While writing, I like to keep things simple. While I don’t go to the extremes of Khoi Vinh’s punishing Blockwriter, I generally use an editor that can’t even make text bold. When I write, it’s just the raw text and me, mano a mano. By using a bare-bones editor, the text can’t fight dirty by throwing frivolous fonts and formats in my eyes. At most, I use Markdown to add style to my text.
Must of my collaborators are the same way. We are often editing each-others’ work, but many hands in the copy-editing cookie jar means edits fly like popcorn kernels on the griddle. How do we keep collaboration simple, especially now that Etherpad is about to reach the end of its life? We need a robust method of keeping track of comments and edits. Standard revision control is too heavy weight, and most diff programs operate on a too-course line-level granularity. We needed another solution. Text interface design to the rescue!
