Ensō: write now, edit later | Hacker News Reader

Ensō: write now, edit later

enso.sonnet.io

416 pointssurprisetalk153 comments

I am amateur (but wannabe professional) fiction writer. When I see this type of tool I realize that I have a conceptual misalignment with some (most?) writers in regarding to focus, editing, flow.

For me, editing is part of the flow. I like to edit things as they go through my head, as part of my state of flow, not as a separate chore from which I have to “protect” my draft writing from.

I think of it as an analogy from sculpting. The first draft writing is getting the amorphous block into a rough shape of, e.g., a hand. Then, editing is the fine work to make the bones, skin wrinkles and veins of the hand to make it perfect.

In this analogy, the editing is the hardest, most focus demanding, most detail-oriented work that requires no distractions.

But just offering my perspective here. A good thing about having more software developers in the world is the diversity of tools available for diverse people. So I am happy that this exists.

You and I are what Kurt Vonnegut called Bashers:

> Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.

I always found this frustrating in high school, as some assignments required submission of a first draft, second draft, and final version of a paper. I always wrote the final version first and then worked backwards to created a second and then a first draft by removing sentences and generally making it worse.

Just as a side note, I worked for several ad agencies with art directors who did the same thing. We'd make the final ad, then screw it up intentionally and show it to the client so they'd spot the obvious flaws/mistakes, tell us to fix them, and then we'd give them what we'd already done.

It's not a strategy I use in my own work now, but it taught me something interesting about the psychology of clients. I think there are better ways to let them know they got their money's worth, like writing full explanations of your choices and thought processes. But intentionally sabotaging your first draft is definitely a well-worn method in the art and design world.

I got a general contractor talking shop once and he confessed to me that they overwhelm the customers with cosmetic choices on purpose. People need to put a certain amount of energy into a process to feel they have done their due diligence, and it often doesn't really matter how that energy is spent, just that it is.

In his case it was to distract the customer from worrying about things they can't control, like physics and building codes. The bones of a building only allow so many locations for a sink, for instance. Trying to fight that can snowball an entire project.

Easy decisions that you ultimately question leave a sliver of doubt and regret in your mind. I could have done more. I should have said something. Things you work your ass of on and still don't succeed, you can say you did your best.

This is exactly the “Important Corollary Four” from Joel Spolsky’s old blog post The Iceberg Secret, Revealed from 2002: <https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/02/13/the-iceberg-secret...>

> The bones of a building only allow so many locations for a sink, for instance

Why not just tell the customer that instead. I'd rather pay for someone to tell it to me straight, than someone who wants to purposefully overload the customer with trivial decisions.

Because you don’t get paid for arguing with customers. Neither the physical time nor the stress.

If you don’t deal with it all day you may have no idea/empathy for the sorts of coping mechanisms people develop to reduce trauma. People can be the worst. They pay you for copper and expect gold.

Also as I stated above, until the customer has invested a certain amount of energy into the process, they will second guess themselves and you. Reviews are often tainted by how the customer feels about themselves. Ultimately the same problem the Duck is solving. They need to pee on it to mark it as theirs.

Every ad / design agency I’ve worked for engages in this practice. Futhermore, in the large corporate rebranding exercises I’ve witnessed approximately 75% of the engagement consists of make-work designed to justify the price.

From a purely psychological perspective I find it fascinating. If you want to get a handle on how it looks IDEO is a company that publishes and speaks on ”process” quite prolifically. Keyword: “Design Thinking.”

This is pretty chilling to hear.

One of my big quarrels in my professional life is how clients/bosses want exposure to creative process but can't really handle it, if it's anything but linear, which, in actual reality, it never is.

Going through the creative process without exposing the bossman to it and then playing "creative process theater" for them is a solution to the problem, because the theater caters to their unrealistic expectations, not to reality.

But, the more tightly controlling they are, and the shorter the reporting interval, the more difficult it becomes to execute on this charade. This is particularly poignant, because the point applies not just to ad agencies and design work, but also other types of creative endeavor like software engineering. I really pity the wretched souls having to do daily standups, who end up getting caught in the crossfire there.

