Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielleMolloy | Hacker News Reader

Necessary pointer: George R R Martin still writes on WordStar 4.0 on DOS. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27407502 Conan clip this refers to: https://youtu.be/X5REM-3nWHg

As I need to write for work I recently got into this topic - this blog post makes some interesting points about how distraction free writing used to be the norm: https://vascsurg.me/2019/11/17/distraction-free-writing-used...

The AlphaSmart Neo devices became tremendously popular among writers recently, apparently many of them can’t stand modern software anymore because it has become too visually distracting for them: https://orcutt.net/weblog/2018/03/17/my-prodigiously-convolu...

Distractions certainly are too blame here, but my pet theory is that the added visual input blocks top down imagery in the visual system.

View on HN

So that's why George R R Martin is taking five years to write his last book. He's out of diskettes.

There was a pet theory he wasn’t backing up his work and a system failure caused him to repeat it from memory

five? ADWD was published in 2011. We're coming quickly up on ten years for the next to last book, no one holds out any hope the last one will ever be written.

not just last one, last two

"next to last"

It will probably come in a bundle, along with a copy of Half Life 3.

The popular theory on reddit is that he Winds of Winter almost finished around season 5 of the show, but found plot holes (specifically in Mereen) and basically rewrote the whole thing.

That's my hope anyway.

Windows 3.1 is coming

He does, but he's also a terrible pointer if we're trying to explain ancient tech is still relevant to writers. GRRM is such a celebrity that he's just riding out the "I'll write some more when I feel like it" money train, making him more of a hobbyist (with very good connections) compared to the vast majority of "there isn't enough time in a human life to write all the things I want to write" people in the fiction writing world.

Having something with very few bells and whistles lets you focus on your writing. Whether that's a "only works in fullscreen, you don't get to multitask" markdown editor, or a 1992 486 running word perfect on DOS basically makes no difference.

Based on the speed of his previous output, I dont agree, I know a couple scifi authors, and he's not out of the norms for his genre.

He’s written a ton of words for money during this time. He’s clearly a procrastinator of almost mythic proportions, but he’s not lazy.

I know a fairly well-known children's author that continues to write using a typewriter out in an outbuilding on his farm. I imagine it's a very effective way to focus (for me, I'd have to make sure I didn't have my phone).

I have an electric typewriter I use occasionally. It makes for a very different feel than both typing on a computer and hand-writing. (The only reason I don't use it more often is that it has terrible ergonomics, even compared with today's flat keyboards.)

He's written 13 novels and lots of shorter works. He's not someone who's written very little.

I think his fundamental problem is that he's in a position that few writers end up in -- he became so popular that if he doesn't end the book well he will be hated and reviled by thousands of people on the internet. Most writers never end up in a position where if they let the public down, they will become hated figures.

See also: Tom Hanks.

He's become so disillusioned with modern word processing that he uses a typewriter.

It made him such a fan of typewriters that he has an app called Hanx Writer to simulate various typewriters on iOS devices.

At this point, Microsoft Word is so geared toward writing inter-office memos that I feel bad for anyone who wants to do any serious writing on it.

Big companies are only capable of sustaining what they do.

That’s why Outlook and Excel are almost operating systems and Word meanders around with no real focus. It is not an opinionated app.

Changes in Word are driven by awful end user communities like attorneys. Attorneys are smart people, but the influential ones have doctor egos, get set in their ways, and spend their day interacting with fossilized bureaucracies, as demonstrated by the fact that people are still screwing around with WordPerfect 5 for DOS in 2020.

The excuses given (ie “Federal court filings are finicky”) are 100% bullshit. The reality is the chief poobah of counsel likes WordPerfect because he’s the chief poohbah, and his minions get to suck it up and learn how to use an application released when they were in diapers.

> Attorneys are smart people

Attorneys are usually people who went to three years of law school and then passed the bar exam. Possibly many years ago. I have found that their most distinguishing characteristic is that they didn't quit law school.

They tend to be smart in the exact same ratio as any other college graduate. That is to say, some attorneys are smart.

