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Comment by nickbarnwell | Hacker News Reader

For those who prefer working offline, I've created a raw-text version of the application here: https://github.com/nickbarnwell/YC/blob/empty_app/form.txt

It was very useful for me when faux-applying to have the dark glow of vim instead of the YC page's harsh white, and I thought I might put it out there for others to use.

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There is a whole spectrum of vision impairments (pun intended) involving excessive sensitivity to bright light. As you might expect, there is no single answer to all of them. A lot of people have trouble with white background and dark text normally seen in applications and on the web.

The best answer is knowing how to configure your software. There's actually a reason for the ancient phrase "User Agent" which predates the web by decades; your software should be an agent for you and handle the details for you much like a Hollywood agent takes care of the details for a star.

You can configure some web browsers to take care of the pesky details for you like fixing dark text on white background:

http://www.designtools.org/pix/news.ycombinator.com_w2013for...

For me, with my config, every website looks basically like that. The web would be nearly unusable for me otherwise.

I can hear the "artistic designer" faction gathering their torches and pitchforks due to me offending their skilled sensibilities with something so ugly, but when you have a disability, often your only choice is between something less cool and nothing at all.

This (and not div shadows) is exactly why CSS was invented. If you're looking for a web browser that lets you quickly change the look for individual web pages, try Opera.

The previous time we applied, we pasted the text version on a google doc and created two versions (main and redacted versions), which we were then shared with the team and our app-reviewers (for the app-reviewers, disable editing and allow only for comments). We found this strategy to be really helpful in gathering feedback and more importantly it helped speed up filling up the app.

I have a whole writing workflow built around using vim and git for testing out new story ideas or structure, and this format works best for in terms of rebasing/merging at the very end. It's really about getting all the distractions out of the way and taking a long, hard look at your business - whatever gets you to that point is awesome :)

For such things I invariably use WriteRoom. I find formatting and futzing with a web app to be built in procrastination mechanisms. It's generally trivial to spend a few minutes copying and pasting once the actual text is done.

http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom

WriteRoom is nice—it's also one of the first distraction-free writing app—but i prefer to use Byword. I like to combine paragraph focus with full screen for distraction free mode. Also it support markdown syntax, that for me is a must have for a writing app.

http://bywordapp.com

I'm partial to writer.vim - aesthetically similar to WriteRoom with none of the foreign keybindings.

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