Show HN: Aquietplace, a small writing tool | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Aquietplace, a small writing tool

joevennix.com

24 points_joev27 comments

I generally like distraction free writing environments, but i doubt that it's really a good idea to have such without the ability to open / manage multiple "files". If you have to type everything into one textbox, without the possibility to switch context, you are IMO likely to be distracted by what you wrote earlier.

Nonetheless, nice tool!

wakes up 10 hours later to find this on HN homepage

Sorry, originally I had some functionality so that changing URL hash gives you a new file. At some point I switched this to using location.pathname and broke it. Let me add it back :)

Okay, feature implemented :) To work on a new file just change the URL hash

http://joevennix.com/aquietplace#newfile

Nice, i really like the idea of just using URLs for that but not having any specific GUI. Great!

I don't mean to be rude, but what is the utility for this ?

There is plenty of text editor out there, many of them are very good. What is the added value of this tool ?

It's not the first one I've seen, but the general idea is that it lets you write in a completely distraction free environment (when you full-screen it).

WriteRoom (http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom)

DarkRoom (http://jjafuller.com/dark-room)

iA Writer

Write! (http://wri.tt)

To name but a few of these distraction-free writers.

Write! is cool but Windows only. iA Writer isn't free but Dropbox integration and mobile version justify the price for me.

I think the idea is to have the simplest writing tool (no menus, no gadgets, no distracting items). Nice idea.

I tried it with Opera Android and I get a cursor in a white page. I can type but nothing else. Is this a desktop only editor? I sometimes use this tablet to type or annotate Google docs files so there is definitely some space for mobile editors.

I love the black background in full screen feature a lot. I have actually wanted to write this (trivial)tool myself. I do not like others (around me) to read my blog posts or emails before I finish writing them. And this is perfect for getting the initial draft to work with. I usually am distracted by what I'd already written before I finish writing what I wanted to write. This tool helps me not do the root of all evil.

Now the black background in full screen thing seems like a bug to some of you. I think it was unintended too (given the name - aquietplace). But it's definitely a useful feature.

How do you change the background?

You can't, there was a bug in my code when run on firefox fullscreen.

Formatting options would be nice, for now you can copy some text from an external HTML document and it will preserve the formatting. You can then edit this text.

Thanks for the votes :) The code is here if anyone wants to modify it (this site is hosted on github pages):

https://github.com/joevennix/aquietplace

It was not obvious to me how to save my work, other than as a webpage.

Yeah right now there is only saving as the browser allows (print to PDF is another way). I'll add support for saving as a .txt on cmd-S through HTML5 download API in a bit.

Added a cmd-S to save to txt.

I swear by plaintext text editors for pretty much any kind of (non-coding) writing work but nothing beats TextEdit (OS X built-in) in plaintext mode with a good fixed-size font.

Nice, but full screen mode won't accept input on OS X 10.10.3 using Safari 8.0.5.

I can input in the browser and it shows fine. If I full screen it the text remains but it ignores input.

It's a Safari bug unfortunately.

https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/allow-k...

Seems like the best recourse is to disable the feature in Safari. Bummer.

In full screen mode, the entire screen goes black. It still accepts input, but I can't actually see what is being typed.

This is on Mac OSX 10.10.3, using Firefox 37.0.2.

I cannot for the life of me figure out how to fix this. Maybe someone here knows. I define the fullscreen bg color:

    bg:fullscreen, bg:-webkit-full-screen, bg:-moz-full-screen {
      background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);
    }

But it does not get respected

Fixed it with *{background: white;}, strangely enough.

If it could save automatically to a note in evernote/dropbox/whatever with a name automatically created from date of creation, it would be great.

Doesn't do anything in Safari, it's just a textarea. Is it supposed to give you a unique URL per document?

Nice. I was unable to type in full screen mode, using Chrome.

You will have to click the middle again (the textbox) to refocus

Silly bug. Should be fixed now, with a .focus() call.

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