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Earlier today I was asked about what tools I use when writing. This is not something I have written about here on the blog before, although I do have very strong opinions on my own tools. I actually really enjoy reading about how other people work, so writing about it here may perhaps also be interesting to others. Text editor: Atom Most of my writing, whether it is e-mail drafts, meeting notes, or academic papers, is done in the form of plain text files. I use different text editors dependent on what computer/platform I am working on, and that is also one of the beauties of text files. They work everywhere. On my main laptop (running Ubuntu Studio), I primarily use Atom as my main text editor. This is mainly because it is cross-platform, has some plugins that are useful, and has excellent integration with Github. ...

Last year I decided to use plain text files (TXT) as the main file type for all my computer text input. There are several reasons for this, but perhaps the most important one was all the problems experienced when trying to open other types of text-based files (RTF, DOC, etc.) on various iOS and Android devices that I use daily. Another reason is to become independent of specific software solutions, forcing you to use a specific software for something as basic as writing text on your computer or device. Along the way I decided to shift my note-taking from MacJournal to nvALT. The best thing about nvALT is that it can unobtrusively monitor a folder of text files, and it allows for quickly searching in old files and write new ones. Since all the files are just plain text files stored in a regular folder (and sync’ed to the cloud), I can of course also use any text editor to view and write the files. ...

This, and several other recent and forthcoming blog posts, have been lying in the drafts folder of my blog writing software (MarsEdit) for a while (some for more than 4 years…). I am currently going through the drafts one by one, deleting most of them, but also posting a few. Here is one I started writing back in 2009: Alex Payne has published a list of rules for computing happiness. I don’t agree with all of them, but many of them resonate with my own thoughts. Here is a condensed list, based on the things I find most important: ...

I am trying to debug a Max patch that does video analysis. For some reason many of the exported text files containing the analysis results contain exactly 4314 lines. This is an odd number for a computer program to dislike, so I am currently going through the patch to figure out what is wrong. The first thing I thought about was the text object, which is used for storing the data and write to a text file. So to check the possible limitations of the object, I have made a small patch that writes lines of 60 random values. It turns out, however, that the text object easily handles 1 000 000 lines of random values, and manage to write the file to disk (366.9 MB). ...