 Word processors are pointless programs. They're just horrible programs. They are really almost evil Programs and I'm not even kidding word processors should not exist and no one should use them And it's a topic. I want to discuss with you guys today And this is not some kind of click baity kind of topic I'm being dead serious is that word processors serve no real purpose and you know, they're these You can start composing a document you do creative writing or technical writing scientific writing whatever it is you do and you fire up You know Microsoft Word and you start typing and you're worried about all of this formatting stuff this wissy wig stuff Instead of composing the text, you know worrying about the actual text of the document Which is the most important thing when you're writing you're worried about what font size should the heading be what kind of margins? Should I say should I go ahead and add some images here? Maybe a table here and this and that and all this formatting stuff that you know You really can't do with plain text, but you should be writing in plain text. That is the point You know writing in a plain text editor, you know really saves you from getting distracted If you're writing in a word processor, you're focused on things that are completely and totally pointless And it's a very inefficient way to do any kind of writing You know you you fire up your word processor and you're gonna write a novel and then you start worrying about the cover page the title Yes, as far as the the font size what the font type is should it be at the top of the page centered in the page? Where should you put the the author name? You know should I go ahead and start adding a blurb now and this and that you know And then you get to chapter one. Well, how big should I make the chapter one heading? Well, you know what font should I use for that and this and that? You know if you did this in a plain text editor, you wouldn't worry about any of that stuff, right? You would have already been writing you'd already written chapter one, you know Instead of worrying about all of this pointless stuff and that's the thing Write everything in a plain text editor. The only time a word processor Could possibly be useful is in typesetting But even that you don't need a word processor for what you need to do Write everything in plain text and then typeset it using free tools things like LaTeX or in my case I love using org mode those of you that write in markdown markdown would be a great way to write to and you know And this is a great thing, you know when you do these kinds of formats, you know Say you're writing something in markdown You know what a top-level heading like a chapter heading is because it's a single Hash symbol a pound sign right and in a wissy wig editor like Microsoft Word. You don't have those kinds of Markers, right? You don't because you didn't have to add a asterisk or a pound sign or you know like you would in markdown or org mode Or you know in some of the formatting with things like LaTeX or gruff if you were writing in those formats You could always write the entire document in that format and then hey What style do I want all the chapter headings? Well, you can go find the chapter headings very quickly because if they all have a single pound sign or a single asterisk You can go quickly find those in the document in a wissy wig Word processor, there's no way you could do that because you didn't add any kind of markers like that, right? You would have to go back and Actually read the document. You're probably gonna miss some of the chapter headings. It's just it's just horribly inefficient word processors Serve no purpose. The only reason They are found on every computer these days is because 30 or 40 years ago, you know Word processors really became popular with Microsoft Word and really a word perfect before that and No, people were kind of enamored by these things because it allowed you to do fancy type setting and you know People back then used mechanical typewriters to write things and now these word processing programs were really powerful And allowed people to just use a computer to do this kind of stuff But really, you know, it breaks the Unix philosophy and I know not everybody cares about that I know a lot of people watching this video. We're gonna be a Windows users and Mac OS users rather than Linux users But really the Unix philosophy do one thing do one thing Well, you should write your text in a text editor You should actually write anything using plain text ASCII text in a plain text editor And after you write it then you should use a proper program to actually type set the program You know export it to whatever kind of format you want a PDF or whatever it is You're trying to do that is the way that you should be doing it. And this is the way I Think everybody knows that kind of makes sense But everybody has now been sold this bag of goods mainly by Microsoft because Microsoft You know has a lot invested in pushing Microsoft Office and Microsoft Word word processing format They've got everybody tied into this dock ex proprietary format of theirs And because we're all we have to interact with so many people that use that format even on Linux You know, I've got to deal with people that are sending me Word documents And I'm trying to open them in Libre Office or some other free and open source office suite And sometimes those Word documents they get converted just fine Sometimes it breaks things and even between different versions of Microsoft Word From one version of Word to the next sometimes they're not compatible They break backwards compatibility and it's just a mess You don't have to worry about backwards compatibility with plain text You know ASCII text is always going to be the same no matter what Going forward five ten a hundred years from now plain text will still be plain text So earlier in this video when I said that word processors are really evil I was being dead serious because you know obviously These word processors were created in a time before free and open source software was a thing You know Word perfect and then Microsoft Word These were created before open source was even thought about And they were really created before the free software movement really got going So they were proprietary companies making these proprietary pieces of software That outputs their documents in a proprietary format And they got you guys hooked on it You know it's like a drug dealer you know they're selling you this And they're hoping you got hooked on it and you guys did You got hooked on this proprietary format you bought into it right And now you're forced to suck the Microsoft tit When you need to wean yourself off of that right because you guys Especially you guys that know about free and open source software Know that there are better more efficient ways of doing things And if you don't know about Markdown or LaTeX or Graph Or org mode or any of this stuff look into it because it will make you so much more efficient It'll make you a better writer you'll get more done And in the end you'll be happier too because you won't have to deal with all the headaches That you have to deal with when you're dealing with proprietary software And proprietary formats like the DocX format So the next time that you need to do some writing Whether it be an essay or a research paper A dissertation, updating your resume or writing a novel Guys just don't blindly open up that word processor to do that kind of thing Guys open a plain text editor and do your writing in that