From cca23935351965349c65c48d8c02edae3dcb3536 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Zhiming Wang Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2014 03:45:37 -0800 Subject: this article needs some heavy editing --- source/_posts/2014-12-05-distraction-free-writing.md | 8 ++++---- 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) diff --git a/source/_posts/2014-12-05-distraction-free-writing.md b/source/_posts/2014-12-05-distraction-free-writing.md index 6d45b302..122f6fc2 100644 --- a/source/_posts/2014-12-05-distraction-free-writing.md +++ b/source/_posts/2014-12-05-distraction-free-writing.md @@ -19,15 +19,15 @@ Strangely enough, reception is great, although the price tag is currently set at That brings home my curiosity about "distraction free writing apps" in general. _Why would anyone pay $30 for a "distraction free writing app" (which basically justifies any lack of feature — "we deliberately give you no choice for anything so you can focus on writing!"), **without even a trial**?_ MAS is such a bad model for utility and productivity software since you can't just look at five screenshots (seriously?) and decide "this is for me!" Yet I have the impression that more developers prefer this model nowadays, especially in this focused-writing business, another example being IA Writer. Sure it makes licensing and combating piracy simple, but again, I need to feel it to decide if it's the right tool for me, especially for a feature-deprived focused-writing app. (This is a general thought — in this case I don't need to feel it to tell that it's not for me.) -More specifically, let's think about distraction free writing. What does IA Writer, or Desk, or other apps offer that's not already available to you with your OS? They support Markdown syntax highlighting, or even WYSYWYG (but only the very simple kind of WYSYWYG limited by the Markdown feature set), sure. They support some select-and-click type of formatting (by the way, Desk's formatting tools look a lot like those found on medium.com), which is good for some who are not competent enough to type simple markups, I guess. Desk supports drag-and-drop of media (although I'm sure it's limited to certain platforms and not portable at all — I always upload images to Imgur and embed the Imgur links, which is super simple for me since I have several homemade scripts to take care of that). So are these features essential? Not at all. For the general public, plain Markdown without rendering should be more than enough, since Markdown was designed to be human-readable as plain text in the first place. Markdown only gets ugly when you have a lot of inline hyperlinks, or worse still, plain HTML tags, but that's not what I would expect from the general public. The technical population who do probably need the rendering, on the other hand, aren't the target audience of these apps; certain needs of the technical folks are hardly ever addressed by these feature-deprived focused-writing apps — e.g., where are my keybindings (full-featured, not just C-k, C-y, C-p, C-n, C-b, C-f, M-del, etc.; in particular, what about M-d, M-b, etc.)? What about custom Markdown engine? What about Jekyll integration (no need for that, actually — I'm happy with my iTerm2)? So, to sum up, for the target audience, realtime rendering really isn't necessary, although I guess people with technophobia hate to see the markup like `**`. Second point, select-and-click type of formatting, is already dismissed. Third point, drag-and-drop media might be useful some people, but not all. After, Desk uses a typewriter as its icon, and there's no way you could throw photos into your typewriter. It's about writing, and most of the time writing is enough. +More specifically, let's think about distraction free writing. What does IA Writer, or Desk, or other apps offer that's not already available to you with your OS? They support Markdown syntax highlighting, or even WYSYWYG (but only the very simple kind of WYSYWYG limited by the Markdown feature set), sure. They support some select-and-click type of formatting (by the way, Desk's formatting tools look a lot like those found on medium.com), which is good for some who are not competent enough to type simple markups, I guess. Desk supports drag-and-drop of media (although I'm sure it's limited to certain platforms and not portable at all — I always upload images to Imgur and embed the Imgur links, which is super simple for me since I have several homemade scripts to take care of that). So are these features essential? Not at all. For the general public, plain Markdown without rendering should be more than enough, since Markdown was designed to be human-readable as plain text in the first place. Markdown only gets ugly when you have a lot of inline hyperlinks, or worse still, plain HTML tags, but that's not what I would expect from the general public. The technical population who do probably need the rendering, on the other hand, aren't the target audience of these apps; certain needs of the technical folks are hardly ever addressed by these feature-deprived focused-writing apps — e.g., where are my keybindings (full-featured, not just C-k, C-y, C-p, C-n, C-b, C-f, M-del, etc.; in particular, what about M-d, M-b, etc.)