#### Editing

Editing, distinct from writing, requires mental space to stitch many lines of reasoning and thought 
together, compare them, organize them, etc.
In software engineering everyone knew the term “in the zone” and sometimes managers would even 
enforce the space needed by putting employees “in the box”; is it reasonable to assume that a 
homeless person needs this same amenity? I would say yes, but most people view the homeless as 
less than human. There is more discussion on Offers later.
Is there is productivity metric for screen real estate? Resolution, DPI, Area. # of screens. OSHA. I 
think there’s a minimum required for some functions like editing. Processing may have similar formula for number of cores and clock speed, as well as memory and bus speed. We could provide 
concrete examples: 13” MacBook, iPhone SE, big new iPhone, iPad, RasPi 7” RasPi 24”.
Editing needs feedback. Writing may be improved by feedback, but the main point of editing is 
making it presentable for other audiences.
Imagine the movie “Almost famous.” I made an audio recording on 3/23. The scraps of paper that 
the protagonist edits together are his writing. Medium was limited in that time, 80’s at latest, to 
paper and a few radio and tv and movie and play like things.
Content for this section can be pulled ffrom writing and Email, so that the capabilities can be 
specifically delineated. An email can be printed and a response written and edited beffore typing and
sending. If a person has always had a comfortable editing or emailing enviornment then the 
activities may not be distinct. But in the absense of enough power to run a compting environment, a 
different approach must be taken. Where can email be printed? For example. Tasks explode in time 
required, and a new method is simultaneously being learned. If a person were accustomed to it 
before homelessness, then it wouldn’t be an exponential issue as it is for a first timer at both 
homelessness and offline email management. On old buddy used to come to my code night and send
emails, and he had a laptop but no Internet at home. Editing may require some types of security, at 
very least from attack and theft and the ability to carry work between days and see it though.
Is WYSIWYG required for editing? Can one stitch together a huge array of notes and data by 
converting them to common formats and configuring scripts? Picture the scene in Almost Famous 
where he’s writing the article from his notes described as incomprehensible. Could he have turned 
those notes into the final article? Writers may struggle to refrain from editing while they write—the 
important part of the first draft is to ship a complete set of ideas, and may be totally rewritten in the 
final copy. Knowing this, does it seem plausible to stich together the scraps or writing? I would say 
no. Is a WYSIWYG required? The astute may quip back that things were edited before IT, on paper 
or rock; indeed. A typewriter leaves its mark and shifts the view. A pin board accepts scraps being 
pinned to it, and the change is what you get. So yes, in order to edit one must be able to immediately
see the final product. To assemble it from scraps, on could argue, one could view the final product in
a preview screen. Indeed. Would this lost the UX benefit of for example InkScape where objects can
be selected and edited in place? For the most part, yes, without advanced tools to integrate with the 
rendered document. I would argue that the power consumption would be the hinging factor; the edit-compile-preview loop intuitively sounds more expensive than the WYSIWYG approach. The 
argument for paper could include lighting costs, if the work will require hours beyond daylight and 
thus artifical lighting? Screen size is a factor too, like for writing; the preview should fit at a 
reasonable zoom level in full on the screen.

[ IMAGE wysiwyg editor ]

One can see page breaks and rivers in white space with WYSIWYG editing, which are an element 
that the reader notices.
WYSIWYG is like training wheels. If you know what the document that you are writing to looks 
like, then you can imagine the scripts and pieces that would be composed to create it and make those
pieces. Without having a visual idea of the end product, it can become intractable to work with 
scripts. Intractable in the sense that if the mental image changes, then many scripts and sources need
to change instead of one document that can be incrementally transformed using the known 
operations of the wysiwyg editor. 
So one could make the argument that the scripted solution can produce and document and is thus an 
equivalent, in fact wysiwyg is an implementation of an imagination system that would be translated 
into sources and scripts. One could thinkg of writing, editing, production, deployment… editing would be done using the wysiwyg tool, and then its pieces would be mapped into a production 
system like _____ that is sourced in markdown fed through a binary through a shell script.
Wysiwyg is an imagination aid in addition to an editing or writing tool. Writing and editing can be 
done without one, but when it comes to composing the final document without a clear picture and 
without experience using tools to make documents that are similar, it is a complex problem of 
imagining the output and editing the source to generate that output.
It takes a certain kind of mindset to be able to work in a loud cafe. Growing up in an abusive home 
with “one shot” at getting out ASAP is great training. Indeed there are countless distractions, if one’s
focus is enough to block that out then they will have a much better chance at doing higher order 
activities like editing that are a solid step in the road toward wealth.

##### Energy usage of WYSIWYG vs. REPL system

[ IMAGE power usage graph ]

REPL systems may have a lower marginal energy usage since the sources and scripts can be 
independently edited on less capable viewing hardware. But there are periods of scripting and needing 
to find documentation that inturrupt flow state—as is the case when learning to use any new tool, 
nothing in particular about REPL tools causes this. WYSIWYG has a learning curve as well, as does in 
coding an IDE or illustration software as well as the postscript file format that works on printers.
If you want your documents to have character, as well, it’s nice to be able to quickly draw illustrations 
that fit the final style of the document. Indeed, a REPL loop can offer this but as the changes increase 
and the number of types of sources increase, whos products need to be linked together increase, the 
REPL loop will get more expensive. Print can abstractly include refreshing a PDF or HTML view. 
There are reasons to avoid WYS or prefer REPL but lack of a large screen is not one. REPL does not 
replace WYS in that respect, in its capacity as an imagination aid. If the document is of a familiar type of the system is familiar and documents can be imagined and mapped to hypothetical source then a 
REPL system can replace WYS on systems with small screens.
WYSIWYG is great for the exploratory period of a work, perhaps through the first draft copy. At that 
time decisions can be made about producing the work onto the target media, and whether undertaking a
project like REPL / build conversion with data merged are worth while. Imagine an engineer founding 
a project in an IDE and then sub-contracting out some of the modules with fixture data and some 
particular specificiations. The REPL or build system could be used for an analog of modules of the 
project, which may be books and worksheets with common records utilized.