In particular: Bosses have unrealistic expectations of what creative process looks like. Those unrealistic expectations get reinforced because so much of the creative process they witness is "creative process theater". And then the poor soul who finds themselves in a situation where they have no other choice but to expose their boss to real creative process obviously can't deliver on their boss's expectations.

Most bosses have never gone through the creative processes that are being discussed here. Or if the boss did it for bread they won’t know how to apply the process to cars. A corporate rebranding is done many times by an agency but once or twice, ever, by the individuals on the client personnel. The boss who knows how it’s actually done will get less theater than the uncertain or over-eager boss who’s doing their first agency rebrand. And, sometimes, the marketing exec is party to the theater because they know a straight up offer to their upline won’t get accepted.

Put another way: I’ve done rebrands for agencies themselves. They’re still prone to the errors even though they know how the sausage is made. It’s an innate human tendency.

And btw — nothing is pretty. Branding, marketing, coding, project management, budgeting. It doesn’t have to be bullshit, but process is not often going to be pretty.

Funny to hear you validate this. What's even funnier is catching my own junior designers trying to do it to me, and totally calling them on it.

This is a bit like the age-old tale about the contractor that adds waits at the end of each function in his codebase, then when the client complains about performance in one area, he just removes the wait, then bills them more money for "optimizations."

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop

I remember reading here on HN of some web or ad agency intentionally adding a duck to a page before a demo to the customer. The customer eventually said, it's all OK but please remove the duck. They directed the customer's need to fix something to an obvious target. The customer is happy to have made a difference, the agency is happy not to have to do some extra work on something expensive to fix.

One origin of that approach is from Battle Chess - aka a duck feature: https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/

> Duck: a feature added for no other reason than to draw management attention and be removed, thus avoiding unnecessary changes in other aspects of the product.

In animation they called it “the thumb on the frame” for obvious reasons.

> I always found this frustrating in high school, as some assignments required submission of a first draft, second draft, and final version of a paper. I always wrote the final version first and then worked backwards to created a second and then a first draft by removing sentences and generally making it worse.

I always did this as well. You are the first other person I've heard describe that.

Here’s another person reporting the same thing:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM#t=5m10s>

(It’s Larry McEnerney’s very excellent lecture The Craft of Writing Effectively, aimed at writers who are either academians or otherwise experts in some field.)

I am also a Basher. But I've always suspected it as a sort of perfectionism that ultimately holds you back from getting better. I have a couple of pastimes where I've gone out of my way to try to avoid this. I find it is often easier to 'change your ways' in one context than globally. But it's also a sort of 'end of the beginning' rather than 'beginning of the end' in spending more energy on doing and less on fussing about doing it well. Take that too more and you're trying to do well on your first try.

If you ever played board games with someone who operates this way, it's exhausting. The fact that it's meant to be fun probably amplifies that experience, but I do wonder sometimes how people experience me and whether they think the same sorts of things I think about a perfectionist gamer.

The iconic example of a Swooper is Jack Kerouac, who typed up "On the Road" on a scroll of paper, so he would not disrupt his flow by having to switch pages: https://www.npr.org/2007/07/05/11709924/jack-kerouacs-famous...

But contrary to legend, it appears that said scroll did not represent the first draft, but the final product of numerous editing iteration.

Fellow Basher here. I’ve heard the advice to “just get it all on the page and edit later” so many times and it has never really made sense to me. I write something like Shlemiel the painter’s algorithm from this old Joel on Software article [0]. Write a bit, reread everything, tweak, write some more, reread everything again, tweak. The re-reading cycles aren’t always back to the very beginning, sometimes it’s just the current paragraph or sentence. But I’d definitely say I edit as I go. I’ve tried not doing this, but I never get very far with that before it starts to stress me out that the writing isn’t coming out right.

And then afterwards, read the thing another 50 times just in case, especially if it’s an email.

0: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/

I just submitted the same draft all three times. I might make minor changes based on feedback but generally there wasn't any backlash from teachers for not changing enough things, if your initial draft was already high quality.

I would just re-write my one-and-final draft by intentionally-poor hand because I knew no one was gonna call that bluff.

Someone should make the enso for bashers! Not sure what that would look like. Maybe a text editor is enough.

I am not much of a writer at all but if I write a blog post I am both basher and swooper. Swooping happens after I publish. Something psychological about someone might read it motivates the swoop.