I started typing letters to people once this pandemic got going. I'm on a Selectric II and have a bunch of different typefaces.

The Selectric II is such a joy to type on. Unlike Hanks, I use corrective tape, though. He mashes 'x' through any typos.

I forgot how nice it is to get mail that isn't a bill or an ad.

My wife does that. She sent messages to her people on social media and it turned out many of them wanted to do the same thing.

Now she writes to her friends all over the world. And since it's paper mail that takes between three days and two weeks to arrive, there's no posturing. No boasting. No one-upsmanship. It's people really writing about things that are actually important to them because it takes effort.

That's awesome!

Letter writing / penpal'ing is really magical -- specifically for the reasons you noted. Even with friends I speak with (digitally or in person) on a regular basis have plenty to talk about in a letter.

I hadn't purchased a stamp for years. Its remarkable that sending a letter domestically can be done for around a dollar.

Microsoft word is fine if you're not doing anything too complicated and don't get fancy. Lots of people don't properly use the styles feature of Word (aka don't learn the tool basics) and then scream and yell at it. I've cranked out some rather long docs with it without hardly any issues at all. Just like people who rule out emacs or vim, 95% of them don't take time to properly learn the tool that they are using. That said I still prefer TeX/LateX for my own stuff and when I get a choice (I using don't get the chance because it's using collaborating on a Microsoft document online these days).

Word suffers from the case that it needs all features for all users accessible at almost all times (despite most people only needing about 20% of it at a given time). Word actually has a great "Focus Mode" if you can find it (among other ways to get to it there's a button for it in the status bar these days).

I wrote most of a novella in the iOS version of Word last year for NaNoWriMo, mostly because I really liked Word's OneDrive-based sync to make sure I was always up to date no matter which device I used and that I could reasonably trust offline sync in the rare cases where I worked on the document on multiple devices "in parallel" because one was offline. The iOS version defaults to "Focus Mode" and that eventually pushed me to figuring out how to get the right "Focus Mode" settings on my desktop to get a similar writing experience, which turned out to be easy when you knew what you were looking for.

I think it's all another reminder that it isn't necessarily your tools, but how you use them and how familiar you are with them. In a nutshell that is most of the discussions here, use what you like and if a 30+ year old word processing tool meets your needs, wonderful. On the flipside, the modern tools aren't without their merits and there are similar familiarity tricks to using them that maybe just take a bit a seeking them out or learning them.

Martin could upgrade to Wordtsar - Wordstar for the 21st Century: http://wordtsar.ca/

To be fair, DOS was new and exciting when A Game of Thrones was first published, and I don’t think anyone wants to have to reformat the extensive notes for ASOIAF every five to seven years.

When I need to write distraction free I open a fullscreen Vim terminal window. I copy the pages into a more shareable format after I draft them in plain text.

"A Game of Thrones" was published in August 1996[1]. Windows 95 was new an exciting then. OS/2 Warp was new an exciting then. DOS was already old, and I'm assuming GRRM used it just because that was what he was used to.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_of_Thrones

I should have said “written”, then. (GRRM is an infamously slow writer.)

He's not a writer.

That's the distinction with which everyone is being bogged down.

George R. R. Martin is a storyteller. There's a difference. Stephen King is a writer. Michael Crichton was a writer.

Crichton summed up what it is to be a writer in the most simplistic and eloquent-in-its-brevity language I think I've ever heard: "If you're going to be a writer, then you have to write. You have to wake up every day and sit down and write. Can you imagine if a pilot woke up one morning and said, 'I don't feel like flying the plane today.'"

If we are defining whether someone is a writer or not by the amount of published content they create, then very very few people are actually writers. If you have to have the published output of a Stephen King to be considered a "true writer" then I imagine there would only be a handful around the world. That's surely what your argument is implying, right? That it's whether someone is publishing a lot that defines "writer-ness"?

Basically my point is, just because someone is not adding titles to their bibliography every year or so doesn't mean they're not doing the act of writing every day. In fact, there are many references online to the importance Martin places on writing every day. And in fact, he has published things since his last ASOIAF book.

