I’m going to quote this entire message:
Funny. I like a good pen or a beautiful notebook, but I never use any because writing on paper feels clunky and too constrained to me.
It is not that I am too young to have experienced a world where pen and paper were the dominant form for writing, I have enough experience in my fingers. But the flexibility of a text editor allows for a process that better matches my way of thinking and writing.
When I start writing on a blank page, after I’ve put the first sentence down, I often get a short burst of ideas for sentences or ideas for later in the text. In a text editor I can immediately jot those down, with some blank lines in between. Then they just get pushed down while I continue writing at the top, until I get to the point where they need to be incorporated in the text and then they get ‘swallowed’.
Similarly, when rewriting an existing piece. I start with a new version of a sentence or paragraph, again pushing the old version down, and keep doing that until I think I have a better version. At that point I delete the old one.
The part of the document that is below my cursor is a kind of dynamic to-do list. Such a process would be very clumsy to recreate with paper, because what is written then must stay in the same location at all times. So you either get large gaps for buffer space, need to copy things, or must fumble around with multiple pieces of paper.
— As seen on lobsters.
It’s the very same thing for me! I like to draw on paper, but I don’t like to write on it. Digital form is so much better for me.
Plus, not all living conditions are appropriate for having a luxury of having a nice pen and paper. I have kids, and they’re not too tender with a paper. Plus, they can hurt themselves by my pen, if it’s exposed. Plus, I have very little proper storage for papers. With digital storage, it’s so much easier! I have my laptop, and it occupies exactly the same space regardless of number of notes. I can use it all my life, if it won’t break. Or me, I’m fragile too.
Yeah, and this too:
A physical notebook with its clunky input interfaces will never be able to beat the niceness of being able to move your cursor back and insert text in the middle of what you’ve already written :P