Today I learned I swoop the outline of my texts and then bash the sentences.

>by removing sentences and generally making it worse.

Can I offer another POV? If those sentences weren't needed, they weren't needed. You didn't really make it worse.

I think they meant they were needed and removing them _did_ make it worse, because they were needed.

It’s less about flow but more about a practical problem faced by some writers:

Some writers have the trouble stopping themselves from constant editing of the words they’ve just write, to the extent that significantly impact their ability to produce an actual draft. Lots of the editing are useless anyway, since when you are really editing the draft later, most likely you are going to throw away many pages and paragraphs of work, so all the time spent on micro-editing are wasted.

The biggest contrast between sculpting and writing is that sculpting is non-revocable. You can negotiate over a single paragraph for hours, rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. There is no redo button for chiseling.

> ”since when you are really editing the draft later, most likely you are going to throw away many pages and paragraphs of work”

It seems relevant that I also do not write like this.

When I wrote my first novel, I wrote the draft and gave to my beta readers. Most of the feedback I got was that I needed to add stuff. Develop a character more, take more time to get to the resolution of a problem, add a new perspective.

From the first draft to the final version, it got probably around 30% bigger. Very few paragraphs were cut after that initial draft.

I hate to invoke the tired "plotters and pantsers" dichotomy, but this does seem like one of those things that comes down to whether you set out to write with some kind of scaffold in mind (or on paper) or whether you're more inclined to let the blank page take you wherever it takes you.

I'm definitely in the former camp, and have the same line-by-line editing habits that you describe, both in my professional and personal writing. And like you, end up throwing away very little, because anything I included the first time around was included deliberately.

OTOH it stresses me out a little imagining what it's like to write more spontaneously, without even a vague sense of where you're headed—what happens when you hit a dead end and need to backtrack? Do you just throw out hours and hours of work and try again?

> what happens when you hit a dead end and need to backtrack? Do you just throw out hours and hours of work and try again?

If it’s good, you put it aside and can maybe reuse it at a later point in a different context.

Or you do like Neil Gaiman: write everything by hand the first time, and edit at the same time you type it. That way when you have to throw away a bunch of pages which don’t really fit you no longer feel like you’ve wasted effort but that you’re saving effort.

> what happens when you hit a dead end and need to backtrack? Do you just throw out hours and hours of work and try again?

Quite literally, yes! :)

That sounds so frustrating! But I admire and maybe even envy your ability to do it. And with a smile, no less.

It's rare to hit a complete dead end, but if it happens, yes, backtrack and try again.

But it's not like it's all going to be wasted. I've explored one branch of something that doesn't work, but I've explored. Some plots/character developments/scenes/places can still be reused in a different way when I try again.

Keep writing. You can always go back and add or change details as needed later on.

We all have different processes. I write short stories, and almost always have to axe/rewrite/move whole sections when editing. I usually edit my draft in 3 tiers: structural editing, then language editing, and finally copyediting.

This just made me think... what would be really interesting would be a destructive, non-revocable writing app. You start with a giant pile of GPT garbage and just remove things.

Sudowrite, an AI tool for fiction writing, sort of has this philosophy. I interviewed with them and the analogy they used is that they want to “provide the clay so you can mold it”. They generate some basic text for you and then you edit it.

> so all the time spent on micro-editing are wasted.

True. On the other hand, there's sometimes the satisfaction of a well-written sentence you can sneak in elsewhere, even if the rest of the scene gets the ax.

This varies greatly between writers. I've self published two scifi novels, and I found I wrote faster when I didn't edit as I went (even when subsequent editing was factored in), but fast isn't always what you're going for. And I don't personally need (or want) tools to push me not to edit.

But where editing really kills you are for those who get stuck in "endless" polishing of the smallest little details before they have anything, and as a result never get anywhere. Then having tools to push you past that can be useful.

On the Basher/Swooper working style, I believe there value for each type to incorporate a little of the other type. Through most of my education, I was a Basher. I didn't write drafts, I wrote start to finish, but it was never as good as I'd wished.

Later in life I began to deliberately practice some of the Swooper techniques, and my writing got more satisfying.

