I'm a PhD student, and as a result often have to write. I've always had the problem of editing as I type, constantly back tracking, writing alternate versions of a sentence, insisting that I get it right the first pass.

Increasingly, I've taken to outlining my work (like Xe Iaso recommends[0]) on pad and paper (helps if you have a nice pen and nice paper), and then trying to write a stream of consciousness for each section.

Then, I'll go to my text editor of choice and start forming more coherent, cogent, and discrete thoughts and arguments from the previous word salad.

All to say, I appreciate that typewriters make it really hard to revise your work while you're writing as it facilitates that draft phase. Same deal with writing in pen, you can only scratch out so much before the page becomes an ink rag.

Perhaps this implementation was sloppy in that it _only_ has this no-cursor/no-backspace mode. A physical dial could be a cool alternative ("Draft Mode", "Editing Mode")

[0] https://xeiaso.net/blog/doing-a-writing