

The story of "Bean," a free word processor for Mac OS X - jasongullickson
http://www.bean-osx.com/Essay.html

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grinich
_I suppose this is why painters sometimes resort to mixing their own pigments,
why fiddle players resort to making their own fiddles. It's not necessary for
what they do; yet, the process of creating the tools needed for a medium
serves to deepen one's understanding of that medium. In fact, this pattern has
emerged in my life: I create in order to understand._

That definitely resonates with me.

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bugs
The painter part really isn't true though if you are a painter you mix your
own pigments because you can achieve a better color, effect, and blend with
like 6-8 tubes of colors versus buying all 100 tubes of colors you need to use
in a painting that likely will look splotchy and as if someone colored in
lines with crayons.

Unless of course the author is talking about mixing pigments from flowers and
such with a binder then painters really don't need to mix their own pigments
for any understanding.

~~~
danielzarick
But you start to mix your own pigments to dig into and understand how colors
work and how paint works. You become a better painter by understanding the
tools you use and how they function.

~~~
hrabago
I imagine a word processor's equivalent for a painter would be the easel, or
maybe the brush handle, not necessarily the paint, the brush bristles, or the
canvas.

It affects how the creator works, which indirectly affects the resulting work.
However, it doesn't directly affect the actual output.

The novel, when printed, could be laid out and paginated differently, printed
using different fonts, with no trace of the word processor used to create it.

A painter mixing paints could be to achieve a specific color or texture. The
equivalent of that for a novelist could be studying word origins or creating a
new language or new words (Tolkien?).

~~~
danielzarick
While all of that may be true, I just think you and bugs are looking far too
into the details of paint:painter::word processor:writer. I was basically just
trying to simplify what I thought the author of the piece was trying to say.

It never hurts to understand how your tools are made and how they function. In
fact, it most likely helps you create better work in the long run. At least,
that is my interpretation.

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cduan
Not to be too nitpicky, but TeX is not really an exemplar of any hierarchical
document format. I think the author is thinking of LaTeX, which has the
\section, \subsection, and similar headings. LaTeX is just a macro package
built on top of the TeX language (similar to how Ruby on Rails is a library
built on top of the Ruby language).

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Luyt
I just downloaded Bean and it looks good. It fills a gap between TextEdit and
heavyweight word processors like Word. Also, it comes with the source, so it
makes good study material, since I’m learning to write cocoa apps.

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sketerpot
I did something similar when I needed to write a lot of fiction, except that
my solution was a monstrosity hacked together from emacs, LaTeX's memoir
package, org-mode, and a couple of Python scripts to convert from my own text-
based format to TeX, and handle daily word count goals. It works great,
despite being hideously ugly. And it was _fun._

The Bean guy is right that it can be rewarding to make a word processor that
works exactly the way you think. Even if it's not strictly necessary.

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NathanKP
One part of the article through me off: "There are many people who use Text
Edit". I have to say that I rarely if ever see someone use Text Edit. Most
people that I know use Pages, from the iWork package.

~~~
ilovecomputers
Well, you can count me as one. When I ask myself, is this document going to
end up as a PDF or am I quickly editing a piece of text for a short writing
assignment, I choose the Pages for the first situation and TextEdit for the
latter.

~~~
kentosi
As for me, I ALWAYS start with TextEdit when I want to type something out -
only because it loads up very quickly (and without a big flast-screen).

Word gets opened up afterwards when I know that the doc is going to get much
larger and complex.

