Dipping into the past

1. Progress is a strange thing. I am quite fond of progress, believing that there are very few things that were truly better in the past than it is now. So I find it strange that I am currently typing this in the DOS version of Microsoft Word 5.5, running in a full screen DOS window, which I’ve adopted as my primary writing program on my PC laptop.

2. On my Mac I have WriteRoom, which is a great full screen text editor. On the PC I was using DarkRoom, a program offing almost the same functionality of WriteRoom. But it was not a perfect match of WriteRoom, and the few differences were jarring.

3. My first complaint with DarkRoom was how long it took to load. It almost as long as a full fledged word processor, yet it offered the functionality of Notepad. It’s nothing more than a text window, yet it required a mammoth .Net Framework download. It’s supposed to be a modern text editor, yet it had that nagging feeling of yesteryear; pressing backspace did not delete a whole block of selected text, you need to press delete.

4. Enter the DOS alternative.

5. DOS offered the sort of isolation and sparseness I was looking for when writing. All I needed was a readable font and zero distractions, and this version of Word delivers in spades — I reckon this is the best version of Word I have ever used. It’s just blue background and white text for me, having hidden everything from scroll bars to menus. I daresay I prefer this even to the Mac — the default DOS font is actually quite a pleasant thing to stare at for a while.

6. It’s not the perfect solution though. For one thing the now stock standard ctrl+c and ctrl+v keys for copying and pasting were not standard back when this version of Word came out, which takes some getting used to. And obviously Word for DOS and WinXP do not share the same clipboard, so you can’t copy and paste a link or a quote from a website, you have to edit the text in another editor. But for me the lack of visual clutter is such a boon that I am more than happy to use another editor in Windows to format and add links to my text. This is a case where it’s what you don’t get that counts — the clutter, the distractions, and the stress.

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