Earnest – A writing tool for first drafts
moreofless.co.uk
moreofless.co.uk
One problem I have writing is that I've spent ~25 years conditioning myself not to write first drafts, by doing so much writing on BBSs, then Usenet, then mailing lists, then (briefly) blogs and finally on boards (the new Usenet). As a result, I lack the discipline to get my thoughts on a page and then walk away.
Draftin solves this for me by making it so easy to collect reviews (by sharing links to drafts with friends or interested people) that I feel compelled to do that every time I write something.
I'm also surprised at how little I miss emacs (my normal writing environment) when writing on Draft. I almost prefer Draft's interface.
It's a little more restrictive since you can't move the caret. However, you can 'delete' mistakes by striking them out. Also, when you save your draft, text you've struck-out is excluded.
I turned it into a desktop app for mac since I wanted something which would work offline and save/read files nicely but you can preview the basic writing experience in browser (http://llllll.li/typewriter/app/). The code is also on Github: https://github.com/davidmerfield/Typewriter
> Earnest shows you the number of words in your text, useful for people who need to hit a particular word-count, but it only re-calculates the number every minute to deter you from constantly keeping an eye on your progress. The word-count should not be a distraction from your writing.
I would maybe have the counter be real-time, but require the user to leave the keyboard (or some other significant action) to show it? (ex: on mouseover). I was trying this out and still was looking at the "0 words" and thinking "damn, I wonder how many words there are."
It's potentially more useful, though, because when you're done "no backspace" writing, you can switch to normal mode and get all the features of a full collaborative piece of software.
It's a lot like learning programming. There is a lot that is unknown, but learning is exciting, and the potential is clear to the budding author. Unfortunately, the available tools and feedback systems for writers are extremely primitive compared to what is available to programmers.
In the cases I've observed, emerging writers often can intuit errors in their writing, but lack the skillset to correct said errors. Lacking tools like spelling- and grammar-check then causes anxiety for the user. And in my own personal development as a writer, I know that my spelling skill only improved with the introduction of ubiquitous spelling-correction indicators in browsers. I would often try to correct the spelling mistake on my own so I wouldn't have to grab the mouse to right-click the broken word.
So, against my initial judgement that spell-check was a detriment to mean-time-to-first-draft, I eventually came to re-enable spelling check in my own writing tool: https://www.justwritedammit.com.
If you're serious about helping writers be more productive, please consider joining me. JWD is open-source, free software. https://www.github.com/capnmidnight/JWD.
> There's no need to name you text
> Earnest will auto-save you work
your* writing, your* text, your* work
Was the value proposition written in Earnest?
I like the concept though.
But, yeah, it was written using Earnest and the first draft of it looked much worse.
Imagine you log in to Wordpress as 'contributor' and write with the 'Earnest' plugin, no edits possible, but still in the knowledge that you are writing for the blog and surrounded by the WP interface you know well. The autosaved article would only be 'draft'.
Then, you log in as 'editor' to do the editing, with the regular WP editor.
For me I could see the attraction of such a work flow and it would not be like I was having to learn a new tool, as is the case here.
I would love an option to have bigger text size for writing. The current editing text is too small for comfort.
The text on the info page is also far too small for me. Sorry to sound like I'm whining.
I spotted one typo - "Earnest automatically saves you writing every". I gave up reading because my eyesight is so bad and I just couldn't read the smaller text.
I do really freaking like the idea though. I will be using it. Is there any way to send you a (small) amount of money?
Thanks for the kind words, glad you liked it. Are you viewing Earnest on a table or phone? Think I need to tidy my CSS up a bit for smaller screens.
You can achieve a remarkably similar effect with
cat <<EOF >file
And I actually use it on occasion. Usually for initializing README files, occasionally longer texts.
I suppose the minuscule details of life are better left in the hands of others (or software, for that matter). When spell checks, word counts and the like are left outside one's realm of thought, it's easier to focus on what's truly meaningful - in this case, the content itself, rather than grammatical intricacies.
Premature optimization is an enormous problem in both code and prose. This tool's core purpose is to remove that temptation, I guess, though I'm not fanatic about the concept. If modern word processors are too distracting, and their advantages aren't necessary, I'd prefer to write on physical paper instead. It brings the same "don't look back" mentality.
The auto save would be nice though.
Here's a similar, though uglier, idea[0] for the console, the console because less opportunity for hn, facebook, distractionware, etc. Backspace deletes the whole word.
I like to correct obvious mistakes, such as typos, when i see it. I like to insert a paragraph, or a phrase, on a early section, when i think of it. I like to erase whole paragraphs that a new one I just wrote contradict or substitute.
I am starting to write some essays and this would be perfect, except for this write-only. You disrupted too much my process.
Thanks for checking it out.
It's perfectly sensible and appropriate that such a request would be rejected. It's really no different than, say, requesting that the directory listing functionality of the ls command be removed. Yeah, it is a suggestion, but it's surely not a viable one.
EDIT: and it works on smartphones, too, which I've personally been using to get some writing done on my galaxy note 2 while on the go or at the coffee shop/bar.
Put another way -- you don't have to make something entirely impossible to discourage a user from doing it. What other ways are there to reduce in-place editing?
Just one idea: don't show what people are writing for more than a few seconds, and then gradually fade it away.
They avoid the distractions of spell checking and all that, while still saving files locally, and while still allowing you to delete text you've written.
I certainly wouldn't view it as a substitute for a regular editor, but a tool for a different job.
I don't advocate that we should all follow GRRM's lead for our writing, but I'm wondering whether the race to introduce text editors with ever-decreasing functionality is actually taking us somewhere particularly useful. In 1994, I could run a DOS word processor called Nota Bene that supported movement, selection, deletion and transposition by word, sentence, line, paragraph and phrase, and could near-instantly index and do Google-esque boolean searches on entire project folders, showing you search terms in context. (And of course it had its own multiple file, window and clipboard support, IIRC with multiple clipboards.) While the editors are surely a lot prettier twenty years later, could we stop dicking around with ways to prevent me from editing and start coming up with ways to help me edit better?