You can watch how much I rewrite here

> Memory is fallible after all this time but I think he

Waiting with bated breath for the continuation. Not often you see dang write about things which aren't moderation.

edit: After seeing the continuation I'm just nodding along. Very few things could make me abandon Vim.

in replit we just implemented playback mode, it's called history mode, and we do happen to have vi shortcuts (couldn't live without them)

(I'd expect pg to know this already, but hey, here it is)

Ha! I once saw PG writing an essay at his home and he told me what it was about, then when it came out it was so radically different that it felt like not much must have remained. But I didn’t watch long because it does feel intrusive watching someone write. It’s like you’re reading their mind.

> Memory is fallible after so much time but I think he told me later that he wouldn't keep using it because he was so used to vi.

Now I'm wondering if there's a length limit to vim macros...

> ... He was like a little kid about to get a birthday present. IIRC, he wanted it so he could see how he actually writes.

Was that the intent of the feature, or something else?

It seems like this might be coupled to some kind of teaching program that helps you become a more efficient writer. Maybe something that could recap your session and offer a focused lesson on, say writing a paragraph from a prompt.

Especially for someone you've never met before, right after getting through a 30 second "getting to know you" introduction where you don't say anything of substance.

I don’t find it odd at all. I think it’s illuminating.

Sure there’s an observation effect, but this is 1000x more informational than if Paul were to write an essay: “how I write essays”.

It's Sartre's "The Look"

> people want to share this sort of thing

> People change behavior when they are being watched

Maybe they want to share this sort of thing, so they can practice not changing behavior while they're watched.

You don't create these if you're worried about being embarrassed. For most people, this is one of the most embarrassing things a person could do.

I don't use them often, but when I'm doing something new, these kinds of references are absolutely invaluable.

The impression you get from someone describing their process is totally different than seeing it. Especially iterative aspects, false starts, etc. All of those are thing writers AND readers gloss over.

In my experience, some people perform better when operating feels performative. I don't think it's something anyone comes by naturally, though.

That's true for many people, but people also like to show off, or to educate others. I think that recording yourself is just applying new technology to the problem.

For example, Vernor Vinge wrote many of his stories on early computers. He didn't have any way to record that, but his style of annotating the text as he wrote it and thought of ideas or problems turns out to be quite interesting. He eventually shared his annotated text for A Fire Upon the Deep; you can read it at <https://3e.org/vvannot/>.

Although he didn't ever intend to publish them himself, JRR Tolkien kept extensive (but very badly organized) records of how his stories evolved over time. Christopher Tolkien later published stories from those notes, but also successive versions of the same story from different stages of it's development. "Beren and Luthien" is especially fun because you can see Tolkien's mistakes, such as characters like "the appalling Tevildo", Prince of Cats who captures Beren in the earliest surviving draft.

It's a great shame that these links now only show the etherpad landing page!

unfortunately not this gem

https://etherpad.fileplanet.com

Learning to separate the writer from the editor is the single best piece of writing advice I ever got.

For me, if I edit while I'm writing, self doubt gets in the way and I can't get a draft finished.

When I wrote frequently, I was the exact opposite. I couldn’t make myself keep going down a road once I knew it wasn’t leading where I wanted to end up. It was like I’d get halfway to where I wanted to go and then realize I wanted to go somewhere better.

If I tried to just write it all and edit it after, it would feel like I forced myself to a conclusion. I wrote not just to express what I thought but to figure out what I thought. Putting the words on the page just has this way of clarifying my thinking, and I never end up where I thought I was going to when I started.

It might of been Vonnegut who divided writers into bashers and swoopers...this is bashing -- swoopers tend to free write and edit later. But bashers can also edit later, too.

For a writer, the computer (or not) is simply a matter of process just like bashing or swooping. And the world is entirely different for a full time professional writer than for ordinary people who write (I have made the statistical assumption that you are not a full time professional writer).

I mean the waste basket full of the morning's failed pages is a real thing, and if your goal is 500 good words a day, you're potentially in the novel-a-year range.

For what it's worth, the main ideas can go into an outline -- a step the computer encourages skipping. Here it looks like Graham was working from an outline via the ten idea structure. Maybe all first drafts are not equal?

Being old enough to have gotten through college writing papers on pen and paper, you can still do some editing along the way. Use index cards, as an example - you write an outline in a notebook, you write out sentences and paragraphs for each point on an index card, and then you can shuffle the cards around until you nail down the order in which you want to present the content. Once you have it down, you re-write it all onto paper. And often, then mark up your draft and re-write it again with corrections.

I would never go back to that process, of course. It was painful then, and would feel even worse now. But it was possible.