To try to say "This man is not a writer because he hasn't released the books I want to read" feels kind of silly to me.

And I suppose Kubrick wasn’t a director either.

Or maybe he's a writer and not a technology nerd?

Maybe a word processor is just a tool and if it's useful and gets the job done, no matter how "outdated" everyone else things it is, why bother to change?

I would argue that perhaps he wants to focus on writing and not perpetually learning new tech but lately writing seems to be lower on his priorities. Glad I never got sucked up into the books - as good as they are; it's pretty apparent he really doesn't want to finish them which is a shame.

Meh, I was still using DOS (w/ 4DOS) back then because I vastly preferred it (BBS and cli apps in general) over Windows 3.x. My use of GUI didn't really start until Windows 95 and was solidified with Winamp.

I think the timeline is a little different as I remember it.

DOS was dominant between 1981-1990. I lived through those days and remember them fondly.

In 1990, Windows 3.0 happened, and the world changed.

For the worse, if you were doing heavy-duty word processing. It's not that there were no usable WYSIWYG word processors, but even the star of the show (AmiPro) was rather limited in its feature set compared to WordPerfect, and they were really competitors to LetterPerfect and the like: great for simple text editing, but templating, macros, and so forth were toys at best - and you really needed to pay close attention to the maxim "the computer you want costs $5000 and will be obsolete when delivered" if you didn't want to type too far ahead of the screen.

AmiPro was _not_ a good wordprocessor. It had fatal flaws, like visible redrawing the entire paragraph when changing a single character or adding a single character. And the more text you wrote, the slower it would become, because it would format everything from start; even after a page or two, the delay would be noticeable.

https://gottcode.org/focuswriter/ is great if you want to get something that just stays out the way while you write.

I used and loved an Alphasmart. I created a web app to mimick it. You can try it out over at https://ponder.joeldare.com

I got a Neo2 a while back and found it nice for note taking. I put my notes in Pandoc Markdown and then convert to pdf on a pc. While the Neo2 has no GUI elements, I'm not convinced that it's any better for distraction compared to an airgapped pc running Word/OneNote. Curious if anyone has tried the latter(which I admit is getting harder to do as my newer computers don't have removable wireless adapter).

Many NICs can be disabled in BIOS/UEFI. Laptops can disable the WiFi usually with a switch and/or keyboard shortcut. Barring that, the specific drivers can be uninstalled.

Those that have written whole books on it typically mention the following advantages over a PC or notebook with some distraction free environment:

* hundreds of hours of battery life on 3 AAA batteries

* readable in bright sunlight

* instant on and off (you are back to your text with a button press, no waiting for booting up)

* portability and durability (great for traveling and writing..)

I have a 40$ (incl. shipping to Europe) Neo 2 too and do appreciate all these details. The manufacturers got a lot right.

I’ve tried distraction free terminal writing on an old x200 and other old and virtually disconnected devices too before but it wasn’t the same. E.g. in a library or café, searching for a free and calm spot with power supply and no sunlight on my screen is a problem I don’t have with my little AlphaSmart.

A pity that isn't hackeable, it would made a nice z-machine portable gaming machine.

Get a Dana then. It's basically a Palm laptop but a full-fledged AlphaSmart otherwise.

Link? Price?

They haven't been made in years but you can find them on eBay for about US$60

A nice modern writeup on the Dana: https://www.osnews.com/story/131180/the-alphasmart-dana-in-2...

I think if I were writing fiction that might be a really nice option.

The fact that you can only write is the exact reason that it is such a loved device. If want to get distracted by the lust of hacking the device instead of writing, there are thousands of other alternatives.

I'm not sure why more authors don't use Latex, it's superior to all of these other also ancient ways of putting things on paper. I did my first thesis (forced by my engineering advisor) on it and fucking hated it for the first few weeks and then something just clicked (or my brain broke) and I've been using it since for most of my word processing needs.

If you have fairly sophisticated formatting needs, like if you’re writing technical papers with formulae, the latex is a help. For most authors, who are in the business of writing words (not formatting documents) latex offers nothing.

