Scribe

A scribe is a person who writes books or documents by hand in hieroglyphics, cuneiform or other scripts and may help keep track of records for priests and government.

Description

The profession, previously found in all literate cultures in some form, lost most of its importance and status with the advent of printing. The work could involve copying books, including sacred texts, or secretarial and administrative duties, such as taking of dictation and the keeping of business, judicial and, historical records for kings, nobles, temples, and cities. Later the profession developed into public servants, journalists, accountants, typists, and lawyers. In societies with low literacy rates, street-corner letter-writers (and readers) may still be found providing a service.

Ancient Egypt

The most important was a person educated in the arts of writing (using both hieroglyphics and hieratic scripts, and from the second half of the first millennium BCE the demotic script, used as shorthand and for commerce) and arithmetics. Sons of scribes were brought up in the same scribal tradition, sent to school and, upon entering the civil service, inherited their fathers' positions.

Scribes (software)

Scribes is a lightweight free text editor for GNOME licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3).

Features

Its features include crash-recovery via automatic saving, syntax highlighting, snippets, automatic word completion, pair character completion, smart indentation, bookmarks, and various text editing functions. However, it does not provide the options to turn off some of those features, such as involuntary automatic saving (which can overwrite the old version of opened file without user's consent).

Official description

"Scribes focuses on streamlining your workflow. It does so by ensuring that common and repetitive operations are intelligently automated and also by eliminating factors that prevent you from focusing on your tasks.

The result is a text editor that provides a fluid user experience, that is easy and fun to use and that ensures the safety of your documents at all times."

External links