to find the right solution the first time).
See, so I am capable of making decisions.
Sometimes though, it’s just more fun to daydream about how software/hardware/equipment X is going to change your life once you have it.
Ya know, rather than actually getting it and using it.
