i swear, these days i'm easily using notepad more than word or anything else. i'm getting pretty dependent on the small white window, barren of toolbars, barren of margins, with no condescending paper-clip guy changing my text around after i've written it, capitalizing willy-nilly & underlining everything he can't comprehend. i take this as a sign that i'm some kind of computer nerd, but i can take comfort in that i know far worse than myself.

but what's not to like about notepad? sure, i have to press enter all on my own. & i'd never use it for anything i was going to print out (i'm afraid i'm addicted to fonts). but frankly i can do without a lot of the junk they try to shove into the office suite. word especially, since that's mainly what i use. if i want to run a spell checker, i'm perfectly capable of going to a menu or clicking a button myself. i don't need distracting red lines showing up everywhere, like a bad substitute teacher is standing over my shoulder & trying to grade as i type. because although sometimes i do make a mistake & not catch it (& some of you have caught a couple nasty ones that crept out onto the mailing list!), but most of the time when word underlines a word it's because it doesn't know it, or it's a name, or i made it up. i don't want to add every weird word i invent to my custom dictionary; it'd fill up my hard drive.

the automatic capitalization has irked me about word since word 6. disconnected from the web as i am at home, i can't check this, but i'm sure there must've been talk in one of the early sermons about how violently word would capitalize my innocent documents back in the lab at school. word simply assumes that everyone wants to capitalize every line of every page, & does it for you if you "forget". unfortunately, i don't forget to capitalize sentences or anything else; i choose not to. so i have to fight to keep my documents the way i typed them. & i don't even have an editor.

now yes, i know that you can change the settings for all these features in one or another obscure branch of the program preferences. but that's really not the point. i shouldn't have to tinker around with the program's guts to prevent it from mutilating my writing. & if i'm too lazy to search through all the preference boxes, i shouldn't have to try all kinds of stopgap measures to keep my text how i want it. the application shouldn't force itself upon me. it should be a tool to simplify my work, not an added burden.

there are all kinds of other similar features. autocorrection, autoformatting... i still haven't figured out how to change the formatting of an email address once you've typed it in. i can type it in notepad no problem: stallio@geocities.com stallio@geocities.com stallio@geocities.com. but type it into word & bam! it's underlined & blue & everything, & it doesn't want to go back. even if i manage to change the color somehow, it suffers a relapse eventually & is blue once more. i wouldn't be surprised if sometimes word inserted hidden pro-microsoft propaganda into your documents, deep inside the really boring parts, where nobody would notice on a conscious level. or even worse, it might search for keywords & implant the pro-billisms in especially impressionable documents: children's books & the like. scary...

& finally, the number one reason to use a simple text editor over word: macro viruses! this new melissa virus is irking everyone (appropriately named; i sort of dated a girl named melissa... but i've probably said too much already). luckily i haven't come across it personally; from what i understand it's a lot worse than that lame word concept macro thingy i battled back in the labs.