Productivity Sauce

Simplifying Writing Workflow

From time immemorial, I've been using OpenOffice.org Writer and then LibreOffice Writer as my writing tool of choice. I even wrote several custom macros and the Writer's Tools extension to make my writing workflow more efficient. But all these years, I've been using only a fraction of Writer's functionality 90% of the time. So I finally decided to leave the comfort of LibreOffice Writer and simplify my writing workflow by moving to a different tool set. After trying several text editors, I settled for Sublime Text. This text editor is not free, but it offers a slew of useful features like customizable keyboard shortcuts, code highlighting schemes, snippets, the ability to manage multiple documents, and spell checker. Oddly, the editor doesn't have a native word count feature, but the WordCount plugin fills the void quite nicely. The nano text editor now serves as a writing tool when I don't feel like using the mouse or a graphical desktop environment.

In Writer, I heavily rely on the Changes feature to keep track of changes made to documents. In my new workflow, this functionality has been replaced with flashbake, a versioning solution based on Git (I wrote an in-depth article on using flashbake and Git in general for the upcoming issue of Linux Magazine).

Finally, to replace the functionality provided by the macros, I use the excellent AutoKey utility with a handful of simple scripts.

Of course, I don't plan to abandon LibreOffice just yet: it can still come in handy in many situations like when working with long documents containing complex formatting.