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.
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.
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.
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?).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
That definitely resonates with me.