Fast Minimalist Writing Tool | Hacker News Reader

Fast Minimalist Writing Tool

toolsforthoughts.com

27 pointsWolfOliver17 comments

My minimalist writing tool is the one I wrote: https://enso.sonnet.io.

I must admit that my definition of minimalist is a bit more strict: writing is separated from editing so you can stop censoring or second guessing yourself. You can't edit, select, scroll. The only thing you can do is to put your text on the screen, as a sort of stream of consciousness. I've been using every day it for almost 3 years for journaling and to organise my thinking (ca. 800 words per day). Check it out!

Important: it's not a tool for structured writing. When writing articles with sources, cross-references, I use Obsidian and export the .md files to my blog on 11ty. It's over-engineered, but since I don't have to change anything, actually fast. Plus, [[links]] in Obsidian are a killer feature.

That is an interesting idea. If you made it a writing application and sold it for $10 on the Mac app store instead of a hosted app, then that would be awesome.

Thanks, I'm actually working on it at the moment (and even the price will be similar).

If you want access to a native beta when it comes out, shout. You can find the email in my profile.

(btw, the web app works offline)

The pricing model at https://www.monsterwriter.app/ says:

> Publish an article about MonsterWriter. Include a link to this website and get a license for free.

Thank for you this post. My minimalist writing tool is the GitHub web interface editing README.md or IntelliJ markdown support.

I just update a giant README.md file. My journal (see profile) is a series of markdown headings.

I try write all the time and since 2013 I have 700 short entries for computer ideas.

I suppose if you were writing a book you would need a more involved writing style but this low technology writing style works for me since it keeps me productive.

There's no blog mechanism to maintain or update. There's no static site generator to remember how it works. It's hosted and backed up by at least 2 computers (my computer and GitHub.com) and I can work on it on my Android phone or on my desktop Intel NUC)

Why would anyone use an electron app as a minimalist text editor?

Exactly and most require subscription? Notepad, Gedit, TextEdit, the most minimalist text editors.

Nano.

I use https://ia.net/writer. It does the job and supports templates for quick export to HTML or PDF.

Seconded, iA Writer does a great job of getting out of the way while having enough features to make it pleasant to edit text.

I mostly use Highland 2 - but even then I use the iA Writer font iA Writer Duospace which is exceptionally nice.

As regards Highland 2, in addition to its own format it will load standard Markdown files with a hierarchical document map. Native, fast, light on resources, and the file format is both documented and simple (basically Markdown in a container format).

People seem to have very different ideas about what constitutes a minimal writing tool. For some, the important thing is that the tool excludes other distractions: perhaps it runs full screen, or on dedicated hardware. For me, it is important that the tool gets out of the way: it must not prevent me using other resources for reference; it must start up fast; it must have very little in the way of ribbons and buttons; I need to be able to compare documents on the same screen; and it must not drop non-text in to the text I am working on (so no on-screen markup). I need bullet points, italics, and red text. I need to be able to print in 18pt. Documents must be read/write viable for 30 years. I have a preference for RTF as a format.

Those are simple requirements, but I would be surprised if they match any other person directly. This is the problem with the idea of a minimal editor - people have conflicting requirements. Just consider "red text" for instance: a simple requirement, but it rules out anything based on markdown.

I suspect that the answer has to lie in using subset functionality of existing sw. Personally I use TextEdit, but not with any features which would cause it to save to RTFD.

add this to favorites bar of any modern browser or just open it in any browser window:

data:text/html,<html%20contentEditable>

clean blank slate-- always available - when done copy and paste into whatever your retention system is

> but I need to write this review on Monster writer as the developer is offering a free licence if you blog about it, and this tool seems worth spending that extra time writing about it.

That says enough for me. Backing out and not really going to read the rest of the article. At least the author was honest up-front.

Edit: fast, minimalist; you can use notepad. Or nano/vi. It’s plenty fast and minimalist to boot.

I'm a writer and in my opinion the perfect writing app would be thought-to-text ox better yet thought-to-edit-to-text-to-printer. Sci-fi stuff at the moment alas.

My current go-to writing app is Zettlr with ghostwriter a close second.

I've discovered Enso through a comment here and will give it a try.

And here I am, writing LaTeX code directly

why is the minimalist writing tool so bloated ??

for really simple notes i use FromScratch, it does not even require a saving and structured notes SimpleNote that has all network traffic blocked so that it doesn't mess things up or share my ideas :D

ps. using windows and wanting to be offline

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