George R. R. Martin Still Uses A DOS Word Processor | CONAN on TBS

Do you really thing you would put aside your regular laptop to use an old terminal for writing? Yes. I already do. It provides focus and a chance for me to concentrate on my writing, rather than be distracted not only by a thousand notifications and temptations (Oh, let me just switch over and see if there's anything new on HN...), but also the mild background anxiety that comes from knowing interruption is just a push notification, or a Command-Tab away. I have very little faith that anyone would regularly fire up an old power hungry machine to do one single task Then you have very little faith in George R.R. Martin, who isn't shy about writing on a Kaypro II. ▶ this video

Software needs to be maintained to be useful Maybe that’s the problem we need to be addressing. More and more these days I find myself frustrated using modern software when old unmaintained software had already solved the problem. We consider it a novelty when a writer like George RR Martin still uses WordStar on an old DOS machine [1]. Maybe it shouldn’t be a novelty. Maybe it should be the normal thing to do. It’s utterly at odds with a consumer culture though. People don’t seem to want well-made things that last a lifetime. They want shiny disposable crap. [1] ▶ this video

Many authors use WordStar. Here is George R. R. Martin taking about WordStar ▶ this video I think, and I believe it has been suggested to Robert J. Sawyer, that Emacs keys are very similar to WordStar in the use of cords (or prefixed keystrokes). WordStar has ^Q as a prefix whereas Emacs has ^x, ^c, and ^h, etc. [edit] Add bit about Emacs

Necessary pointer: George R R Martin still writes on WordStar 4.0 on DOS. link Conan clip this refers to: ▶ this video As I need to write for work I recently got into this topic - this blog post makes some interesting points about how distraction free writing used to be the norm: link The AlphaSmart Neo devices became tremendously popular among writers recently, apparently many of them can’t stand modern software anymore because it has become too visually distracting for them: link Distractions certainly are too blame here, but my pet theory is that the added visual input blocks top down imagery in the visual system.

Why bring the whole Devorak part into the article? Also, I'm surprised the author didn't go pure stenograph then because that's way faster. WPM is only a good measure of WPM. The best coders don't need to type faster. The best writers still hand write things or type on DOS[0]. Once you hit a baseline competency, other areas of improvement/reward far outweigh the time devoted than to a better WPM. Wanting to type faster is fine, but do not mix it with being more effective aside from being a great typist. [0] ▶ this video

It feels like that dev time cost is instead being crowdfunded by energy, disk, CPU and RAM that every user has to pay with and eventually that cost is paid by Earth itself. An app might be cheap or free but in the long time cheaper for the planet and each user would be an app costing a dollar or two more per install. I was using a 2011 laptop with only an HDD, 2 gigs of RAM and no discrete GPU until it actually went and finally broke last year so it irks me especially when I see this handwaving of "computers are cheap", especially from Westerner millenials or developers from SF. The fact that well off people who change machines every few years can even dare to call less well off people with older and shittier hardware "entitled" for wanting performant snappy software just like they got 5-10 years ago when they bought their machine is baffling. Not everyone needs a crazy and new machine, writers, reviewers, sales people, admins, etc. Case in point - G.R.R. Martin uses a DOS machine to write - ▶ this video . I.e. Slack and Atom got absolutely lambasted for performance, sluggishness and resource use (while VS Code was applauded, so it's clearly not an Electron specific thing) despite being made by companies valued in billions and based in the most expensive region of the world, one of them even being a paid product. Or a game with pixel art (I do like it and I understand that particular indie dev optimizing for time with such a niche product so I don't want to name names here) graphi

I imagine there are a number of authors who don't want to be bothered by the extraneous bells and whistles on a new system. It reminds me of this clip of George R.R. Martin. ▶ this video