I liked Scrivener back when I used a Mac, but I stopped using Mac after Steve Jobs died and found that Scrivener didn't do much that I couldn't do myself using Unix shell commands, a reasonable directory layout, and a text editor.
I like your thinking, but I also like my Apple devices. I don't think of them as computers as much as appliances that serve well. On the other hand, emacs, vi/vim, grep, sed, awk, cut and paste (the text utilities), and simple things like cat are all included with MacOS. There's even lex, bison, and yacc, if you want to explore grammar beyond prose, and pandoc runs fine. At work, I live in emacs and vi. Vi, of course, only where emacs is not installed. When I want to write for art's sake, though, I like a little valet parking. Pretty tools, even if they aren't heavy artillery, are nice.
They're good machines, but I keep wearing out the keyboards. I probably use too much force when typing. Used T-series ThinkPads work better for me.
whereas I write on a iMac but hate the apple keyboard , so I use a generic keyboard from staples - when it dies I just chuck it and get another one
Hello Sean, I am the Deputy Sultan of Brunei, with unlimited funds at the service of my quirky editing needs. My Deputy Majesty gets antsy sitting at computers and prefers to work on handheld flatscreens. Now Sean, kindly forgive my technical ignorance. But I beseech thee to follow my reasoning. Let us examine a lovely brand new Android 8" flat screen... amazing resolution, processor speed like my Koennegsegg racer, cameras that can see through the dark... truly magnificent... Then load up any whatsoever text editing app... Jota +, Textkraft, Jotterpad... for writing they're all good enough... a very comfortable virtual keyboard pops up and thumbing can be quite fast... but for editing... HOLY COW... it's worse than 1978! Mini-handles! One must reach up to the screen... tap-tap to highlight the first word, snag a mini-handle, and then with keen eye commanding pudgy finger guide the highlighting of DOOM all the way up to and EXCLUDING the desired value (word, punctuation mark, symbol, number, etc.) before finally hitting BACKSPACE to effect a forward deletion. We all take this procedure for granted... but surely it's a bad joke. It's so clunky, awful, embarrassing... that my Deputy Majesty himself has applied his frail wits to the only programming language he has been able to master... the 1987 Macro Language of Microsoft Word 5 for Dos... to seek a viable solution. I believe I have found the key to VASTLY improving text editing on handhelds. May I share it with you?
I'm a proficient user of Scrivener. Basically any writing app has to beat Scrivener for me, and so far no one has.
The features I would need: * Custom word lists and grammar checking. * Word use counts. * Multi document tabs. * Rule-based checklist of my own common style mistakes. (share with others to build a knowledge base) * Automatic generation of alternative formulations. * Support for Ubuntu and Raspbian (easy with Java).
