Episode: 3764
Title: HPR3764: My text-focused journey into tech
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3764/hpr3764.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 05:08:22

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3764 for Thursday the 5th of January 2023.
Today's show is entitled, My Text Focused Journey Into Tech.
It is the first show by Newhost Ennis Tello and is about 19 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
This summary is, My Journey Into Technology Covering Some of the Pro's Raking Technology
I've used along the way.
Hi, this is Ennis Tello, you're listening to Hacker Public Radio.
We're very short of episodes at the moment, so if you've ever wanted to record a podcast,
grab a microphone, go and record something that you think people might be interested
in and get yourself out there and become a broadcasting star, my son.
It's traditional on HPR to have your first episode or your first recording to describe
your journey into technology, at least.
That's what I've heard a few times over the last year or three that I've been listening
to HPR.
So I thought I'd do the same by trade on a writer as in text or prose.
And what became apparent while I was scribbling some notes for this episode was that my journey
arc, if you like, through technology was pretty much step by step in with my use of technology
as a writer.
So I thought I'd discuss the two together and maybe share some of the writing tools and
tips that I've picked along the way might be useful and interesting for anyone who writes
any type of prose, might be documentation, might be blog posts, there are a few things
I've picked along the way and there's a few techniques as well which hopefully you guys
might find interesting.
So to start at the beginning, I've first got into computing back in 1981, I won't say
how old I was, there was a computer kicking around our house at home called ZX81 made
by a company called Sinclair coming out of Cambridge here in the UK.
So I learnt programming basic on that and also Z80 assembly.
I guess the ZX81 came with one K of RAM which obviously is very limiting.
So we bought the 49 pounds worth of 16 K RAM pack which sort of plugged into a proprietary
port in the back of the ZX81 and you had to type on a membrane keyboard which there
was a particular technique to it and it involved wiping your fingers across each key.
All very physical and of course that had the effect as well of wobbling the computer slightly
which meant that the RAM pack wobbled slightly which meant it crashed all the time.
The RAM pack as well as providing 16 K also provided some seismic instrumentation in
that if someone dropped a pin in the next room from where you were trying to write your
code bite by bite and the whole computer would crash because the connection between the
RAM pack and the computer would break momentarily and then you get this kind of grey fuzzy
screen on your television in front of you which meant the computer had borked itself.
So after that having learnt to do a bit of programming we progressed in our household
anyway to the risk computers from ACON, another Cambridge based computer company, risk of
course now being really quite popular and you can track obviously arm computing right
back to Cambridge in the 80s. The computers we used were the BBC Micro A and B and the ACON
Electron, these are computers I think that never really got far from the UK so I guess
it was about the same kind of time as the TSR80 was big in the US and early Apple machines
as well we're coming out the Apple 2 I think was floating around that time so we're talking
about that sort of era of technology and they were running on, was it 6502 processes I think
they were cool so again our programed on those in basic and also some assembly as well and
then I guess when I went away to college I discovered very early 386s and 486s running
DOS, DOS 3.1 and the first word processor I ever used was WordPerfect which I think was version
6 and had this fantastic white on blue display of text which I still used to this day actually
at least that colour scheme and it was great because what it would do as a word processor it would
show you literally how it was putting together your page so rather like HTML tags or XML tags
if you wanted to select italics you could see if you turned on this mode you could see
the computer insert the italics tag and then your type whatever text it was you wanted in a
and then when you turned off italics mode it would insert another tag so you could see literally
exactly what the computer was going to do to your text and it would show you spaces it would show
you new lines it would show you underlines and so on and so forth using these tags so you could
predict incredibly accurately what your page was going to look like and this I found to be absolutely
fantastic when I eventually got my first computer which was a Macintosh LC 475 I think there
was also a performer version and a quadraversion of the 475 depending on which market you're in
I used WordPerfect on that Mac until it was eventually stopped and it stopped being developed
and I was unfortunately pushed onto having to use Word by Microsoft for Mac and it was there really
that I discovered or using Word for Mac it was there that I discovered this distraction thing and
