Authors can learn a lot about writing from computer programmers.

Substack and Medium overflow with articles praising alternatives to Microsoft Word: Ulysses, Scrivener, whatever’s hot this week. Everyone craves a “distraction-free” writing environment, but I submit that “distraction-free” has less to do with the interface than with the benefits of using a text editor instead of a word processor. Writers would do well to get comfortable with what programmers call “the terminal,” which leads directly to an appreciation for plain text—simple, durable, efficient.

The Unix programmers who built the foundations of modern computing made plain text central to their philosophy:

1. Write programs that do one thing and do it well
2. Write programs that work together
3. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a
   universal interface

Other writers discover text editors by chance—dabbling in HTML, managing gigantic book-length files without the clunky overhead of Microsoft Word. Unlike word processors, text editors are fast and can handle files that would cause Word to choke.

True geeks prefer plain text because it never changes. I can open plain text files I wrote in 1983 on my first Kaypro computer with thousands of programs today. Try that with a Wang word processor file from the 1980s.

In the Beginning Were the Words

Plain text is unformatted characters that are program independent. It doesn’t light up, blink, or spontaneously create hyperlinks if you fat-finger a typo. You can’t insert YouTube videos, but you can copy in hyperlinks.

Plain text means words separated by spaces, sentences by periods, paragraphs by blank lines. If you’re in the writing business, it’s often all you need.

Open a Microsoft Word file in a simple text editor like Notepad or Sublime, and you’ll see gobbledygook. Open a plain text file with almost any program—Word, WordPerfect, any of hundreds of editors—and you can view and edit it, just as you could twenty years ago, just as you probably will twenty years from now, whether Microsoft still exists or not.

The Unix programmers who worked forty years ago believed in economy, simplicity, and reliability. Instead of making bloated programs that tried to do everything (“It looks like you are writing a suicide note! Enter your zipcode so we can show you local laws!”), they made small, well-designed tools that each did one job well. One program found files, another opened them, another counted words, another searched for text. These programs accepted plain text as input and produced plain text as output, by piping text to the next simple program.

Only an idiot would propose creating programs that couldn’t talk to other programs. Why create files editable only by the program that created them—say, Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Word?

Novelist Neal Stephenson put it this way in his manifesto In The Beginning Was The Command Line:

Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic…. What made old epics like Gilgamesh so powerful was that they were living bodies of narrative that many people knew by heart, and told over and over again—making their own embellishments. The bad embellishments were shouted down, the good ones picked up, polished, improved, and incorporated into the story.

If Unix is the geek Gilgamesh epic, it’s a tale told in plain text.

Tales of Woe from the Elder Geeks

It takes geek writers of a certain age to bring home the hazards of proprietary file formats. Consider Ray Kurzweil, Seer of the Singularity, looking back over forty years of accumulated data formats.

In a sad section of his otherwise upbeat book on the future of technology, Kurzweil asks: How do you access data on a circa 1960 IBM tape drive or a 1973 Data General Nova?

First, you need the old equipment and hope it still works. Then you need the software and operating system. Tech support? You can’t get a help desk worker to call you back about the latest Microsoft Office glitch, much less a program from forty years ago. Even at the Computer History Museum, most devices stopped functioning years ago.

Kurzweil’s conclusion: “Information lasts only so long as someone cares about it.”

Do you care about your writings? The first order of business is to back up. But as Kurzweil sees it, data remains accessible only “if it is continually upgraded and ported to the latest hardware and software standards.”

Or you could use formats that don’t go out of style. I have a 1983 Kaypro in the basement that still works. All the plain text files I created are still legible and formatted as I left them. The files I created using WordStar, a proprietary word processor, are lost.

Consider another elegy to a lost file, from Neal Stephenson himself:

I began using Microsoft Word around 1985. I wrote a lot of stuff in early versions, storing it on floppies. Sometime in the mid-1990s I attempted to open one of my old, circa-1985 Word documents using Word 6.0. It didn’t work. Word 6.0 did not recognize a document created by an earlier version of itself. My words were still there, but the formatting had been run through a log chipper—interrupted by empty rectangular boxes and gibberish.

In business this is only an annoyance. But if you are a writer whose professional identity is a corpus of written documents, this is extremely disquieting. There are very few fixed assumptions in my line of work, but one is that once you have written a word, it is written, and cannot be unwritten. The ink stains the paper, the chisel cuts the stone. But word-processing software has the eldritch power to unwrite things. A small change in file formats, a few twiddled bits, and months or years of literary output can cease to exist.

But technology is relentless. It moved on and prettified new documents, which made plain old documents unreadable.

The Universal Interface

The Unix founders glorified plain text not just for permanency but because it’s easy to read, scan, search, access, pipe back and forth, share. Now. Forty years ago. Forty years from now.

In true Unix fashion, the best tools for creating text (editors and file utilities) are often not the same as the best tools for presenting text (Word, LaTeX, Final Draft). Programs like Highland, pandoc, Markdown, and Fountain let writers type text once, then convert it for the Internet, print, e-book, screenplay, or manuscript format.

Plain text is the universal interface. Your words, unadorned and permanent, and yes, “distraction-free.”

Adapted from Rapture For The Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ, by Richard Dooling.

I Would Prefer Not To

Richard Dooling publishes I Would Prefer Not To, a quarterly miscellany with links to his recent essays and news about his upcoming books.

Sign up HERE.