phew, exhausting. Neat idea, only annoying thing: makes my computers fans spin
The Most Dangerous Writing App
51–60 of 193 posts
Re: The Most Dangerous Writing App
#52I don’t think this is particularly useful as it does not let you to fully form an idea in your head. Granted, it forces you to spew out your mind but in that case I would prefer to have a voice recorder with good speech to text algorithm. Also I would like to have a mode when an amount of text, rather than the length of session would be considered because for things like this HN comment even 3 minutes is too long. No…
> I don’t think this is particularly useful as it does not let you to fully form an idea in your head. Granted, it forces you to spew out your mind but in that case I would prefer to have a voice recorder with good speech to text algorithm.
Hi, I really wonder sometimes what to type but I think that it's fine to just have a stream of consciousness flow through. But the purpose of writing is to have someone read something later. And it so happens that a stream of consciousness is not at all interesting to read. I think that the key to good writing will be writing with a structure in mind. And there are two ways to do this. First you can do this using a planning phase that sets out everything you want to say. If you use this approach then the seams of your plan will be evident in the structure of your prose. The second way you can use structure is to keep writing streams of consciousness, keep telling stories from the top of the head, and then continue to improve as you do it. In a sense this comes down to the old way of practicing sports. The two ways are to practice as a slow speed and then focus on skill and practice speeding up. The other way is to keep playing at full speed and practicing getting better at such a speed. Neat!
Re: The Most Dangerous Writing App
#53This reminds me of early versions of Microsoft Word. Edit: And more generally, DOS, FAT and CHKDSK. You never knew, when there was a power interruption -- or when the system just crashed for whatever mysterious reason -- just how bad it would be. NTFS was such an improvement.
I still have a habit of pressing CTRL-S intermittently...
I think everyone older than 30 does.
I also have the habit of pressing it more than one time, every time I press it.
I'm not even be sure that save will really save.
Re: The Most Dangerous Writing App
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damn. I was almost going to guess that. One of my clients was still using WordPerfect for DOS in the late 90s. They didn't want to deal with the retraining cost for secretaries and paralegals. I always did like WordPerfect much more than Word. It was fundamentally a markup-style text editor. And you could switch to raw-text mode if necessary, and actually edit the markup. Word, on the other hand, is entirely opaque.
Word is pilcro hell. God knows where what formatting came in. Onenote is a disaster. There’s a reason these apps have a “format painter”.
Hey, thanks! I didn't know that ¶ is a pilcro.
But yeah, you can edit the format on one little paragraph, and the entire document format changes. I do understand that one should define styles for documents, but I've never had the patience for that.
Re: The Most Dangerous Writing App
#55This reminds me of early versions of Microsoft Word. Edit: And more generally, DOS, FAT and CHKDSK. You never knew, when there was a power interruption -- or when the system just crashed for whatever mysterious reason -- just how bad it would be. NTFS was such an improvement.
I can remember Word on SCO Xenix from around '89 or so which I don't think was particularly unstable.
In '89, I was on DOS. It was unstable.
Re: The Most Dangerous Writing App
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still have a habit of pressing CTRL-S intermittently...
So do I. Also the habit of saving multiple copies, as a revision history. Because Word occasionally wrote garbage to files, while crashing.
Consider using org-mode [1] as your primary word processor and committing revisions to git. I recommend org-mode because org documents are saved as plain text and therefore can be easily diffed. org-mode can also be exported to many formats [2]. If you are concerned about how the look and feel of writing in plain text might impact your experience authoring a document, there are lots of editor specific tutorials for beautifying the presentation of org documents. Here is one such article on beautifying org documents in emacs [3]. Also, if you choose emacs as your editor and you are uncomfortable using git, then I recommend magit [4] because it makes git functionality highly discoverable.
[2] https://orgmode.org/manual/Exporting.html#Exporting
[3] http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/orgmode-wordprocess...
Re: The Most Dangerous Writing App
#57This is awesome! It needs a short domain so it's easy to access :)
Re: The Most Dangerous Writing App
#58Ah, you can paste. I pasted ~6000 words of "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, ..." in hardcore mode, before I gave up.
Re: The Most Dangerous Writing App
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
So do I. Also the habit of saving multiple copies, as a revision history. Because Word occasionally wrote garbage to files, while crashing.
Consider using org-mode [1] as your primary word processor and committing revisions to git. I recommend org-mode because org documents are saved as plain text and therefore can be easily diffed. org-mode can also be exported to many formats [2]. If you are concerned about how the look and feel of writing in plain text might impact your experience authoring a document, there are lots of editor specific tutorials for b…
Thanks. I mainly write in Geany, these days.
Re: The Most Dangerous Writing App
#603 minutes typing: This is me writing a comment for this app using hardcore mode which right now I realise is having the text co clompletely blurred and it is quite hard indeed I can barely come back a word if I write a type. Although it doesnt seem to be based onmy typing speed so I guess if you are good at typing it's not as bad as if you are bad at it. Well I don't what to say more than that the interface is nice a…
Wow I’m typing on my phone and I can’t see anything. I suppose if I don’t keep typing this will be all read I mean deleted. Oh well. Such is life. It reminds me of free writing. It is a form of free writing that is enforced I guess that’s useful. For things like writers block and what not.
But what am I to say? Nice product? I guess it’s a cool proof of concept. But I don’t see myself using it. It is more like a neat little toy, almost like performance art.
It is a new form of medium, where the rules are enforced onyoi. I suppose there are other such forms of modes. Does this bring with it anything u inquest and of lasting value? Or is it mostly single player entertainment?
I wonder if something similar can be done for multiplayer chat. Text that mimics actual social interaction in a new way is interesting. Such as IRC and twitter. Maybe even communicating with gifs.
Only time will tell what will last. Normal text yes, movies sure.
I find myself speeding up more for the 3’ deadline