John Griffiths wrote:
> what I'm after is a recommendation from others who might have used
> something like this to write 5,000 word plus english language documents.
I've had no problems writing documents in that range with vim. Folding
becomes fairly useful after a while, if it's all in one file. I've
probably never exceeded 10 thousand words in a single document; though
I've written several systems of documents in the 150-200 thousand word
range, using vim.
> most debian editors, understandably, are aimed at writing code, not prose.
Remember that one of the first purposes unix was put to was writing
English text (for patent applications). So the unix toolkit is less
code-oriented than you might at first think.
Most unix text editors cannot (easily?) be set up to reflow a paragraph
automatically if you edit it somewhere in the middle. In vim this means
a bit too much typing of the gqip command when editing a paragraph to
reflow it. Like changing modes, this becomes second nature -- I've
probably done it at least twice while composing this paragraph.
You might want to look into using something like docbook or tex for your
documents, which has the nice effect of making them more like code, and
thus more native to unix editors. A completly different approach that
still meets your stated needs would be to find a good word processor,
preferably one that outputs human-readable text, and use cvs to check
out the documents from the remote server to wherever you are.
--
see shy jo, realizing slowly that maybe he does know what writing a novel
or real book would be like.. maybe
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