Show HN: A spreadsheet for writers
zeminary.com
zeminary.com
It's like Excel but without automatic grids. You have to add them manually.
The way I write, I think things and then I think ABOUT things. Word & Excel's structures kinda work for this but not exactly. Excel didn't have enough freedom and was clearly designed for numbercrunching and all the extra features also got in the way of thinking. Word had too much freedom.
Also, they were really slow after a certain size.
So I made Zeminary.
EDIT: my guiding philosophy and roadmap https://twitter.com/Zeminary/status/1432571606744899587
Maybe make a video where you write something in the boxes and explain why they go where they go.
Not having the prior context of “excel for writers”, makes the new context “better excel for writers” impossible to get.
COPYPASTE: A video would take a really long time. I'll make one when I'm done fixing everything. One thing you could try right now is making a 10x10 grid, then clearing the borders of the 2nd column from the left. Everything on the right would be inspiration or raw material. The leftmost column would be the actual draft.
Zeminary to me is supposed to be an Ideamusicsheet.
I didn't want to call it that in my post cause that just ... sounds a bit kooky.
https://twitter.com/Zeminary/status/1432571606744899587
Zeminary is more for artists than technologists.
Artists are very concerned with relationships of meaning and time.
When I write, I really only have one main line of thought, but to grasp what that thought means, I have to decompose it. I need to write to the side, to show that at this point in time, this and other thoughts arise. I don't want just the final line, I want to see all the lines that make up that line.
That's overkill for alot of usecases, but necessary for mine.
I also do alot of annotations of dense philosophical works. I have to seriously grasp them because I want my art to cohere.
I guess you could say Zeminary is a metathinking app. Or a chordal or a contrapuntal thinking app. It makes Ideamusic more deliberate.
You can do the same work in other places, but Zeminary makes it alot easier for me. For example, writing in one place doesn't cause everything else to shift around. Images and extra context local to a specific grid can be hidden in that grid (scrollable). The soft shadows help to "bleed" ideas. You can unborder grids to separate context. The bareness and the lack of distracting UI helps me to focus. Movable mindmaps are easier to pull off. There's marks, there's multipoint comments. There's alot of subtle touches. Etc. I'll be adding more feature layers in the future.
One of my future art projects is to write a 4096 part work based on the King Wen Sequence. 64 x 64 = 4096. It'll be very dense. I'm making Zeminary Tensor for that.
Zeminary Tensors might even become an app of choice for anyone looking to author & publish large textworks.
And progressive summarization / expansion / composition.
And analogical thinking.
So it's a non linear writing app.
EDIT: Actually, no you're right. It's nonlinear.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-GECsGXoAEU3l6?format=png&name=...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-GEQbGWUAAmZJ5?format=png&name=...
It's kinda "out there" tbh.
It would be nice to be able to export this as a docx, xlsx and pdf file. Importing is perhaps impossible, but exporting should be doable.
> The way I write, I think things and then I think ABOUT things.
I don't understand. You are talking about writing a book? About writing an internal memo for your team?
Writing books, movies, screenplays, etc. Contexts where subtext is heavy. Contexts where meaning per time is dense.
I'm planning to be able to export this as an HTML on top of those formats.
You'll be able to upload your Zeminary writings as a static webpage.
I'll change the indentations.
When I work on stuff it drives some people nuts because the idea I have is to spread all the pieces spatially so I can see all the parts at all times as I take things apart, and then condense it in as I finish. So when taking things apart, it uses a larger area. People like my dad will take things apart and all the parts get mixed into a place I find it hard to remember where they went, my short-term memory is shit.
For writing, I've always felt there hasn't been tools that allow writers that need to scatter parts/ideas and be able to drag them around and arrange them. Sometimes on writing papers and long-form works I write the bits, then later on 'stitch' them together. I can't remember if I just file in a note software, doesn't work super well.
Needs some UX work to better explain this, I hope I'm describing something along the lines of what you're trying to create, but that's how I'd use this.
Tangentially, for anyone wondering — Zeminary isn't meant to replace other PKM and writing apps. You can have your ideas elsewhere, then assemble them in Zeminary.
Zeminary is complementary.
That doesn't tell me anything other than "you need to be logged in".
Why make your project depend on twitter? I need to have a twitter account and login just to read the project help?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-GECsGXoAEU3l6?format=png&name=...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-GEQbGWUAAmZJ5?format=png&name=...
The roadmap is on that tweet. It relates to Zeminary and what's in the images.
You can edit a paragraph without shifting the whole text.
It gets really useful when you have to write a book or thesis or movie script. Anything very long really.
Something I noticed working with the JS editor in Zeminary was that the load time increased exponentially with more and more text and formatting.
So chunking it helped to offset that problem. I don't know if Word has that problem. But I know I can load the Zeminary equivalent of a 100k words formatted Word file in about 5% or 10% the time.
It is natural to be able to drag. Maybe pressing some key so that doesn't happen accidentally, or have some snap in corner that must be dragged.
Resizing... we do intuitively within OS for decades...
Adding. Perhaps + sign can be added in the adjacent column/row, that spawns new one.
Having other commands within right click would also be helpful. Well, that's at least how we are used to use word/excel.
What's the problem with drag to resize?
I'll add tooltips as someone else suggested earlier.
I'll add hover options to make it easier to add new rows and columns.
I've been relying on hotkeys for a long time (you can click the question mark to see the interactions and hotkeys available to you). Thanks for bringing up those mouse-related UI problems.
