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Write thin to write fast

breckyunits.com

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Re: Write thin to write fast

#131

Post by goatherders »

Sirenos wrote: post #94
goatherders wrote: post #65

Really interested to try this out. I crank out between 5 and 15 content pieces each week (blog posts, ebooks, white papers) and am constantly looking for ways to optimize my workflow. It has never occurred to me to modify column width to get a "jump start" on the editing process. Excited to futz around with this tomorrow.

Any tips for someone who is struggling to get barely 1 piece done per week?

Work hard on the outline. Go as deep as you can for a while on the outline as it makes the piece itself simple.

Tools like the Hemingway editor are quite valuable as well.

Re: Write thin to write fast

#133

Post by finder83 »

I have an irrational hatred of columns. My master's degree reading includes many articles in journals that use columns, and pieces from the 1800s which are in columns, and I almost always feel anxiety with opening them for the first time. I felt that same anxiety for this website.

I think part of the reason is that actually scrolling a page with columns is a pain if you are zoomed in to make the text legible. You can't just scroll one direction on a tablet, you have to scroll down then back up and slightly over, scroll down again, then back up, etc. Sometimes you lose your place and have to zoom out to find what column you were previously on. Even then if I have the choice between a print book with columns and without (such as the Bible), I will always choose without.

Re: Write thin to write fast

#134

Post by telotortium »

supersrdjan wrote: post #107
siscia wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the line break to be semantical important! So it is different if there is or if there is not a line break. How do you manage it? Double line break?

Pandoc ignores single line breaks when exporting markdown. So all of this would be treated as a single sentence. But an empty space in between indicates a new paragraph. If for some reason you require to have separate lines, perhaps when enumerating something, you can leave two trailing spaces after the line, that preserves the break.

Instead of leaving two trailing spaces, I tend to just use `
`, which is more explicit.

Re: Write thin to write fast

#135

Post by telotortium »

carl-erwin wrote: post #96
telotortium wrote: post #88

It would be cool if you could automatically do this in a browser, by essentially telling the browser to render a very long screen and then split it into however many columns fit on your screen (imagine taking a screenshot of your window, going down a page, taking another screenshot, and so on, and then putting these screenshots side by side). Questions: - Are there Ebook readers that can show many pages at once? - Ca…

Hi, In Emacs, it is possible by using "follow-mode": Open a "large" file. M-x follow-mode C-x 3 ;; to split vertically And adjust splits width as many times needed. I usually use 3 splits with "visual-line-mode" enabled.

Yeah, I tried that out. It works pretty well, except that it's not always obvious how the files relate to each other at a glance - I tried it out on an Org-mode file with a lot of small headlines, so that made it more difficult. It would be nice to see in my modeline which window shows which part of the file.

Re: Write thin to write fast

#136

Post by thaumasiotes »

speleding wrote: post #114
thaumasiotes wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The OP thinks that humans read thinner columns faster. Generally, this seems not to be the case, so maybe we should treat his main conclusion with some skepticism. > In any case, it's probably best to refer to the scientific literature. You might not think so if you read the literature review which takes up most of that paper. The literature covered is generally focused on questions of no obvious interest and then,…

Your points help with discounting the claim that long lines read faster. But that does not say anything about OP's claim that short lines are better. I'm not convinced by OP's argument "New York Times does it": pretty much any book does the opposite. Perhaps we need more/better research. For what it's worth, I set my screen to be very wide when I write because I like to write each sentence on a single line: it allows…

Your points help with discounting the claim that long lines read faster. But that does not say anything about OP's claim that short lines are better.

Yes, that's true. I was not trying to dispute or support OP's claim that short lines are better. I was trying to dispute my immediate parent's claim that the way to handle questions like this is to refer to the scientific literature.

Re: Write thin to write fast

#137

Post by thaumasiotes »

grey-area wrote: post #120
thaumasiotes wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The OP thinks that humans read thinner columns faster. Generally, this seems not to be the case, so maybe we should treat his main conclusion with some skepticism. > In any case, it's probably best to refer to the scientific literature. You might not think so if you read the literature review which takes up most of that paper. The literature covered is generally focused on questions of no obvious interest and then,…

On HN, your line here is 200 characters in 9pth Verdana, so it's also pretty extreme (perhaps because I have a wider screen). Personally I find the max line length on HN really uncomfortable. > nature of the longest line, i.e. 132 characters in 12 point Arial (rather than 10 point Arial used by Dyson and Kipping). The line length therefore not only has more characters but is also physically longer because of the larg…

> On HN, your line here is 200 characters in 9pth Verdana, so it's also pretty extreme (perhaps because I have a wider screen).

I'm actually doing two things to shorten the line width as measured in characters. #1, my browser window is set to a size I find reasonable, not fullscreen. #2, I have HN configured at "110% zoom" (not sure precisely what that means, but it's how Firefox reports it), which makes the text larger and therefore allows fewer characters per line.

Re: Write thin to write fast

#138

Post by telotortium »

telotortium wrote: post #88

It would be cool if you could automatically do this in a browser, by essentially telling the browser to render a very long screen and then split it into however many columns fit on your screen (imagine taking a screenshot of your window, going down a page, taking another screenshot, and so on, and then putting these screenshots side by side). Questions: - Are there Ebook readers that can show many pages at once? - Ca…

Update: I've managed to get at least part of this working by combining Emacs' built-in follow-mode with the built-in (I believe) eww browser, creating a multi-column browser. Here it is showing the GNU Emacs Wikipedia page: https://i.redd.it/t9joft2nbvy71.png

Re: Write thin to write fast

#139

Post by telotortium »

gauchojs wrote: post #99
telotortium wrote: post #88

It would be cool if you could automatically do this in a browser, by essentially telling the browser to render a very long screen and then split it into however many columns fit on your screen (imagine taking a screenshot of your window, going down a page, taking another screenshot, and so on, and then putting these screenshots side by side). Questions: - Are there Ebook readers that can show many pages at once? - Ca…

VsCode: a single thin column is possible: turn on Zen Mode, word Wrap, and slide the bar for a thin editor.

Thanks, but I feel that the benefit of thin columns only really comes when you can keep many of them on the page at once.
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