Text processor

[Robin Miller <roblimo home com>]

Okay, I got Gnome running. Now I need to be able to *work*
with it. I write, like words, for a living, mostly online,
and so far I haven't found a single Linux text processor
that has the features I need, which are:

1) Mousable Win/Mac-type interface

2) Ability to strip SGML and HTML tags from imported text (a
la quotes from e-mail and Web sites)

3) Ability to strip in basic HTML tags; links, <P>, <I>,
etc.

4) Character Conversion; UC to lc, lc or UC to Capitalized,
etc.

5) Able to write and save in ASCII, Word, and RTF.

6) A WORD COUNT FEATURE! NO PROFESSIONAL WRITER CAN LIVE
WITHOUT ONE!!!

GXedit comes fairly close, but it crashes more than Win98
running three copies of Netscape on a 486, and the word
count feature doesn't count words accurately. It is a toy,
not a professional tool.

Pico and Vi are no better than DOSEDIT -- and harder to use.
If I wanted to use DOSEDIT I could have stuck with an 8086
that took about 0.5 seconds to boot. :)  

I haven't tried TED yet, but plan to shortly. WordPerfect
and StarOffice are too locked-in on paper-oriented formats
and eat a whole screen. Reporters and others who do online
research need to work around open browser windows. We're not
secretaries or novelists. We research and write at the same
time, usually at high speed, because we have DEADLINES!!!

The world's best text editor for modern writers whose work
either appears online or is submitted to dead-tree
publications by modem is NoteTab. Its home page is
http://www.notetab.com.

I think one reason so many reporters write negative articles
about Linux is that there is no way they can actually use
Linux in their work. I'm sitting here running Linux,
downloading information about Linux, and writing about Linux
-- mostly in Windows, using NoteTab. (Through VMware)

There are dozens of usable Windows text editors for writers.
It would be nice to have one for Linux. (Nedit is the
closest I've found so far...)

I can promise any developer who comes up with a usable,
non-crashing text/HTML editor for Linux at least a little
bit of fame and fortune. My sites aren't as popular as
slasdot, but a good word from me can overload most ftp
servers.:)

-- Robin Miller
Editor and Columnist
Andover News Network
http://www.andovernews.com
http://www.techsightings.com
http://www.davecentral.com

-- plus freelancing for all kinds of magazines and
newspapers.
(You have probably read things I wrote and didn't know it.)