In grad school (philosophy) I found Latex (via Markdown/pandoc) let me focus on writing words and do styling/layout of my papers (and keeping the bibliography consistent) as a separate task.

LaTeX works great for just writing words, too.

    \documentclass{article} 
    \begin{document} 
        <your words here> 
    \end {document}

is pretty lightweight and distraction-free. Substitute the appropriate documentclass for whatever thing you're working on (book, report, whatever), and it will just work, provided you're willing to accept a lot of default formatting.

Once you get into twiddling formatting, then you're back in the realm of non-distraction-free writing, but that's not the tool's fault.

The tool LaTeX is not the relevant tool in this context; the text editor is.

LaTeX is relevant if you use it as part of your tool chain. That's like saying "Markdown isn't relevant; the text editor is." No. They're both relevant.

If you’re suggesting just putting in a latex header and footer and writing your text in between then latex is not relevant.

Well, how do you produce your document, then?

I first decided to give it a shot when I was redoing my CV after the Oral Defense portion of my MA in early 2013.

Like you, I spent the first couple of days cursing BasicTex in all sorts of ways until it just clicked. The Tex Stack Exchange was a big help in solving some of the more complicated formatting conversions I needed to do.

That said, I think that community in particular can be slightly hostile to new users because they will vehemently insist on a working example that people can run themselves in order to debug it. To your point that not as many people use it as probably could, this may have something to do with it.

E.g, "My project doesn't typeset, is effectively "broken", and until you really think about it, the error messages seem inscrutable."

I understand why this is the case, but if my problem is a syntax error - because I don't get how something works - this approach is...not helpful.

At this point, with the exception of actual plaintext notes, just about every project I work on (words or code) goes through some kind of "compile" step, whether that's Rake/Make, npm scripts, shell functions, Markdown.pl, etc.

It's just burned into my brain at this point and comes naturally when the work is done.

LibreOffice has a full-screen mode. If you enable it and also disable Rulers and Text Boundaries then you see only the pages, the text, and a scroll bar at the edge of the screen (unless your GUI toolkit has vanishing scrollbars enabled, which is IMO more distracting). Run it on a laptop without Internet access and nothing else installed for minimal distraction.

Like a X200 Where you remove or disable the Wifi card. Sturdy machines with a decent keyboard.

Wondering how long it will take for someone to take up the task of configuring a veeery simplistic 'JustWriteOS' that optimized on distraction free writing. Should be possible to build this upon Alpine or NixOS with a tiling window manager preconfigured to only start the text editor full screen in distraction free mode.

Decent sleep mode configuration would be nice tho

Maybe once https://github.com/nix-windows is working better, make a distro just for WordPerfect for DOS itself!

My biggest problem with things like that is there's still all the mental overhead of styling clutter. You copy and paste something from a webpage and it's all mangled.

I think half the success of markdown is identifying a useful subset of html/document languages and saying "this is your whole featureset, everything else is out of scope for composition".

Ctrl+shift+P is "unstyled paste" on many systems. It is what I use when copying between documents/webpages/etc.

Ctrl+Shift+V (or Cmd+Shift+V on Mac) usually does the trick.

Well, that was a stupid typo of mine, of course it is V, not P. Too late to edit that post.

Works on far too few things. I find I just paste into notepad more often than not. But then you lose styling you like such as hyperlinks, bullets, bold/italic-for-emphasis, etc.

Which comes back to Markdown, which is the "useful subset".

MS Word has something similar, if not exactly the same if you go to View->Focus.

I like the idea for a low-tech, no-distraction solution for writing but man, this AlphaSmart device looks really crap. I hate chiclet keyboards, but I know that not everybody agrees. On the other hand, I can't imagine that anybody finds these 1990's style low-contrast LCD matrix displays pleasant to read. I'd sooner use an actual old-school typewriter.

There appear to be some e-paper solutions but they're expensive.

Honestly I think I'd rather go the George R R Martin route: take an old laptop with decent screen and keyboard then install a barebones environment. It could be as simple as booting straight to a full-screen vim/nano with no distraction installed.

