ConnectedText vs. Scrivener

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Mar 6, 2012 at 02:04 PM

I have yet to really put CT to the test of writing long, more formal works. At my office, I am not required to write such documents. In my personal life, I do, but I am not very happy running CT through VMWare Fusion on my MacBook, where the whole thing is clunky, and it slows down my computer. (I don’t know what’s at fault—Fusion, CT, the fact that I’m using Windows XP, or some combination of those things.) I will say this, however, I was looking forward to working on a certain project that has been hanging over my head for the past year—one written by someone else, but which needs massive re-writing. I haven’t had luck making progress on this project with Scrivener, and CT just felt as if it would work well. But the cludginess of the whole system made me abandon that avenue. (For the record, I’m now trying it with Ulysses, which shares some attributes with CT.)

But to get back to your question, I think CT would have been a good choice for this project because I could decompose the manuscript very easily, then use the outliner to reassemble the useful pieces. It also does versioning (which I haven’t tried out yet), which could have been useful.

I’m still so intrigued by the possibilities of using CT for this project that I’m almost tempted to purchase a low cost netbook just to run it. (The only thing stopping me is that I suspect my wife might actually kill me if I did this [definite smiley face].) So I’d welcome reading about other experiences with CT and writing.

Steve Z.