Writing with VS Code
POSTED: October 6, 2020
Scrivener version 3 for Windows has overshot its announced deadline by a couple of years. However, for at least two years a rolling beta version has been available free, and I have used this to write everything (including the posts on this site) for eighteen months or so.
The delay has resulted in a lot of threads on the Scrivener forums complaining and accusing and throwing various kinds of tantrums. I have kept out of these, but I have read them, because sometimes they contain useful information (about other softwares, and different approaches.
Last week I came across one of the strangest alternatives yet: using Visual Studio Code as novel-writing software. When I looked at the post from Jay Penner in Medium, though, it all made a perfect sort of sense.
He writes in Markdown, and then transfers everything to Word at the end for final formatting. He has used Scrivener but found he didn’t need the corkboard, or a lot of the other features that make it unique. I have discovered that I don’t seem to either.
His post contains links to four Youtube videos in which he describes his set-up in some detail. This intrigues me. I shall investigate further.
If nothing else I will learn more about VS Code…