I loath Word. Every time I have to open it (when I'm proofreading one of my mothers texts for example) a perfidious feeling of oppressed rage creeps into my toes. For me, Word oozes with malice. Application-wise it's the only thing able to induce such epic feelings of discontent. It's quite irrational. Of course there is some justification since it was painstrikingly slow on my old computer (during the 10 percent of times when it didn't crash entirely). I assume the whole crashing-thing wasn't Words fault, but mine for attempting to bring two entities together that were obviously not ready to collaborate.

The last few months I used TextMate for every bit I wrote - and if you ever have to clean up 100+ pages of multiple bibliographies - this one does just fine. It has a great search function where all the results from different documents are actually shown in context. Of course it is quick, but it better be, because there is nothing more to see than plain text. behold:


click to enlarge

For someone who slowly made her peace with an ahem simple user interface LaTeX was the logical next step. It works very gracefully (at least it seems so to me, who has no prior knowledge* about the arcane workings of ... macros) and the endresult - the paper/article whatever - has some understated dignity. (Of course one could say the formulas look dapper, but the humanities need incentives too).
So if you can part with the WYSIWYG principle as shown here - try it!

And I'm sure this one will come in handy someday:




* Naturally I had a macro to kill off the fire creature down in the mines - I was only a marginally talented elf, what else could I do? - but I didn't write it myself. Cheater.