For this problem, I am a little bit irrationally in love with Draftin --- https://draftin.com.
One problem I have writing is that I've spent ~25 years conditioning myself not to write first drafts, by doing so much writing on BBSs, then Usenet, then mailing lists, then (briefly) blogs and finally on boards (the new Usenet). As a result, I lack the discipline to get my thoughts on a page and then walk away.
Draftin solves this for me by making it so easy to collect reviews (by sharing links to drafts with friends or interested people) that I feel compelled to do that every time I write something.
I'm also surprised at how little I miss emacs (my normal writing environment) when writing on Draft. I almost prefer Draft's interface.
Thanks for the link to draftin. Looks very useful. Fwiw, the op's work seems equivalent to draftin's "Hemingway mode" .. which (if I understand it right) doesn't permit any edits at all.
Yes, they mention it on their landing page that the purposely disabled those to make you focus on just putting words on paper. They don't want you breaking your flow to correct a typo
It's a little more restrictive since you can't move the caret. However, you can 'delete' mistakes by striking them out. Also, when you save your draft, text you've struck-out is excluded.
> Earnest shows you the number of words in your text, useful for people who need to hit a particular word-count, but it only re-calculates the number every minute to deter you from constantly keeping an eye on your progress. The word-count should not be a distraction from your writing.
I would maybe have the counter be real-time, but require the user to leave the keyboard (or some other significant action) to show it? (ex: on mouseover). I was trying this out and still was looking at the "0 words" and thinking "damn, I wonder how many words there are."
Perhaps the writer could enter the target number of words. You could show a progress bar (with a course granularity of say quarters) then when you're near the target show the word count in real time so that you can fine tune your words into the limit.
Draft (http://draftin.com) has had a similar "Hemingway Mode" feature for a few months now.
It's potentially more useful, though, because when you're done "no backspace" writing, you can switch to normal mode and get all the features of a full collaborative piece of software.
I am actively researching something I call "emerging writers". An emerging writer is a person who has finally gone beyond just saying they want to be a writer and is actively working on their first manuscript.
It's a lot like learning programming. There is a lot that is unknown, but learning is exciting, and the potential is clear to the budding author. Unfortunately, the available tools and feedback systems for writers are extremely primitive compared to what is available to programmers.
In the cases I've observed, emerging writers often can intuit errors in their writing, but lack the skillset to correct said errors. Lacking tools like spelling- and grammar-check then causes anxiety for the user. And in my own personal development as a writer, I know that my spelling skill only improved with the introduction of ubiquitous spelling-correction indicators in browsers. I would often try to correct the spelling mistake on my own so I wouldn't have to grab the mouse to right-click the broken word.
So, against my initial judgement that spell-check was a detriment to mean-time-to-first-draft, I eventually came to re-enable spelling check in my own writing tool: https://www.justwritedammit.com.
If you're serious about helping writers be more productive, please consider joining me. JWD is open-source, free software. https://www.github.com/capnmidnight/JWD.
Would this not work better as a plugin 'editor' for a CMS such as Wordpress?
Imagine you log in to Wordpress as 'contributor' and write with the 'Earnest' plugin, no edits possible, but still in the knowledge that you are writing for the blog and surrounded by the WP interface you know well. The autosaved article would only be 'draft'.
Then, you log in as 'editor' to do the editing, with the regular WP editor.
For me I could see the attraction of such a work flow and it would not be like I was having to learn a new tool, as is the case here.
That's a good idea, that could definitely work. I created Earnest as a standalone page for myself mainly so that I could do away with almost all controls and clutter on the page and just have the textarea - keeping distractions to a minimum.
I would love an option to have bigger text size for writing. The current editing text is too small for comfort.
The text on the info page is also far too small for me. Sorry to sound like I'm whining.
I spotted one typo - "Earnest automatically saves you writing every". I gave up reading because my eyesight is so bad and I just couldn't read the smaller text.
I do really freaking like the idea though. I will be using it. Is there any way to send you a (small) amount of money?
Interesting how we sometimes prefer restriction to full-fledged freedom. Similarly, many of us find Twitter more pleasant that Facebook, which puts no limitation on post length.
I suppose the minuscule details of life are better left in the hands of others (or software, for that matter). When spell checks, word counts and the like are left outside one's realm of thought, it's easier to focus on what's truly meaningful - in this case, the content itself, rather than grammatical intricacies.
Premature optimization is an enormous problem in both code and prose. This tool's core purpose is to remove that temptation, I guess, though I'm not fanatic about the concept. If modern word processors are too distracting, and their advantages aren't necessary, I'd prefer to write on physical paper instead. It brings the same "don't look back" mentality.
This makes sense. I don't write a lot, but when I do, I actually use Evernote on my phone or TextEdit on my computer. I find the smaller the space to write in, or the shittier the tool, the better. Basically limitations are actually a good thing. You're not compelled to write anything beautiful, and so there's no pressure, and you just write anything that comes to mind. You can always edit later...
Personally, since i do a lot of typos, i'd find it rather distracting that i can't go back and fix something even though i know it's wrong. I suppose the idea is to let go of all of that and just spew out words without breaking your flow, and i know going back to correct a typo does break flow, but it's something i think i'd have to train myself to do.