I wish I could do something like that for coding, unfortunately when I program I usually need a browser and internet access to browse docs so I can't remove that. Maybe I should see if I can survive with only elinks or some low-featured web browser.

They feel really great; very similar to a PowerBook keyboard of the era. There's a different model (AlphaSmart Dana) that runs Palm OS 4 if that type of display is more your thing.

Not sure about the older Alphasmarts, but the Neos have pretty standard laptop keys. The display contrast isn't great, but it's not terrible like the late 80s/early 90s graphic LCDs. The small footprint compared to a current laptop is nice.

I'm also building something like what you are thinking about with an old intel NUC mounted on an even older LCD monitor and running Xmonad. It's a surprisingly fun project. My notes on the build are here: https://hackaday.io/project/174680-distraction-free-linux-ba...

This can be done with modern tech. A lot of the time I use a Debian box for my personal stuff with keyboard and cheap 1080p display. It does not run X at all. It's literally just framebuffer console, tmux and terminals. I don't use a web browser on it either.

A neat side effect of this is the machine I use is a fanless N3010 celeron based Lenovo M600 which feels positively lightning quick if you never go near the www on it. Perhaps 90% of the reason a PC feels like a sluggish POS these days is because there's some chunk of browser stack in there somewhere.

Edit: picture of the set up here: https://imgur.com/yjPMYaX

Cheap Chromebooks work well for this, as long as they're among the models that can be jailbroken and take a proper Linux install. Ample power to run a text editor and a textmode browser (Emacs and eww, or any other, lesser, choice you may prefer), but not enough for graphical browsing and other distractions. Too, since they're specced to run Chrome for a couple hours, you can easily get 8 to 10 hours of battery life running something less absurd.

The keyboards aren't what you call great, but they serve well enough. I like a mechanical keyboard as much as the next dork, but I've never really felt the lack when using the Chromebook for writing.

> Cheap Chromebooks work well for this, as long as they're among the models that can be jailbroken and take a proper Linux install.

Jailbreaking Chromebooks is a huge hassle, though. Much easier to install Linux on a standard box from the past 10 to 15 years. You can also buy cheap low-end hardware with Chromebooks-like specs that will run Linux out of the box.

That's literally my setup in slackware, but you can watch movies in framebuffer, and I surf too (lynx/links/sacc).

        #!/bin/sh
        clear
        setterm -cursor off
        echo -en "\e]P0000000"
        mplayer -really-quiet -vo fbdev2 -vf scale=1280:-2 -cache 2048 "$@"  
        setterm -cursor on
        echo -en "\e]P01d2229"
        clear

Games?

- IF. Lots of them.

- Slashem.

- MUDs.

- Mednafen through framebuffer. Even gamepads work.

Also, if you get used to edbrowse, you can even use some JS ridden sites. Youtube? mpsyt + youtube-dl. Telegram? Bitlbee+IRSSI.

But when you use gopher (gopher://magical.fish and gopher://floodgap.org as a start) everything is instantaneous.

Oh, and, for music the Soma cli tool from slackware. Amazing.

Completely. I’ve actually written a mostly working terminal gopher client in Go which is reminiscent of such browsers :)

Source: https://pastebin.com/B7KqsDRg (no dependencies, no license)

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/vNLO2zJ

Ah, I know it, I tried it long ago, but I prefer sacc.

Is that an actual LCD matrix display? One would think that a small-form-factor e-paper display (the format that's sometimes used for shelf labels and the like) could replace monochrome LCD pretty much everywhere these days.

I always get this terminology confused. My Pebble 2 supposedly has an “e-paper” display, but based on looks I’m pretty sure it’s the same type of screen as what’s in my graphing calculator and my AlphaSmart Dana, although the latter two definitely have less contrast than the Pebble, I assume because they’re older and/or of lower quality.

The pebble 2 is e-paper. The underlying tech is quite different from lcd.

Are you sure? I know Pebble always referred to it as "e-paper", but I recall seeing a lot of people say it's actually a type of LCD screen.

