Would you believe I use my email program rather than WordPerfect or Word, to draft my articles and blog posts?
Why? Not only does Thunderbird spell check my work, it is simply far easier to use. Latter day WP programs are so overladen with features I’ll never use in a million years, not to mention hog so much disk space, that they have become worse than useless.
Plain text appeals to geeky types partly because it is a lowest common denominator. It travels smoothly between applications, operating systems and devices. For example, sending a Word document to a mobile phone is difficult, sending text is trivial. Text is compact, efficient, quicker to search and easier to manage than word processor documents. Text editing programs are far simpler than word processors. Many have been around for 30 years or more with roots in the pre-graphical-user-interface computing world. They use esoteric keyboard commands.
Before “switching” to WordPress last June, I also for many years used NotePad to code my XHTML and CSS. Actually I still do, but that’s another story.