When testing a new writing app, I tend to write a stream of consciousness kind of thing. Here's what I wrote to test the app. "This is an experiemnt with Earnets. I'm not quite sure how this works. This is another sentence. The word count is notn being updatineed ... oh I ejust realized the stupid logic of this application. Cool app, bruh."
Here's a similar, though uglier, idea[0] for the console, the console because less opportunity for hn, facebook, distractionware, etc. Backspace deletes the whole word.
This is a super interesting idea. I work with a lot of undergraduate students who struggle with the writing/editing divide, and I will absolutely be recommending that they try this tool.
I've never done anything resembling professional writing, but I've always found myself creatively paralyzed when sitting in front of a keyboard. Not quite sure why, but it's so much easier to let it all flow out with a pencil and paper.
That can definitely help! I do work with some students who have learning challenges or other issues with writing, physical or otherwise, for whom writing by hand isn't an option. Freewriting is a good idea whether by pencil or by keyboard, though!
Hey, OP here. Glad you liked Earnest, I wrote it for myself a while back and have been using it for almost all my writing, does make a hell of a difference for me - seeing as I found it so useful I decided to tidy it up and release it.
Nifty. Could take it further and prohibit capitalization and punctuation. (Perhaps, allow one sloppy stand-in punctuation placeholder no matter what you type, like ·.)
Interesting experiment to forbid editing. Though the delete key doesn't work, cut-copy-paste does. Forbid that too! ... otherwise I'll be tempted to cheat :)
Great concept, but "not delete" feature? God no! A total deal breaker for me!
I like to correct obvious mistakes, such as typos, when i see it. I like to insert a paragraph, or a phrase, on a early section, when i think of it. I like to erase whole paragraphs that a new one I just wrote contradict or substitute.
I am starting to write some essays and this would be perfect, except for this write-only. You disrupted too much my process.
I think the intended audience is people who want to practice finishing as opposed to perfecting. I often struggle to finish bits of writing I start because I go back and read and re-read and tweak and then before I know it the afternoon I allocated is over.
I certainly wouldn't view it as a substitute for a regular editor, but a tool for a different job.
The "no delete" feature is super-weird to begin with and takes a lot of getting used to. If your workflow is to edit-in-place all the time then Earnest is probably not for you.
I do respect the "this is the vision, take it or leave it" way of thinking, but there is a middle ground. Perhaps give one edit per 100 characters (or something configurable).
Put another way -- you don't have to make something entirely impossible to discourage a user from doing it. What other ways are there to reduce in-place editing?
Just one idea: don't show what people are writing for more than a few seconds, and then gradually fade it away.
Well, the feature that you're suggesting be removed is pretty much the only thing that distinguishes this from low-end text editors.
It's perfectly sensible and appropriate that such a request would be rejected. It's really no different than, say, requesting that the directory listing functionality of the ls command be removed. Yeah, it is a suggestion, but it's surely not a viable one.
I certainly don't think the same way. On browser, easy saving with no signup and counting words, that would be enough for me to chose among the mentioned competitors. Only if i could delete
My site, https://www.justwritedammit.com lets you save automatically to browser local storage, Google Drive, or Dropbox. If you have writing in Google Drive already, you can import it as chapters. You can also manually export and import files to and from the desktop. It has word count and a timer showing you how long you've been writing. There is a word and phrase frequency analyzer to help you figure out if you're over using certain idioms. And if you've been using it for a while and have a lot of writing, you can export it all to an EPUB package for eReader devices.
EDIT: and it works on smartphones, too, which I've personally been using to get some writing done on my galaxy note 2 while on the go or at the coffee shop/bar.
Why wouldn't you just use a minimalistic text editor like Notepad or nano, then?
They avoid the distractions of spell checking and all that, while still saving files locally, and while still allowing you to delete text you've written.
I use Sublime Text for my writing for this purpose. I'm fairly good at not making spelling errors, and I usually correct them when I type them anyways, but it's nice to not have something look like it's on a printed page already with the margins, etc.
Except that WordStar 4 has a delete key. Actually, WordStar has a lot more editing capability than a lot of the "minimal" text editors that have been the rage the last few years.
I don't advocate that we should all follow GRRM's lead for our writing, but I'm wondering whether the race to introduce text editors with ever-decreasing functionality is actually taking us somewhere particularly useful. In 1994, I could run a DOS word processor called Nota Bene that supported movement, selection, deletion and transposition by word, sentence, line, paragraph and phrase, and could near-instantly index and do Google-esque boolean searches on entire project folders, showing you search terms in context. (And of course it had its own multiple file, window and clipboard support, IIRC with multiple clipboards.) While the editors are surely a lot prettier twenty years later, could we stop dicking around with ways to prevent me from editing and start coming up with ways to help me edit better?
One problem I have writing is that I've spent ~25 years conditioning myself not to write first drafts, by doing so much writing on BBSs, then Usenet, then mailing lists, then (briefly) blogs and finally on boards (the new Usenet). As a result, I lack the discipline to get my thoughts on a page and then walk away.
Draftin solves this for me by making it so easy to collect reviews (by sharing links to drafts with friends or interested people) that I feel compelled to do that every time I write something.
I'm also surprised at how little I miss emacs (my normal writing environment) when writing on Draft. I almost prefer Draft's interface.