It's possible the difference is somewhat generational as well, because the Basher style is suitable for writing with the somewhat cranky typewriter on paper, because rework is harder. Today, it's almost trivial to mix and mash our writing because all it takes is ctrl-C ctrl-V.

Unless you're William S. Burrows, in which case, just don't get too near me with those scissors. https://www.faena.com/aleph/cut-up-the-creative-technique-us...

I think it's the same analogy, the tool is supposed to separate it so that you can get the rough shape in before you try to perfect the hand, (then realise it's facing the wrong way.)

This kind of tool is great for outline-level rough drafts. Much like steam of consciousness journaling to see where your mind goes. Then decide how much if any of that to bring into the rough draft in an edit-friendly editor.

^This.Maybe part of the problem is that I've been around a while, and already have a bunch of habits around writing, and one of them is that I like to edit while I write, because writing is an attempt to work out what I actually think.

Having something that blocks me from editing as I write would be a huge downgrade. Zero interest.

I'm with you, although any writing I do is technical. I find that immediately micro-editing the fragment/sentence/paragraph I just wrote is easier than coming back as a separate step. Maybe it's because my first cut is so bad!

It's same for me. But now I think maybe it's good to try other way.

The desire/need for focused writing apps has always baffled me, but then again I'm probably not the target audience for such an app. I do some technical writing and some non-technical blogging, and have never felt impeded by just writing in vim or textedit (or anything else that accepts text input).

I'd love to better understand how such apps help people with their writing. I guess I'm kind of skeptical that they actually do help (compared to simply fullscreening any app that you can write in), but since there are so many apps designed for this I accept that they must be helpful to some people. I'd love to hear from people for whom they have helped. (I'm not trying to start a discussion about uselessness. I'd like to hear about _usefulness_. I truly want to understand it better.)

I'm not a professional writer, but as someone with severe ADHD I have battled frequently with my own version of "writer's block". When I'm stuck in this way sometimes small things can make a tremendous difference (positive or negative) in my productivity.

I guess what it comes down to is distractibility. This app seems focused on reducing the distraction of perfectionism: the thoughts of possible improvements to the structure of the current paragraph or feelings that a sentence could've come out better. For me, and I expect for some writers, this type of second guessing may take up a significant amount of the time I've allocated to sit down and write. Especially if there's a lot of external pressure for my work to be of a certain quality, correctness, or completeness.

So while I don't personally use a tool like this, I can see how reducing distractions could raise productivity. And if it I were my livelihood, then even a 20-30% raise in productivity could be well worth installing and learning to use a dedicated piece of software.

Thanks for sharing this. I know different people think differently, but I hadn't even considered ADHD.

I have built https://FileMonger.app (which keeps a diffable undo history of a file) exactly after becoming skeptical as you are.

After a bit of research I've figured that main need for this kind of focus is fear of the document changing too much, to the point where the current idea for an edit will no longer relevant.

Apps such as OP try to solve it by hiding the problem, while with FileMonger the writer gets a guarantee that they can revert to any save at any time, if document indeed changes too much (it usually doesn't).

If you've mentioned vim and technical writing you're probably writing plain text files and are knowledgeable enough to use manual version control like git when necessary, which is why this baffles you.

> ...then again I'm probably not the target audience for such an app. I do some technical writing...

For technical writing in particular, I feel like being able to see (and manipulate) the entire document at once is actually helpful, if not outright necessary, since the structure of a document is just as important as its content. In that sense, a no-frills text editor might actually be the specific "focus mode" that you need for technical documents.

But it's certainly not the same type of focus that people seek when they write fiction. Which I unfortunately can't comment on, because I write fiction the same way I write manuals :P

Indeed. This is why I figured I'm probably not the target audience. Reviewing and editing is a huge part of technical writing (along with having a window open for what you're writing about), at least the way I do it.

Some people are just compulsive about some stuff. It's not always a thing you're (or they're) going to understand.

I really like it. As a writer of novels, this is useful for those moments when I have too many doubts about how it should look. One minor feedback: deleting should be forbidden - it's a way to edit the text.

So it should be like a writing machine + the fade out effect.

Hehe, I considered that in my first prototypes. I avoid any kind of customisation like fire when it comes to Ensō, but perhaps I should change my approach after all...

My main source of inspiration was writing by hand, and then typing.

