Writing with WordGrinder

For the longest time, I've been typing my prose into plain text files. That has a lot of advantages: they can be opened with pretty much anything, they're as compact as files get without compression, and can easily be turned into web pages or e-books through Markdown. Next time however I might just try to use WordGrinder instead.

Wait, what? WordGrinder (available from cowlark.com and various Linux distributions) is a word processor in the old sense of the term, from before humongous office suites became the norm: a program designed to let writers write, with as little fuss as possible. You get a word count (and paragraph count), formatting roughly on par with the aforementioned Markdown, a decent range of import and export options, and a spellchecker. That's it!

More importantly, you get all that from a program not one megabyte in size with all dependencies, that can run in terminal emulators (and X11). Talk about software you can install on toasters! For someone like me, who uses computers so ancient that even AbiWord has noticeable overhead, it's amazing.

Even better, WordGrinder has some unique and valuable traits. Also some quirks, but for once they're part of the charm here.

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