elfs | The strangest craving.

I felt the strangest craving this morning to start using Microsoft Word again.

It felt exactly like the feeling one gets when looking back on a relationship where the sex was fabulous but was otherwise horribly abusive. MS Word is very pretty and while you use it you feel like you're getting a lot accomplished.

But when Word gets into a bad mood it gets really crazy. Often, when Word does get crazy, it trashes something of yours, sometimes a piece of work you really value and put hard effort into. Yet, when Word does this, it also somehow manages to make it feel as if the wreckage was all your fault.

Word's gotten worse over the years. These days, it's gotten more bossy and demanding. With it's new DRM thing, it works harder than ever to isolate you from anyone who might convince you that the flash and shine of Word isn't the best thing in the world. Word has a history of bad relationships, as each release has locked out a new generation of some other wordprocessor. Yet Word seems perfectly happy to run embedded viri for you, flirting with every trojan macro that comes along. And really, why hang out with Word? It's gotten fatter and more bloated over the years. Think about how much money you've poured into bling just so you can keep your relationship with Word. Are you doing anything more with Word today than you were in 1995? I mean, really.

I'm sticking with Emacs. Compared to Word, Emacs isn't flashy or hot. It's downright plain and very, very nerdy. On the other hand, Emacs has had twenty-five years to learn how to do safe computing right, and since it's all in plain ASCII I'll never be locked into using a DRM manager and I'll be able to share my work with others. Emacs very rarely crashes, and when it does it's actually apologetic and gives good suggestions for avoiding that accident in the future.