A Little Random
On The Road - original manuscript (Story)
When I was in college, I worked as an software testing intern at Tandy Corp. in Fort Worth, TX, shortly before Tandy sold its computer manufacturing operations to AST. At the time, Tandy was bundling a highly modified version of Windows 3.1 on their Sensation systems, which was notable because it replaced Program Manager with a custom shell, along with a host of utility programs. My personal favorite was a diary program, which simply recorded entries for the day you typed them in. It was a bit like a weblog, without the web part, and without the concept of "posts" - just whatever you wrote that day was recorded for that day. If you closed the application and opened it again, it would just append to that day. I don't remember what happened if you were writing something at midnight... seems like I may have missed a test case.
This month, the Denver Public Library has the original manuscript for Jack Kerouac's On the Road on display (on the 5th floor, if you care to go look). That's a pretty fascinating display, at least if you enjoyed the book. The short version of the story is that Kerouac was a 100 wpm typist, which made changing sheets of paper in the typewriter quite distracting. So he taped together sheets of paper into a long scroll. That problem solved, he sat down and banged out a draft over the course of about 3 weeks - no paragraph breaks, no assumed names, just spilling out his memories of traveling America in the late 1940s. It's amazing that he committed himself to creating a manuscript this way, and amazing that he found an editor willing to put in the work necessary to turn it into a published book. I've heard this story for years and I've always wondered what Kerouac would think of computers as a creative medium. I had a friend back when I was about 19 who was an aspiring writer. His criticism of the computer was that it was too easy, that expending the effort necessary to work a typewriter encouraged him to write quality, and not crap. I wonder what he thinks about that these days.
WriteRoom/DarkRoom/JDarkRoom are attempts at stripping down a computer to that kind of editing. I didn't like that DarkRoom prompted me to save my file when I closed the application, but I was pleased that it had saved the file and silently reopened it when I opened the app again - no asking whether I wanted to recover the file, it just did it.
I use emacs for notetaking. Emacs is surprising in different ways. When you open a python file, or a lisp file, or an xml file, it just switches into the right editing mode. Suddenly, when parentheses and braces matter, they matter to my text editor as well. My universe of file types is pretty limited, so once I have the right modes installed, it just works. I don't use emacs for everything. Visual Studio is just more convenient for C# (especially since all my co-workers use it), and I post to the weblog using Windows Live Writer. There are weblog posting packages for emacs, but I haven't had the commitment to track down all the dependencies.
Is there a place for DarkRoom in my life? I doubt it. It's an interesting idea, it reminds me a bit of the Sensation diary program and a bit of the On the Road display at the DPL. But emacs, for all its complexity, turns out to be pretty simple in a lot of ways.