From a quick Google: https://hackaday.com/2014/02/16/fixing-the-unfixable-pebble-...

> The actual screen used in the Pebble is a Sharp Memory LCD.

It's definitely not e-ink btw, which I know is indeed different. It doesn't look anything like e-ink.

My apologies - I stand corrected. I was pretty certain they actually used e-ink, but it is low power LCD.

Two things:

The latency of e-paper doesn't provide a great typing experience.

"These days" isn't really applicable - the Alphasmart devices haven't been made since 2013.

Disclaimer that may invalidate the rest of my post: I tend to prefer scizzor-switch keyboards. For example, I adore the Apple Keyboards that shipped with iMacs up until ~2016, although I strongly dislike their newer “Magic Keyboard” (never mind the Butterfly Keyboard) which IMO has too little travel.

But now that you know my biases, let me say that I think the Alpasmart has a damn good keyboard! The keys are large, have more travel than most modern laptops, and feel quite satisfying to press. If you’re used to a mechanical keyboard and really set on that experience, you may be disappointed, but there’s still a lot to like.

I too thought the key travel was fine with my AlphaSmart 3000, but found them too loud when typing in a conference room. That 500 (no typo) hour battery life with 3 AA batteries though. Brilliant device.

This is why Sir Clive Sinclair's second computer company invented the Z88:

https://oldcomputers.net/cambridge-z88.html

https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=279

https://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/z88/

I have one, and it's a lovely machine. An 8-bit but it can take a meg or so of RAM and a few megs of storage. Unfortunately, on unique, proprietary memory cards.

I would adore a modern version, say running text-only Linux on a RasPi Zero W. No hinge, letterbox mono screen, and a couple of CF or full-size SD slots...

The Alphasmart Neo keyboard has a decent tactile feel for a membrane keyboard.

The LCD displays aren't great on the eyes but they are OK, and they have the benefit of excellent battery life using just standard AAs and much lower latency compared to e-paper.

How does anyone do academic writing without a reference manager?

It’s just for drafts, so you write \cite{somepaper} and fill in the actual keyword later. For those who use it for academic writing such devices remove another distraction from deep fluent writing.

Optionally, markdown also has syntax for references.

"Syntax for references" is not what's being discussed here. What's being discussed is the ability to write \cite{Robinson89}, and have it come out correctly in whatever style you need, by pulling the actual citation data from a database.

Back in my day when I did such things it was just Excel with some macros and filters. What this person is doing is very similar to what I did, but it was a subset as I use macros to pull up things easily and search the text of them. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/organizing-y...

AlphaSmart...

(OH SO MANY FEELS RIGHT NOW)

Wrote so many assignments in Middle School on one of those little guys, then used an ADB cable to dump the text into ClarisWorks on Mac OS 8.

Kids, ask your parents about ClarisWorks.

I have few laptops lying around. I wonder if there is some kind of Linux distribution or some other way to transform laptop into a digital typewriter. No internet, no applications, only a decent text editor (Emacs perhaps).

I have been toying with this concept as custom distro for a while now... I held off because I didn't think there was any interest in it other than as my own vanity project.

A distro that booted into open office only would be nice !

I have been looking for something like this.

One can of course boot more or less directly to Vim: https://raymii.org/s/blog/Vim_as_PID_1_Boot_to_Vim.html

You asked for a decent editor, not a kitchen sink, so I’ll stop here without touching on Emacs.

Pretty much all of them can do this.

Set up your init system to not start a GUI. It will give you a text mode login prompt. Configure it to have the typeface and size that you like. Run your editor of choice -- emacs and vim certainly don't need net access. Remember to mount a USB stick to save backup copies every so often.

You could set up a script for something like Void/Alpine to just launch vim/emacs as soon as you boot, those are both pretty minimalist ootb, you'd just have to remove internet drivers.

Emacs+LateX for anything complicated and Markdown for simple notes and what not :) . At least it works for me

Thank you for those links. In particular, Orcutt's writing process makes a lot of sense!

I used and loved an Alphasmart. I created a web app to mimick it. ponder.joeldare.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com