There’s something beautiful about a well-loved keyboard.
You know the kind: certain keys’ labels have worn off but the user knows exactly which ones must be pressed harder to work properly now, after so many years.
Alas, most of the signs of our work, as authors or software engineers, are not nearly so physical.
I recently started using Scrivener for my next longform fiction project. Scrivener is a famous (infamous?) application used by novelists and thesis-writers, which is — shockingly, in these years of open source and freeware — not free to use. It seems it can do everything, layers upon layers upon layers of options embedded deep in menus, and nothing about it so far has been intuitive. But certain little quirks are a joy — how lovely it is to tag each chapter with a color indicating the emotional resonance! How easy to rearrange scenes when each one gets its own little notecard that I can drag and drop to a new home!
Until now, I’ve written all of my projects in a Google Doc. I love that I can access it on any device and download it to so many formats, but I hate how long it takes to load and how laggy two-hundred-page documents become. I’ve landed in Scrivener purgatory because I needed something quicker. We’ll see if I stick around.
More fundamentally, though, I just need an empty document set before me, inviting me to create.
There’s an incredible appeal to a blank white screen, hungry for your words. It’s daunting, perhaps one of the most daunting things I confront on a regular basis, but also so full of promise. I feel the same way looking at an empty Google Doc as I do holding a freshly sharpened pencil: like I have such a vast opportunity before me that I long to live up to. How could I desecrate such a perfect pencil with my feeble words? At least if I muck up a document on my computer I can delete it all and start over.
I feel the same call from fresh new terminal window: it’s crisp and encouraging, the cursor blinking like it wants me to remember that it’s there. I feel its power and danger.
Those who don’t use the terminal daily likely don’t even know it’s there. I encourage you to open it up and look at it, this primitive vestige of computers in decades past that lingers still within your modern Macbook. You can do almost anything with it, with enough practice and care. It invites an obscure set of inscrutable commands that have very little relation to the English we normally use to communicate with our devices, even as software engineers. It’s dark and simple and incredibly light-weight: there’s so little between you and the machine.
But those who use it often tailor their terminal to look gorgeous so it feels like home, configuring colors and font size and spacing. I prefer shades of pink and purple, because at times I am egregiously feminine, and evidently this is one of those times. I like my terminal windows slightly translucent, so I can layer them behind each other, barely seeing through to the others. To some this is sacrilege; to me it is freedom.
Of course, just as choosing a font is not writing a story, setting up your terminal is not software engineering. No, before you code, you also have to set up your development environment! There’s a never-ending debate between VIM and EMACS and VSCode and the many heavier options you can choose, all of which have a degree of customizability that put Scrivener to shame. I like that I can hack around in my settings (quite literally) and at time, when working in Scrivener, wish I could just forego the nested menus and simply tell it what to do. But, of course, that implies a degree of familiarity with the program that a novel-writing app doesn’t want to expose. So I’ll let it keep its secrets.
For now.