? What about custom Markdown engine? What about Jekyll integration (no need for that, actually — I'm happy with tty)? So, to sum up, for the target audience, realtime rendering isn't necessary, although I guess people with technophobia hate to see markups like `**` so no rendering will kill them. Second point, select-and-click type of formatting, is already dismissed. Third point, drag-and-drop of media might be useful for some people, but not all. After all, Desk uses a typewriter as its icon, and there's no way you could throw photos into your typewriter. It's about writing, and most of the time writing is enough. -I have dismissed the "additional features" of focused-writing apps as non-essential. And I can argue that they are actually sources of distraction — as soon as you have WYSYWYG and formatting and mouse, you could, in principle, begin to fiddle. But when I say "additional features", you might ask, "additional" compared to what? Okay here's the magic. The magic is designed by Apple in California®, and it's present on every single Mac running OS X. It's called TextEdit.app. Distraction free? How can you be more distraction free then this: +I have dismissed the "additional features" of focused-writing apps as non-essential. And I can argue that they are actually sources of distraction — as soon as you have WYSYWYG and formatting and mouse, you could, in principle, begin to fiddle. But when I say "additional features", you might ask, "additional" compared to what? Okay here's the magic. The magic is designed by Apple in California®, and it's present on every single Mac running OS X. It's called TextEdit.app. Distraction free? How can you be more distraction free than this: ![](http://i.imgur.com/z3LEu0U.png) -It's text, or white. Nothing else. It's more than capable of handling plain text, our best friend (and computer's best friend — the universal interface). You can customize the font once and live with that, never thinking about it again (or even live with the stock setting). That's better than having a font you don't like pressed onto you, as many of those focused-writing apps do. You can even auto save to iCloud if you'd like to. Of course there's no one click publishing or management or whatever, but you could leave that to a publishing app (like Desk, when used as a publishing app). Better yet, you can use Jekyll or Octopress or whatever command line solution, where everything is at your fingertip, a few keystrokes away. No limitation whatsoever. But that's out of question for most people. (The easy-to-use command line interface, and not needing to worry about hosting myself, are two of the primary reasons that brought me to Octopress on GitHub Pages, rather than wordpress.com or self-hosted wordpress.org). +It's either text or blank. Nothing else. It's more than capable of handling plain text, our best friend (and computer's best friend — the universal interface). You can customize the font once and for all, or you can even live with the factory setting. That's better than having a font you don't like forced upon you, as many of those focused-writing apps do. You can even auto save to iCloud if you'd like to. Of course there's no one click publishing or timeline management or whatever, but you could leave that to a publishing app (like Desk, when used as a publishing app). Better yet, you can use Jekyll or Octopress or whatever command line solution, where everything is at your fingertip, a few keystrokes away. No limitation whatsoever. But that's out of question for most people. (The easy-to-use command line interface, and not needing to worry about hosting myself, are two of the primary reasons that brought me to Octopress on GitHub Pages, rather than wordpress.com or self-hosted wordpress.org). -Of course I'm not saying TextEdit is enough as a text editor (it is enough for most people, though), or I use it myself as my text editor of choice. My editor has always been Emacs, which can be distraction free when I need it to be (I've hidden everything I feel like to hide), and which can be an almost feature-complete operating system when I need it to be. Apart from a slightly frustrating loading time, there's no such bullshit as "we deliberately leave no choice and no feature so you won't fiddle." Mostly importantly, it is extensible — I can start to write Elisp right away, and every single line of code I write can potentially save me thousands of keystrokes in the future; I don't need to submit a feature request to the developer and wait forever (usually power user's feature requests are ignored, unless the software concerned was built for power users to begin with or mainly popular within power users). Plus Emacs is free (both as in beer and in speech), rather than being proprietary and costing $30. At any rate, when I'm writing in Emacs, most of the time I'm just furiously typing away — no distraction whatsoever. That's the ideal state of writing, and I feel really good at those moments. That's the main charm of writing, at least to me. +Of course I'm not saying TextEdit is good enough as a text editor (it is good enough for most people, though), or it is my text editor of choice. My text editor has always been Emacs, which can be distraction free when I need it to be (I've hidden everything I feel like to hide), and which can be an almost feature-complete operating system when I need it to be. Apart from a slightly frustrating loading time, there's no such bullshit as "we deliberately left no feature and no choice to you so you won't fiddle." Mostly importantly, it is extensible — I can start writing Elisp right away, and every single line of code I write can potentially save me thousands of keystrokes in the future; I don't need to submit a feature request to the developer and wait forever (usually power users' feature requests are ignored, unless the software was built for power users to begin with or mainly popular within power users). Plus Emacs is free (both as in beer and in speech), rather than being proprietary and costing $30. At any rate, when I'm writing in Emacs, most of the time I'm just furiously typing away — no distraction whatsoever. That's the ideal state of writing, and I feel really good at those moments. That's the main charm of writing, at least to me. ![](http://i.imgur.com/2Jx9Mpv.png) -- cgit v1.2.1