The act of writing depends on an immediacy of brain to fingers on keyboard to screen (of brain to fingers on pen to paper). I need to see immediately on screen what my fingers are doing to the keyboard.

That is why I always use a simple editors. TextEdit, Writeroom, BBEdit – oh even WordPress – are functioning fine.

But Word and OpenOffice on a Mac drive me crazy. They are great programs for many reasons (the track changes for instance), but I do not understand how anybody who writes can really work with them. In any case, I cannot deal with the latency between my fingerstrokes and what is shown on screen. It is way to slow. My fingers make corrections while typing based on what I see happening on screen. Why have I never read (or heard) anybody complaining about this? (I imagine the problem does not exist with Word on Windows).

Yes, it is often just a question of a quarter second, but that’s way too much.

I mean – uh – I’m just amazed how such fundamental ‘faults’ are just taken for granted. Believe me Word 4 on a MacSE from 1990 did NOT have this problem. (Same thing with the shiny screen on modern laptops which under most light situations are utterly horrible on the eyes).