While I can appreciate a comprehensive disk-repair utility that analyzes situations and makes recommendations and does its own “smart” situation-specific response stuff, I most vehemently do not want a freakin’ word processor that thinks it’s smarter than I am.
Don’t decide I’m making a “list”. If I want bullet points I’ll • make a • freakin’ bullet point, dammit. If I want my items numbered, I’ll stick numbers on them. If I want my items numbered dynamically, so that if cut and paste and reorder them and whatnot, give me a symbol I can type that displays as the ordinal occurrence of that symbol at that indentation. Don’t be popping those suckers in every time I hit the freakin’ return key.
Don’t format my text on a per-paragraph level. I don’t ever, ever, want to backspace or paste or cut or delete something and have entire pages’ worth suddenly go to a different font, size, margin, line spacing, or anything else. Just copy and paste the text with its character-level formatting (font, size, bold/italic/plain, color) and don’t be messing with anything else in the bloody paragraph or page.
Don’t spell-check my document. Don’t put squiggly lines under things as I type them and most absolutely positively do not change what I type to what you think I should’ve typed. If I want spell-checking I’ll run spell-check after I’m done, thank you.
Don’t replace any symbol I’ve typed with a cuter, curlier, but less compatible Word-native replacement. If I want a curly quote (“smart quote”) instead of a straight “quote”, I’ll “type” the damn thing. (And when I do it my way it won’t turn into some other silly-ass symbol when I copy and paste it elsewhere). Ditto for apostrophes.
IN FACT LET’S GET RIGHT DOWN TO IT, SHALL WE? Start with being a text editor and add in other stuff only where appropriate. Here is the comprehensive list of what I want you, as a word processor, to do without me explicitly telling you to do it, as I type:
• make the characters happen as I type them.
• wrap the line at the right hand margin (soft wrap)
• widows and orphans linewrap protection, as per my saved preferences
The rest – decisions about font, indentation, headers & footers, endnotes and footnotes, line spacing, insertions of graphics and how to make text wrap around them, page breaks, page numbering, column settings and formatting, hypertext live-URL embedding, where and when and in what format to save the document, etc etc – I’ll do from a menu. Don’t do them for me.
And, since I know this is coming – Don’t ship the damn product with all these do-it-for-me doodads (including talking paper clips) turned on by default and the zillion separate preference settings for turning them off deeply buried in obscure places! I’m sure I could set up Word to behave as I have described – I could probably set up Word to display all text upside down and save all documents in TIFF format, there’s damn little that Word doesn’t have crammed into it somewhere – but life is too short to bother trying to find out.
Oh, and finally:
•Don’t suck up lots of RAM and processor cycles. You’re a word processor, not a SETI engine or a 128-bit encryption algorithm-breaker.