Writing by hand definitely does not allow to delete! :-)

There’re these things called erasers…

…or correction fluid (like Tipp-Ex)

...or just crossing out.

You must be kidding. Striking through the text is ridiculously easy.

So few novelists on HN! Where can I read your stuff?

I'd prefer to try to not associate my user with some personal data. But thanks for the interest!

That's clever, and I see the appeal. The UI looks an awful lot like iA Writer in typewriter mode. That's a compliment.

But it does seem like a feature that iA could add, calling it "write-only" mode or such, and then you could have that nice experience with all the other awesomeness that Writer brings.

Still, unless/until they do, I totally get why someone would want to use this. Nice job!

I found this obscure emacs package last week that seems related: https://github.com/KeyWeeUsr/typewriter-roll-mode

(I'm not related to this package in any way. Don't use it either.)

50 lines of elisp.

I tried it just now, and it seems like what it does is that every time I press space it scrolls the buffer so that I am at the top and only see the current line I am editing. Does not look as nice as that fading out editor, but maybe it is functional enough. It would be more like that other editor if it would show at least one or two previous lines of text.

That's easy enough to adjust if you'd like, redefine typewriter-roll--scroll-up to call (recenter-top-bottom 2) instead of 0.

Thanks! I was inspired by a different thread to disable the backspace key by adding this to the mode file:

    (defvar typewriter-roll-mode-hook nil)

    (defvar typewriter-roll-mode-map
      (let ((map (make-keymap)))
        (define-key map (kbd "<backspace>") 'ignore)
        map)
      "Keymap for typewriter-roll minor mode")

I've played around with a similar idea with a less attractive UI, using Vim or Emacs.

With sufficient adjustments, you can reduce the GUI versions of Vim or Emacs to a single line of text. That way you can just write, but can't see what you've written one it's left that line, until you expand the window to see the full document.

It gives a good sense of flow, although I find that if I'm just forcing myself to write and push forward, it's easy to get into a situation where I'm just pushing text, and not really enforcing any kind of structure on my thoughts.

It's useful to get me into a mode where I'm thinking about new stuff, but I have to be ok with producing a lot of noise that I have to sift back though. Eventually that sifting starts to wear me out.

If 90% percent of everything I write is crap, sorting back through to find the 10% that's good and useful, is more effort than I can make myself keep doing on a regular basis.

With vim, one can go from single setting[1] to something more complex[2] or use one of the available plugins (e.g. typewriter-vim[3] or vim-goyo[4] or vim-focus[5] or Lite-DFM[6] or zen-mode[7] etc.)

[1] https://superuser.com/a/368275

[2] https://vitalyparnas.com/guides/vim-typewriter-mode/

[3] https://github.com/logico/typewriter-vim

[4] https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim

[5] https://github.com/merlinrebrovic/focus.vim

[6] https://github.com/bilalq/lite-dfm

[7] https://github.com/folke/zen-mode.nvim

I also made a nvim plugin but from a different angle.

I set up a "write only" mode, so you can't use backspace or get out of insert mode, you just gotta keep writing forward (also disable <c-w> )

To get out of it, you tap escape 15 times in a row. (to avoid my habitual ESC :wa)

Note': I like the plugin but I don't know if it's helpful. My writing career has been exceptionally short for the moment

> With sufficient adjustments, you can reduce the GUI versions of Vim or Emacs to a single line of text. That way you can just write, but can't see what you've written one it's left that line, until you expand the window to see the full document.

This is how ed(1) works.

I recommend Olivetti for focused writing with Emacs. It is a simple mode but somehow it takes me back to days of writing on a typewriter. Occasionally I add a focus mode to fade out the other sentences or paragraphs. Maybe I’ve just conditioned myself because I typically only use these modes for documents that require flow over a long period of time. Emacs is excellent for the editing part of course, as is vi; plain text navigation and editing are their core values. And being in Emacs with my 100 active buffers, it super easy to combine disparate ideas, though that can mess with the flow.

I've always noticed when writing by hand I could get into the zone more easily but always thought it was because of the lack of speed compared to typing. I had never considered maybe the huge effort required to edit was another factor that kept my mind focused in the present.

