Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by laboratorymice | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

laboratorymice

Genuinely curious, why do you use that web app over whichever bare-bones editor is available on your system?

View on HN

Because the web app is exactly the experience I want to have while writing:

Nothing on my screen except two areas: The writing area and the margin around it.

I want to be able to easily resize the writing area the way I can resize the textarea.

I want to be able to easily change the font size via ctrl+ and ctrl-.

I get that with vim and suckless terminal... Why do you need a browser for that?

Not everybody wants to use a terminal

does it have spellcheck? text-to-speech so you can have it read back to you? A browser window would have those things (on a mac, and I assume there's equivalents in windows)

Funny, Firefox on Mac sure doesn't integrate with the native text to speech, or offer it's own without plugins as far as I can tell. Gee it's almost like all browsers aren't exactly the same

And yes, of course Vim has spellcheck.

I have never seen a terminal solution that allows to have the terminal in fullscreen mode and still have a way to have a user defined writing area which can be resized on the fly.

I have experimented with various distraction free vim plugins but they were all fragile and cumbersome.

If you have a solution, a screenshot would be very interesting.

tmux would be worth checking out. If you’re happy with the browser though then that works too!

I haven't maintained a Vim config in a few years now (more of an Emacs man now), but I do remember using Goyo in college. Looking back at it, I think it might scratch your itch as far as Vim plugins go, it even allows you to resize the area on the fly.

https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim

Goyo is one of the plugins I experienced as brittle and cumbersome. IIRC it creates the centered text area by creating 9 windows. The outter 8 to center the one in the middle, which is used to edit the text.

In my attempts to use it, that created a bunch of issues.

> Nothing on my screen except two areas: The writing area and the margin around it.

what's wrong with the so called "zen mode" that has been available on every moderately popular editor for decades?

See also JRR Martin still using WordStar 4.0 for DOS

https://cdn.eteknix.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/37719_2_g...

https://www.thebookdesigner.com/7-distraction-free-writing-e...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com