what I mean by that was that I would try and write something and if my line of thought wandered off
course or I got distracted I call it writer's block it's probably blowing it up a bit really I
don't think it was ever that grandiose but let's say you know I lost my way a bit well then I
found that I could adjust the margins or change font or find a setting that would indent the first
line of every paragraph and do things like remove orphans and all these things that a graphical
user interface in a word processor will do for you anyway after a while of you know
using comic sands and then switching back to times or aerial or gill sands or whatever font
I found most attractive that day I realized actually I was spending a lot more time playing with
the layout than I was actually writing and obviously this is something that a word processor offers
you all the time and it's a real distraction and so it was from there really that I started to get
into distraction free word processing or distraction free text environments and these are fantastic the
one I used on the Mac which is still going to this day it's called write room which you can
customize to a massive degree so you can have kind of funky luminous green text on a black background
with a block cursor that blinks to kind of make you you know like something out of 80s or 90s
hacker movie it offers you this thing called typewriter mode which only shows you three lines
three or four lines of what you're writing and blurs the rest out so there's no even glancing
back into your previous text it really does keep you focused when I switched to Linux in the
I would say the early naughties perhaps not full time perhaps not as a daily driver but I
certainly began to use Linux about that time I was using crunch bang Linux on a Samsung 10-inch
netbook I discovered various text editors in the Linux world some of which I use to this day the
one I'm using at the moment in Linux is called focus writer which is great through other like
write room and obviously there are dozens of these so I'm just mentioning a couple and again
you can configure it you can put a a black screen or any color you can put an image around your text
you can blur text you're not concentrating on out just show a few lines the blinking cursor white
on black black on white whatever you fancy really the idea being that you can if you want even
you know turn off things like spell correction as you go along normally as you're typing away
in most text editors or prose text editors you can see words you've misspelled with an underlining
or a red wobbly line under a word you've misspelled well with a distraction free text editor I would
say turn that off because if you're typing a long sentence it's really tempting to go back and
correct your spelling as you go along and that way you lose your thread and it slows you down it's
for me at least it's much so much better just to splurge the text out and then go back and do all
the fun stuff like formatting and spell correction and grammar correction and things like that
it is something that drives me crazy actually the whole system and the way that computers have now
centralized communication as well as work into one place into one desktop environment often
for instance the latest iterations of the Mac OS turning off notifications is really quite
difficult it's a bit like android you have to go through each application and turn off notifications
one by one or make sure that the do not disturb mode lasts all day and all night personally I don't
that doesn't work for me at all in fact if I've got a serious job of work on I'll turn off all
notifications on my phone on the computer I'll even go and put my phone or tablet in the room next
door so if it pings or burrs or words or rings I'll just ignore it while I'm concentrating
on what I'm doing and this works for me very well I suppose it's analogous to using distraction
text editors it just keeps me concentrated on exactly what I'm doing when I go into the office in
which I work a few days a week it always amazes me that the people younger than me in the office
are sometimes on their phones they're writing or surfing or doing their work and at the same time
they're switching application and just typing in a WhatsApp message into a web page or they're
picking up their phone and just sending off a you know quick text or posting on Instagram that kind
of thing and that really doesn't work for me I find that if my train of thought shifts for just a
few seconds it can take me 10 20 30 seconds to kind of get back on track and I'm not saying that
people who switch from communicating on various platforms to their work I'm not saying they do a
better or worse job than me particularly all I know is that it doesn't work for me and I wonder
how they can because I know that I can't work like that and this kind of brings me back now to
technology and the way that I use it I tried them or VI first and then moved onto them both in
graphic and keyboard shortcut modes and I didn't get on with them too well mostly because I'd be
typing and you know would miss out the first four or five letters of each word um well it's when
I first started typing because I wouldn't be in I wouldn't be in insert mode I'd be in some command
