Show HN: wābisābi — distraction-free writing
A simple, in-browser, fullscreen text editor (a la WriteRoom and Byword.app) http://wabisabi.cc
Feedback welcome!
Feedback welcome!
- This uses a proportional font. Most web-based editors I've seen so far used monospace, which, frankly, makes them bad for writing prose. The font is really nice, too. Also, importantly, proper line spacing! - The F11 feature is clever. - The word count on the bottom is unobtrusive and elegant.
My use case is writing long (30.000 words+) documents with few formulae. Right now I use Vim, which is nice feature-wise, of course, but not perfect for prose. I write using "markdown" markup, for headings, italics and so forth. I use pandoc to turn it into LaTeX and xelatex to turn that into a PDF. It works beautifully, even for academic texts.
What I love about Vim are its key-bindings. It would be fantastic to add this to wabasabi. I don't whink I'll use another editor which doesn't have this feature. I'm sure I am in a tiny minority in this respect.
You could also add pandoc integration in the future. It's a great piece of software. It also has a few extensions to markdown, including footnotes and bibliographic references. It's extensible as well.
I just wrote this comment using wabisabi, and I like the experience a lot. Are you going to turn this into a commercial project? If you need help, send me a mail (in my profile).
Regarding key bindings, I'm planning on adding some soon, so that it can be fully interacted via keyboard (not sure if I'll use vim bindings exclusively — non-geeks don't know about vim).
On pandoc integration, it's complicated, since the server-side is implemented in node.js. Anyway, my To-Do has an item on supporting markdown :)
Finally, this won't be commercialized. As long as I have few-to-none costs supporting the hosting, it'll be free forever (i.e., why the heck people have to pay for these kind of editors?)
So I'm reluctant to invest any time in it. You need to stay around and make me come back.
The F11 thing is clever, but please also add a mouse-clickable button.
The name also probably means something relevant, but it's impossible for me to remember.
Here's an idea: get listed on the Chrome Web Store. If I install your app from there, I'll see it every time I start Chrome.
* mouse-clickable button: APIs for handling the fullscreen state of browsers are still nascent (Chrome 15 and Firefox 9-ish?), so it's a matter of months until adding it;
* Chrome Web store: already on the to-do (plus 100% offline usage via HTML5 manifest).
Cheers.
HTML5 manifest is now activated, feel free to use it offline :)
I'd much rather, though, just see a list of my documents than the too clever hidden dropdown. Right now it's two clicks and a three-key stroke just to open a saved document. Not so wabi-sabi.
And the word count is useful, but for "distraction-free writing" I shouldn't be forced to see it all the time.
Indeed, the chosen design is a compromise between simplicity and practicality (I just couldn't imagine having a file/document browser taking up much space). Nevertheless, I'm thinking on having 0-9 shortcut keys to select documents.
Regarding dimming the word/char count, you're right. Will be fixed on the next iteration!
To leave fullscreen mode, you press the same shortcut key that enables fullscreen.