Show HN: First Draft (beta) – distraction-free writing for first drafts
beta.firstdraft.io
beta.firstdraft.io
My one gripe is when I export to Google Docs for further editing, it has some weird formatting. The words don't get wrapped, and adding new lines of text pushes everything down a new line, not sure how to get rid of that.
Also, the editor does not accept accented letters (Ä Ö Ü ä ö ü etc.), no Greek (Δεν Έλληνες), in short no Unicode, and not even full ASCII (common punctuation marks like — –).
It seems the app is listening to keys and basically re-implementing the whole typing input — which means you’d be in for some very heavy very low-level stuff (support for all of the 128k Unicode codepoints)…
I guess you’d had to do such a workaround to wrap the lines yourself, and move them up steps-wise, one line at a time (instead of the native scrolling behaviour). Though I really like the typewriter effect, one could ask if that isn’t at a very big expense (both in implementation effort and multi-language support).
The idea of the app (and it’s adequate name) is nice, though: stripping down even the most basic editing features (cursor moves) effectively forces one to focus on the writing at hand. Love it.
It was a huge pain to recreate a textarea, but worthwhile in that I could finely tune the editing experience. I started out with a textarea, but as I tried to disable certain parts, it just became very apparent that I couldn't hack it to death. Better to start over and fake it. It was very interesting learning about the logic behind word-wrap!
For now, I've added a cmd-L or ctrl-L shortcut to open up the last page view.
Another note, line endings and text handling is somehow broken in the final google docs.
1) I wanted to learn Common Lisp. CL does indeed rock.
2) I wanted a way to finish my first drafts, usually for short stories, but also for novels.
The idea is that I'd like to dump the words out with as little editing as possible. If I can do that, I'll have a better chance of actually finishing the first draft.
Right now, it can export your file to Google Docs, and from there you can save locally.