I find the UL is actually better for this use case

Sometimes FORTH shines here. Space is the delimiter. and consequently you can mumble the name on the keyboard without stopping at the moment. you have mix of all digits alphabet and symbols into one token. |alpha| x^y ~x #items [a-b] however YMMV

IIRC they were random letters that do not occur naturally in English words, in order to serve as easily searchable annotation/footnote identifiers. He somewhat already knew they were extra details that would not make it to the main body. Later these get changed [1], [2], etc but you don't want to use these at the outset due to possible reordering/deleting.

Source: I was one of the founders of Stypi and we asked him when porting the data from Etherpad to Stypi.

https://techcrunch.com/2011/08/09/yc-funded-stypi-is-etherpa...

Have been using TK for about four decades of writing, not sure where I picked it up from. An editor who was working with me in my teens I think. More so recently (the past 20+ years) [todo] and [info] and [note] when I have a tangential thought that I need to return to. Interestingly, during an interview with some of the writer's of Star Trek: The Next Generation, or perhaps even Levar Burton, they mentioned that many of the scripts would simply have "TECH" in them for inserting random, technically plausible sounding gibberish that didn't advance the story but could be set aside as a decision point whilst working on the script.

Excellent idea! I will give it a try.

Great idea, will try it out later today, but I have to share a cheap version hack of the same principle:

I write with font size setting of 8pt. It's too small to read comfortably (thus I don't edit), but it still lets me see the overall structure and what I wrote.

Good idea! Will definitely try out Enso. Also, I was almost tempted to reach out for a quick talk and say hi! Maybe some other time I will schedule a 1-on-1! Kudos for being easily approachable. You seem like a fun and interesting person

This is excellent. Thank you so much!

Hey,

I'm a hobby writer and like your idea a lot! I love that you also make the text downloadable in a txt file.

I always feel overwhelmed seeing the text I have written, being aware of what will await me when editing. I would love to have a program on my computer like yours (I'm using windows). Nothing special just an IDE that works exactly the way your website works (I'm not a programmer and love HN for content and comments like yours) I would even happily pay for it.

Let me know if you're planning on doing an app and need a beta tester.

- "It starts with the core points. and if you have more reading time you move the slider and more detail appears,"

That sounds like visibility cycling in org-mode (?)

This is one of those things when freelancing in creative professions. There is a particular (business) type of customer who will always be like: "Why should I pay you so much? It only took you 4 hours!"

The thing is in certain fields it takes dekades to be able to do it in just 4 hours — or it takes dekades to do it at all. If you don't like that, go to your nephew and let him do it as an exercise.

It is worse the more people think "they could do it themselves" — e.g. graphic design is one of those fields where customer interaction can become absolutely exhausting if you have the bad luck of gaining the wrong customer base.

I made something like what you describe, except you click on topics rather than use a slider:

https://skorokithakis.github.io/expounder/

I used to edit books with fanfold printouts and WordPerfect, so I'm familiar with the act.

I find it quite sufficient to compile the text to HTML and read it in the browser, while editing the source. It gives the same shift of context from writing to editing, and it's more closely equivalent to hand-proofing galley prints, since it's in the form the audience ultimately sees.

I would love an iPad app designed around the old-fashioned proof editing flow, using the stylus. I've never seen one and don't know if there's a market for it, but I'd use it every week.

A similar trick is to use the read aloud feature, to read you what you wrote back. Hearing it out loud changes the medium and makes spotting mistakes really easy.

Replace twitter.com with nitter.net in the url.

It's certainly different from how I write. I do most of the repeated rewriting of each sentence in my head before typing it out, rather than after it's down. I'll go back and make edits, but generally only once a logical block is finished and I can read it all together.

That's the cool thing about this; there's normally not much way to know how other people go about the process of writing.

It looks like a fairly inefficient way to write to me. What I've learnt is that writing and editing are two different things, and you shouldn't edit as you write. So you write a first draft quickly, without worrying about the exact words too much, and then edit. The reason this is better is because writing and editing use two different brain "modes" - writing is best done in diffuse mode because it is creative, whereas editing is best done in focused mode.

Well, it's certainly different from Hemingway two-finger typing on a manual typewriter. Or, Jefferson writing on (expensive) paper with a quill pen and iron-gall ink, with only the occasional overstrike.

Supposedly, Kerouac wrote On the Road on a manual typewriter fed with a continuous paper web.

So, yeah, different. Instead of composing a sentence in your head and then writing it down, you waste a lot of time editing it in place. It seems very disorganized to me.

could you tell us more about this ird

I don't know what software this is using, but that could be the history software considering entire edits as single deltas. Editors using CRDT or OT will commonly compress deltas like this.

could be a byproduct of the algo that's recording what he types. Instead of saving the timestamp of each keystroke, it does "every 500ms, save all the characters that have been typed in the last 500ms" or something like that.

To be clear, this is speculation. I haven't actually looked at the code that creates the recording. Just pointing out that the process of recording often alters the recording itself.

EtherPad, see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32896112

Is it a thing that needs fixed though? I find that rewriting helps me think and solidify my ideas.