Scrivener is too heavy

I’ve decided to put Scrivener aside for now and write in a basic word-processor.

Now before I get lynched by writers who swear by it, I should, of course, explain why I’m setting it aside for now. There are several issues. And the biggest problem is the hardest to describe. It has never felt like a comfortable app to use, for me. I don’t know what it is, but there’s just something about that isn’t quite right to me. It is as though I’m always trying to scale the learning curve instead of happily using it at some plateau.

Perhaps it is because I use the Linux version. The Linux version has had a rough start. The current versions are pretty good now, but for quite a while it struggled a bit with some Linux-isms that Windows didn’t have and OS X didn’t have. Things like correct library versions and filename and path handling that was just a little different (it probably didn’t help that Linux filesystems are completely case correct, unlike both Windows and Mac – this means you can have a file called “file.x” and one called “File.x” in Linux; Windows doesn’t like that and OS X will tolerate it but will do unexpected things sometimes).

Another way of looking at this was that I couldn’t really get into the same UI mindset as the designers. I don’t have a problem doing this with LibreOffice. This might be because it was originally an OS X app. I recently switched to OS X at work and there are a few things that bug me about OS X that I know Apple has no intention of changing, even if they could understand why I don’t like them.

This might also be related to the fact that I struggled to embrace Scrivener’s workflow. Scrivener makes it so easy to switch between scenes often when writing. However, that is quite disruptive and I shouldn’t do it. It is harder in a word-processor, but it doesn’t feel so disruptive.

The last problem is trying to manage my writing on multiple devices. You’d think I could access a Scrivener project on my flash drive just as comfortably in OS X as in Linux. However, it always feels fragile. It also leaves out my Android tablet.

So, I’m going back to writing in a word processor. I know word processors. I’ve used LibreOffice since it was called StarOffice. I’m more comfortable in it.