mode and I found that I never really got into the habit of being able to switch modes particularly in
them having said that what I do like about them is that it's all or it can all be keyboard controlled
and this is a big thing for me back in the early days of my career I was working as a help less
technician and obviously I was on a computer all day helping people out on the phone and going
around the college that I happened to work in helping people with their computers and I found that I
got really bad RSI repetitive strain injury in my right hand and this was actually in those days
from using the puck mouse that came with the iMacs that we used at that time and I used to get these
terrible shooting pains up my right wrist and right at my right arm and so to this day if I am
forced to use a mouse I have to keep changing the mouse that I use so I'll go from an upright
mouse to a standard two or three button mouse and then move to a track ball and then move to a
thumb ball track pad or a whack-on tablet and then back to a mouse and keep changing so that my hand
it isn't in the same position to control the computer the whole time and this has led to me
wanting to control the applications that I use almost entirely or at least as much as I can
using keyboard shortcuts and this is why I first got into using them obviously if you use
them a lot you hear about other similar packages and of course the elephant in the room there is
EMacs and it was from my use of EMacs really that I discovered that I had in fact come home or at
least regressed 40 years and I'm now using EMacs for as much as I possibly can and I'm finding it
a brilliant environment in which to work I'm experimenting at the moment with exwm which is using
EMacs as your windows manager it controls the ex window system and you can obviously send email
read your email browse the web in various forms to various varying degrees of complexity
all using the same keyboard shortcuts and key bindings right across every application
and this for me is absolutely fantastic I very rarely have to move my right hand over to the
emails if ever I find that if I am using a Linux machine which are now my daily drivers I always
have i3 windows manager on those and I find myself switching between maybe nano EMacs focus writer
and then if I do have to use a traditional word processor which I do in my line of work mostly
actually to track changes when the copy that I've written goes to clients and back I use WPS
office WPS office is closed source it's a proprietary package there is a community version
it's out of china from a company called kingsoft and the reason why I use it over for instance
Libre office or any of the alternatives abby word for instance caligra I've also used an
enjoyed but the reason why I use WPS office on Linux is because it can be skinned or given the user
interface of what looks like a 1990s version of word for Mac so even though it was word for Mac
back in the 90s that pushed me on to this road of distraction free text editing and if I'm
having to use a graphical user interface word processor it'll be WPS office that I use
tools as well that I use hunspell I find great that's shipped usually with focus writer and you can
switch between many many languages if English isn't your first language and then there are of
course variations on English so you can switch between us English UK English Australia and English
with their particular variations if I'm using emax I use icebell or a spell again switching between
dictionaries is quick and easy I haven't really got to grips with grammar checking in emax
I know there's an API on to grammy.com my employer pays for grammy so it is a service I use
it's not particularly useful but it does pick up things that you think you might correct if you
had the time to proofread your own stuff more accurately for instance you can start a sentence
with a plural subject and then use a singular form of a noun and you might not notice you've done
that but something like Grammily will pick it up a lot of Grammily's suggestions you can ignore
but it is quite useful on occasion and if you haven't got somebody else another human to do
your proofreading or sub editing for you and I've yet to plumb in a decent grammar editor into
emax something I'll be looking at fairly soon I think now whether that's the Grammily API that I
end up using I don't know I'd be very interested to hear how if there are any other writers out there
whether they're using a grammar editor at all which one they're using and any emax users out there
how they're integrating grammar editing into their emax workflows I'll be putting links to all the
applications that I've mentioned today in the show notes there's a great article I found on
using VIM as a word process it's really handy I'll also put links to right room I spell
a spell and Hunspel in the notes so that's about all from me I think thanks ever so much everyone
for listening into this hope you found it useful as I said at the beginning if you want to record
a podcast of your own please do feel free to find a microphone make a recording submit it and get
yourself out there so this is Ennis Dello signing off on Hacker Public Radio thanks for listening
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