Also, set the title attribute on your navbar item divs and modal editor toolbar buttons, otherwise there is no idea what each does. Clicking the '?' for help is useful, but I still don't have any idea what menu icons do even after looking at the source for some of the function names. I don't even see the Unicode characters for the file & modal editor, they are just the U+25A1, white square (representing a missing ideograph). I doubt many first-time visitors / potential users will even click to view the modal editor, it seems great.
I think I get the idea of each square being a cell, not showing empty cells like Excel does for a blank page. Then you fill in each cell in the grid and add/remove rows/columns as desired. So it could wind up looking like a Trello board if you wanted to use it that way.
Thanks for catching those UTF-8 errors.
Thanks for letting me know about the title attribute.
Yeah, I actually used it exactly like a higher resolution Trello to plan out this and other apps and the roadmap.
I'll make an example document sometime soon and post it on hackernews as guerilla marketing.
It seems to mimic how I take notes: I make sections on a blank piece of paper (ordered by subject/context) and I have never found a good way how to translate this to an editor, where everything is top to bottom. This way I can organize my screen with notes much more like I would organize a piece of paper.
Can you tell me more about your usecases?
I'll add tutorial text to the grids you see right now.
I did half-ass the launch. I didn't expect it to actually be on the landing page of hackernews. I was expecting to just have a few users to talk to about it.
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Alot of people asked for usecases. I'll make example documents in the future. Some off the top of my head:
(1) translating & comparing & annotating translations
(2) annotating dense works in humanities / philosophy and law
(3) annotating books & film scripts & editing them & playing with their text
(4) writing an essay where i have to juggle many ideas at once / i put the ideas on the side or the comments while weaving them into the draft (like joecool1029)
(5) planning the company roadmap / the vertical line is events by time / the horizontal is extra details about the event
(6) storyboarding films / keeping track of characters, settings, cameras, etc.
(7) writing a book
Just a quick question: Is your text formatting based on markdown? If yes, is there an option for the user to enter markdown code?
It's Quill WYISWG. Quill has markdown modules. I'll go test them and then maybe add them in later.
The markdown module works well as long as you don't use the fulleditor and the floateditor. But this creates an inconsistent user experience. I've decided to leave it out as a core feature for now.
I'll revisit it in the future. If I can fix it, great. If I can't, I might put it in with warnings that it doesn't work for the fulleditor and the floateditor.
> "hover the topright of this grid to see the mark button, then click it to mark this grid, then right click the mark sidebar item to edit this grid in the free editor"
I don't see a grid anywhere on the screen. I tried hovering in various top-right corners to figure out where a "mark" button might come up, but to no avail.
I suspect the word "grid" means something else in this application than the usual visual meaning (a regular network of orthogonal lines). You should probably define it first.
Straight from Excel.
I quite literally feel like https://i.imgur.com/57bKUlt.jpg
However, if this works for you...then great :-)
But I must agree with most comments here: You need to explain the why and show the benefits if you want to convince people to become users. It's not very evident.
For starters, Matrix (Classic) is only 2000 lines of code right now. This makes the codebase easy to maintain, and easy for developers to grok/mod.
Other than that, I think limitations are a good thing. You don't need 3D or 4D or XD when 2D is enough. Freedom can mean the freedom to fuck up.
What does thisvdo that treesheets doesn't?
Well, there's nothing this or Treesheets does that nothing else (in MS Office) can't do or approximate. It's just different degrees of freedom and fuckupability. More degrees of freedom means more ways to misdirect attention. This is very bad for classicalish artists who have to take in the whole work and make and edit each part with the whole in mind. But also for people writing long books. Zeminary is biased towards getting big things done.
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Things off the top of my head A
I had a discussion a while ago about how email being uneditable is actually a feature. It forces you to focus more on writing and less on editing. Email threads also force you to understand a thing in time. Being able to forward and do emaily things helps you to get feedback. All this helps to free you from perfection so that you can / are free to perfect. But the foundation is uneditability.
Standardization comes with limits. It makes for better communicability. People aren't met with the possibility of a mess of explicit hierarchies. Authors aren't so freely given the possibility.
Limits are features.
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Things off the top of my head B
It's easier to get into FPSs vs MOBAs because you only need to know a few things to get started. WASD to move. SPACE to jump. Leftclick to shoot. Rightclick to zoom. Something to crouch with, something to sprint with. It's also easier to get into some MOBAs than others because you only need to know a few maps and movesets. Both types of games are very fun, very profitable, very complicated. But FPSs are obviously easier for people to pick up on and enjoy — the learning curve to complex fun ratio is just better.
I deleted links & backlinks from Matrix / Tensor Classic in the last week before the launch. I'm saving them & alot of other things for Matrix / Tensor Pro. I think links and references lock you prematurely into premature mental models. I know for some of my artwork, I've iterated on the concept alone 50 to 100 times, then on the work itself 50 to 100 times.
One of my overarching principles for life and work is the "Multidimensional Thermopylae". I try to limit the surface areas of confrontation (making apps, doing things, etc.) to just a single point or easily addressable set of points, then I punch with everything I got. I try to set up my life to maximize those "Multidimensional Thermopylaes".
Zeminary is meant to be a "Multidimensional Thermopylae" for certain kinds of work, (chordal/contrapuntal/holistic thinking).
A video would take a really long time. I'll make one when I'm done fixing everything. One thing you could try right now is making a 10x10 grid, then clearing the borders of the 2nd column from the left. Everything on the right would be inspiration or raw material. The leftmost column would be the actual draft.
Andy Matuschak talks alot about peripherals. I don't know if you know his writings.