It might also partially be that the activity and movements of writing by hand put you in the zone better than using a keyboard. When you have a pen/pencil in hand, your body may feel "it's prose/whatever writing time" rather than when you have a keyboard in hand, when the multitude of activities (browsing HN for example or texting on IRC or whatever) dilutes a similar mental association between tool and activity.

Neko! Write, now edit later:

  $ cat > file
  You can't edit anything.
  So you have to think.

Wow, how much do I pay to run it on MacOS?

For most, the answer would be, "quite a lot".

However, I happen to have a VirtualBox VM of an bootleg copy of an old MacOS version (32 bit x86).

Reminds me of http://al.chemy.org A dead (sigh) drawing app with no layers and no undo and tons of wacky brushes. The main idea is that you can doodle and let the "happy little accidents" drive you into something that you can use as inspiration for a piece (think of it like ink blots)

I would't call it dead, rather done. It's good that it doesn't get more features.

I love this, thank you for sharing.

This by far one of my favorite pieces of software ever.

It's perfect for journaling and just doing a complete brain dump of thoughts. I frequently am surprised by the word count when I download the text file after the end of one of my writing binges.

Thank you for your work on this rpastuszak!

In what way are you surprised? I am always surprised with how few words I actually wrote.

I guess i'm more surprised by the amount of words i have to describe my thoughts about the most mundane set of topics.

I like this idea, I do this all the time. Not sure I need an app though, I'll just turn off the monitor.

I would be very worried that there's some random action stealing the focus of the writing app and me just typing letters into the void.

Heh, for that exact reason I'm using it with my screen dimmed as much as possible and even considered adding a night[*] (black to red) mode for OLED screens (I write at night, I'm a vampire).

One of the use-cases I found when I was researching Ensō: there was a blogger who'd split writing into two steps:

1. writing with their screen dimmed as much as possible

2. editing the next day

Also, perhaps a pure-black screen with a simple indicator of the number of characters/words written would work here? You'd still know that the editor is recording your changes. Seems like a nice idea for a little app/toy.

[*]examples, inspiration: https://untested.sonnet.io/Obsidian+for+Vampires (apologies for messy notes, this project is separate from my main site)

The hotkey to return to my window manager is pretty hard to hit by accident. As for the writing app, it's just a python script looping over lines read from stdin and writing them to disk. Not many opportunities to do anything else.

Why not just cat?

Because I am a dummy. This is even better:

cat - > prose.txt

Thanks for the idea.

Horses for courses, but the fading gimmick would not work for me at all.

However, this is conceptually interesting. It might be fun to speak the first draft of my next piece and transcribe the result with Whisper.

I experimenting with sth similar actually.

One small additional requirement: although I studied linguistics and took a year-long course in English phonology, speech-to-text still struggles with my accent.

The approach I'm playing with atm is inspired by some advice from Simon Willis, here on HN:

record audio → transcribe using whisper → clean up and format using a GPT prompt

So far the results have been pretty good: the original meaning is preserved but the text is much easier to read (and the missing/"misheard" words are often corrected).

What I'm experimenting at the moment:

- picking the right model size, tweaking the prompts

- better UX (e.g. immediate visual feedback)

I think the fading, if I paused to think about anything, would make me lose track of what I'd already written.

This is what I wrote trying out the product, seems really focused haha:

So today I'm thinking about potatoes

warm potatoes, the kind that you eat with cheese

or other saucy stuff really

why not

talk about potatoes today, does this go to the end of the line, oh yeah it does, and it goes to the new line, there's a counter at the bottom, displaying a number, it's word count I think, yeah I'm pretty sure 65 66 definitely

cool, I like it!

Sounds like the start of productive therapy.

I've been writing like this into text files for over a decade now. It feels like therapy, alright, but I wouldn't claim it's productive.

This is a neat idea. But I accomplish the same thing with a pen and paper. Once I start to write there's no time to go back and read or edit until later. Additionally, pen and paper forces me to consider each word more carefully, because my writing speed is always slower than my thinking.

Timing is good for sharing this now, with NaNoWriMo right around the corner. I have heard a similar approach advocated to get through a first draft of an entire novel in a month: just write it all down, never backspace, and save the editing for December!

