Do we really need another text editor?

To make the long story short: Of course we do – there are never enough text editors!

When I was younger, I was writing a bit (don’t panic – all that happened in my mother language, which is kind of a Klingon dialect). I was writing essays here and there, I’ve written several short stories, and I also managed to write something what could be called a “novel”. At some point, I refrained from the narrative writing, but I was still doing some blogging (which I’m not very good at lately, but hopefully I will be able to fix that).

I was writing on different computers, in various editors. I’ve used my good old Amiga 1200 for most of the fiction, later I had several different PCs with different text editors. I’ve understood quite early, that for writing, I need a text editor — I’m not able to use things like Word for writing. Problem with most text editors is that they are not really text editors. They are editors of the text files. And there is difference between editing the text, and editing the dumb text file.

When you write with your pen, you never really lose anything you write on the paper. Sure, you can strike sentences, paragraphs or even whole pages. You can take pages away and stuff them into the folder for later use. But the only way to get really rid of written text is to burn it in the thrash can in the cheap and dirty hotel room. Or something like that. On the other hand, on computer, you just hit delete, save, and after you close the editor, it is gone. There is no evidence of what you have written in the whole universe (well, that’s not exactly true, but I guess we can live with the approximation for the time being).

And the fact, that text editors are editors of the text files, was always kind of ruining my writing experience. Usually, when working on longer text, I end up writing pieces of the text out of order, or I decide that I don’t like something and delete it, only to find couple of hours later, that that pretty stupid, and that I want it back. And honestly – as far as I know, there still isn’t editor which would do what I need on the level I’d like it.

Sure, there is couple of editors integrating a version control pretty closely to writing process, but the problem is, that you can get only so far with history granularity when using tools like Subversion.

Then, around 2006 or 2004 I decided I want to write one more novel. (Honestly, after first two years when I had only first chapter and couple of research documents, I was joking, that it will take me longer to write it than it took Tolstoy to write War and Peace. And I’ll tell you: around the fourth year the joke stopped being funny.) And because I’ve learnt a thing or two about programming, I decided, that it is time to develop the text editor which will be worth to be used for story this epic.

And that’s what naracea is going to be. The text editor which remembers everything you write. No changes to the text will be ever lost. You will be able to move back and forth through the history of the document, deleting paragraphs at your will, because you will know that you can always get back to them.

And of course: it will be the text editor. Not programmer’s editor bended to text writing by adding “wrap lines” check box.

This blog will track course of development of the naracea (well, not exactly, because I’m actually working on it couple of – uhm – years now), and hopefully I will be able to bring the 1.0 version live in following 6 months.

At least for the sake of my novel, because, I must admit, I’m not Tolstoy.