Technically, this breaks my self-imposed embargo on the word “Zen,” but I’m fascinated to see this stuff getting attention in the straight media.

“The philosophy behind zenware is to force the desktop back to its Platonic essence.”

Uhm..? Help me out here Merl. Now what was the connection again between satori and platonic rationalism?

Spaces is definitely an advancement when it comes to the art of computer zen.

One other, which I’m surprised hasn’t been mentioned by Merlin, is the great Desktopple Pro. It is spirited away and backdrop all rolled into a nice menu item. Definitely worth the few bucks it costs.

While I appreciate the recent advance of simplicity and usability in software, I cannot help but smile at the story about setting document properties every time before you started writing. Why? Because Word really does a great job doing all that stuff for you while you are in the flow of writing the document.

The problem is: you don’t know it’s possible, and you can’t be bothered to read up on it, can you?

Word can use template documents, and it’s really easy to use them, basically you set everything up once as you described it above, and then you just save that document as a template. It’s a good idea to learn about styles (I use the german version, so maybe that’s not the correct term) while you’re at it.

There’s lots of predefined shorcuts that let you do all formatting while you write, there’s an outline that lets you elegantly move around sections or chapters, there’s autogenerated indexes and TOCs, you can use it in fullscreen mode so you just see the text, and no distracting toolbars…and it’s all so easy to use once you dig it, you’d wonder why anyone bothers to write another word processor at all.

It is a sad truth that I have only twice in my career met a person who would know how to really use word to its full advantage. Millions of people use it every dat but don’t know how. Even sadder because I have been able to teach the essentials to my colleagues and business partners in less than 2 hours each, because there’s really not much to it.

While it goes without saying that the writing you refer to in your post is an art in itself that takes years of practice to master, nobody seems to acknowledge the fact that using a complex piece of software to it’s full advantage must also require a certain amount of time and effort.

People don’t even bother to read the manual, as they don’t do with their cellphones, and then they bore everybody to death with stories of how they fail to use it correctly.

The real Zen approach IMHO to a problem is to try to make an informed decision of what tool to use and then to learn how to use properly.

To take it to extremes and really become a Zen master, you could use VI and Tex to write your stuff, apart from Q10 there’s no other editor that has less distctracting elements, and nothing else comes even close to the quality of Tex layouts. Both are available on Mac, too.

I write a lot of scientific reports using LaTeX. It wouldn’t count as zenware (at least not using my current Windows GUI; guess I could go back to writing everything in vi) but this post got me thinking. Quite apart from the advantages over Word regarding formulae etc., writing in a markup language allows me to concentrate on the content, without worrying about the presentation (a familiar meme from coding webpages). I know that the typesetting and arrangement is mostly taken care of, or can be worried about at a later date, and all I’m staring at is unformatted plain text.

Interestingly, students who are learning LaTeX normally find this hardest to assimilate. They worry more about why picture x is on page y than they do about the accompanying text. Flavours of Merlin’s perfect apostrophe.

In reading this post, apparently scrivener does not have a grammar checker … is it “to zenlike” for that, too? /snark ;)