Read “Enso” and my mind immediately called up Humanized, Inc. Enso (a modeless command launcher—entirely different from what we’re talking about here( was such a great tool.

https://www.reddit.com/r/answers/s/dkKyKqYI8S

This kind of stream of consciousness is how I do a lot of my GPT work. I have double command key tap to start dictation, and then I launch into these stream of consciousness dialogues with uhms, ohhs, and uhhs etc. GPT is able to then summarize that for me, filter out the garbage, and we can iterate from there.

I do this for five to ten minute stretches to draft pages of prose. Also filtering through ChatGPT to clean it up and reformat it into any shape I'd like.

Reminds me of the (dead) RoughDraft mac app by 43 Folders(?).

There is also FocusWriter - opensource and multi-platform.

https://gottcode.org/focuswriter/

If you are using iA Writer, it also has this feature: https://ia.net/writer/support/editor/focus-mode

Close: Writer still lets you edit text in that mode. Ensō looks like typewriter mode, and is also append-only. Writer doesn't have that bit.

Yup, that's one of the reasons I built Ensō instead of using iA Writer.

True, good point.

I feel like the main point is that you are not able to "edit" your text in the sense that you re-structure paragraphs, moving bits around, not about not being able to correct a typo.

I think you're right. For me, the fading is enough to greatly reduce that temptation. I could just turn off focus mode, but there's a big "out of sight, out of mind" component, too.

It would be kinda cool to have a way to disable backward cursor movement, or a "enable focus mode until I restart the app" option as another barrier to "I just want to make this one quick change...".

Huh. Wonder if I could emulate the cursor stuff with Keyboard Maestro by making it swallow those keypresses?

There are at least a dozen Mac apps that have been doing this for decades. Why the upvotes?

As a non-writer, I don't know those apps, I saw this on HN, tried it for 30 secs, and loved it. I'll never be a customer btw.

Very nice. In my experience writing both prose and code, rewrites are usually better than edits. Strangely, this tool reminds me a bit of how Fossil does not have rebase. The history is useful for context, but it shouldn't be edited.

At some point I realized that it took me a lot less time to write gigantic Twitter threads than a blog post half that size. Of course my own expectations of quality are quite higher for a post on my blog than for a Twitter thread that will be buried by time. But apart from that the big difference was my inability to edit tweets already sent. Now for a few years it's been different since it is possible to prepare multiple tweets at a time, but it's still not as a single big box with text you can freely and easily edit, but the format (the requirement to cut the text in small pieces) still plays a role in the process I think.

I was toying with the idea of making an text editor that would work in the same way, append-only by limited size chunks, just for proficiency purpose, but never had time.

This project seems to be in the same vein. Thanks for sharing!

"If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter" -- https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

I know that quote. The thing is, I don't have more time, and a lot of blog post are just never written because of that.

I accomplish something similar by typing with my eyes closed (or simply looking away from the screen).

And, despite the "you can't edit" marketing, you can use the backspace key for typos. (which is good)

I value this method; my strategy is to turn my display brightness down to nothing while drafting. If I think I mistyped something, I just type a line break and go again.

Love the idea. Also, a fun elisp project to try and figure out.

ed was right all along?

Or cat.

Great design! I enjoyed writing my thoughts, and I like that I can save it to a file right away.

This makes it immediately compatible with all textfile-based systems.

I really like this idea. I think I'll try Enso, as often I think of editing too much while writing, and it definitely breaks my state of flow

(2021)?

Author's Show HN: from then

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26448887

When I used to do nanowrimo, I would turn off my screen to stop my various means of self sabotage.

Worked well enough that I could meet my writing goals.

If you want a dead simple writing app, I think this is a better option for mac users: simpletext.app

Costs 9 bucks for a lifetime license.

Better option: Apple's Notes.app which comes included, you can also make a note full screen and it looks almost the same. On top of being iCloud synced to all your devices for free.

Unfortunately, Notes is incredibly slow. Even with just a few hundred pages of text in a note, and no images or complex formatting, it stutters on text input on an iPhone 15 and, while not stuttering in input, is jerky and slow to scroll on an M1 MacBook Pro. That means that there’s management overhead — going back and editing notes to split them up — to keep it usable, which is almost exactly contrary to the point of this article’s type of writing-and-writing-alone tool.

Reminds me a lot of Omm writer, really nice peaceful writing experience, designed to keep you focused on just writing

Is there a plugin for obsidian?

