My Ideal Writing Tool

I am often unduly tool obsessed when it comes to tasks, and am hesitant to change my tools once I have found one that I can manage.

I love photography, yet use a years old camera (partially because quality has not improved that much) in part because I enjoy knowing exactly how the thing will react to my input.

I have never found a writing tool that worked exactly how I wanted it to though. I find Google Docs occasional slowness exasperating, and Word’s ability to mess up references and footnotes frustrating. I love Scrivener most of the time, except that I find I struggle to keep all my research labeled appropriately and sorted intelligently.

Perhaps, I think as I write this that the problem lies not with the tools, but with the poor carpenter. Yet still since I love writing I will still describe my ideal tool in the vague hope that someone can point me towards it, or it will motivate me enough to build it myself.

Each project is structured in a directory. The application can display a variety of content, allowing it to be used as the basis for much of the research gathering process as well. Each file has the ability for a significant amount of metadata to be added, this will include the information necessary to automatically generate citations, but also can include links to other files, addresses, etc…. References inside the text will appear while editing as a hyperlink to the specified content, and when you go to ‘render’ the final document it will use the metadata to generate the citation in the form you request. If needed metadata is missing it will prompt you.

Reading what I just wrote it makes me think that this is something I could conceivably develop and maybe I will. Or perhaps I just need to re-do the Scrivener tutorials. Who knows. Maybe what I am describing is a Jupyter notebook writing mostly in Markdown with some conversion coolness at the very end. Either way I find the disconnect between research and writing difficult currently. I get excited for the research, but end up with chaotic half-references and memories. I get excited to write and cannot find the references I need.

Yes, I know LaTEX is a thing, and maybe I should just learn how to use it. Honestly, this will never be solved by a tool and eventually I will just need to accept that my habits are what need to change.

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