There are two experiments AFAIK: one done by Steph Ango (Obsidian CEO) and another one by me. I didn't publish mine because I thought no one would like it, but I'm happy to do it if more people express interest.

https://x.com/rafalpast/status/1693961256879726684?s=20

PS I use Ensō with Obsidian for my morning notes: https://untested.sonnet.io/Stream+of+Consciousness+Morning+N...

I would try it if you like! Drop me a mail at enos.luxurious788@aleeas.com (real mail alias)

Made me think of Excalidraw when I saw it - cool stuff! Will try my 750 words on it.

I am building a writing tool and this serves as an inspiration. So beautiful!

for a split second i thought someone had made psv stuff in 2023

Sooo… like a notebook?

Nice tool Rafał!

> All of your changes are saved locally. Ensō works perfectly fine even without internet connection.

I know this is a sign of the times and so I'm not blaming the author, but Christ, what a depressing development that this is enough of a feature to be one of the headline hero paragraphs on the landing page.

Author here:

0) Ensō's on the top page of HN? what the hell!

1) it's fun to use Ensō in the middle of the woods with no internet access (done that), but

2) the main reason I build web apps this way is that following offline-first (generally) results in a better user experience, especially for people without access to optic fibre or 5G[*]. And with Ensō this was trivial to implement.

3) the second reason I do that: often it's much easier to write offline first apps. 10 years ago we already had tools like pouchdb to do so much heavy lifting for us.

[*] Ironically, having lived in Shoreditch for 7 years helped me develop this mindset, as every single flat I rented there turned out to be the one without fibre. In one of them the windows even acted as a Faraday cage, so no luck with 4G!

Kudos for the "offline first" approach.

But Shoreditch? ;) When I worked there (2015) I was wondering where all the alleged hipsters were of the "Silicon Roundabout", since all of the people in cafes had FB on their laptop screens instead of code, and it wasn't cheap either. Not sure if it changed for better or worse since, but since then Google closed Campus.

Yeah, I want to be totally clear that this wasn't a dig at you - Ensō looks really cool and I'm glad to see a web application embrace offline-first development. This was more just generic griping at how the web has become the only real cross-platform application development environment, regardless of how well it's actually fit for that purpose. But that has nothing to do with you - keep rocking with this :)

Developing for the web client and having centralized control over both code and data on your server is just so much easier for the developer. Not necessarily the best client experience, but the difference in development and support cost is huge.

Thus any local-first software is more rare, if it has to also include an online component. It's just harder.

Looks pretty close to what iA Writer has been doing since its inception over a decade ago. Back then it was a very unique approach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA_Writer

Big fan of this app because it lets you write plaintext (.md or .txt) on your iphone

Here's a naive bash implementation of this, just for fun:

  while true; do 
     clear
     tail -n 5 /tmp/notes
     read line
     echo "$line" >> /tmp/notes
  done

I really don’t want to bash it as the web version is free, and I absolutely agree that authors should be able to get money in exchange for their work, but still… not sure if the Mac version does anything more, but if not, making it paid when it is a program most people can reproduce in at tops 100 lines in any framework of their choice rubs me a bit in the wrong way.

I don't understand this comment. If it's that easy to reproduce (and I don't necessarily disagree), go ahead and do it, and users can use that instead.

Or, if it's not worth your time, consider paying the person who took the time to build it.

Cue the famous HN post saying dropbox could be replaced by ftp.

It’s literally a textfield with a fade-off effect on top.

But your take is also correct in most cases, I just felt that this one hits a particularly strange balance here.

Most people? You mean most programmers, presumably?

Or, if you prefer to write with sweaty palms and the gun of permanent literary destruction against your head, there’s the Most Dangerous Writing App of course. https://maebert.github.io/themostdangerouswritingapp

I made something similar at https://drivl.app. I should have known someone else had already done it

Really neat app! Raises the stakes for writers. I'm inspired now to write something like this but with a "redemption" feature where your lost words can be recovered by consistently completing multiple sessions over time.

How long before it actually saves?

you set the session lenght before you start in the tooltip

Seems like it would be a good tool for coding interviews that want to mimic the whiteboard-coding experience without a physical whiteboard. /s

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