This 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.
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.
git is a local program that doesn’t require that you put anything online. It sounds like you might be unfamiliar with it and I suggest that you check it out - it might be just what you’re looking for!
Yes, tracking changes. If something gets messed up, by a mistake or by a program trashing it, you can roll back to an earlier version. You also get tagging, to mark particular versions, and none of this clutters up the file system like multiple copies do, as it's hiding in a hidden folder.
I use git for any important private projects, and don't often use it online.
For some long lived documents I keep a "release branch" and make branches for playing around. If a direction or section isn't fruitful I can leave it on a branch without fear of losing "something good", and go back to mainline. I can also tag shared/published versions easily.
Oh and push a backup to another machine easily or automatically.
I worked at the help desk when I was in college back in the 90s and our mantra to users (and ourselves) was “save often and make backups”. We figured the more people we could inculcate that practice into, the fewer “I’ve been writing all afternoon and the computer just crashed, I can get my work back, right?” and “My only copy of my thesis was on this floppy and now I’m getting a disk read error, you can fix it, right?” visits we’d get that would end in tears.
It's not an age thing I don't think. I'm 22 and after I finish any tiny section of code I format it and then save. I don't know why, it's just habit now
Because most programs don't do anything if no changes were made between the current state and the last save. VS Code shows which files have changes made since the last save, for example.
My dad was doing support & sysadmin and it was save and make copies, both on-line (it was 5 years before we would start using cloud) and on physical media.
A few months ago, I saw a popular meme on Reddit (ProgrammingHumor, or something like that) where the core of the joke was: "that face when Visual Studio crashes after you've been writing code for 2 hours and forgot to save."
And my reaction was: how do you forget to save? That's muscle memory for me, man! Command-S gets hit five times in as many minutes.
IntelliJ doesn't have "saving", it writes all files to its cache constantly and then to the original files as soon as you alt+tab, and yet I still find myself hitting Ctrl+S constantly, usually as part of like a nervous tic or something, where while I'm thinking I'll save, paste my clipboard, undo, repeat.
It definitely is! My company recently connected Office to OneDrive, which means everything saves automatically. I still find myself saving after every paragraph.
I ctrl-s or :w every time I take my hands off the keyboard. A friend of mine, considerably younger, was lamenting that their computer crashed while they were working on a 3d model in Maya and they lost an hour's worth of work because they hadn't saved. I was in absolute disbelief. I pressed the issue, there was no good reason to go without saving every time the file changed, it's not like the program got bogged down when they clicked the save button. They trusted the auto save feature. We had two completely different paradigms.
Not since I became an IntelliJ user. Auto-save, who coulda thought of that?
Oh wait, I did--in the DOS based editor I wrote in High School in 1991, mine auto-saved and flushed the data to disk. Not sure what was so hard about that feature. Although with caching in various places, it was still possible to lose data. I even demo-ed the feature in class by unplugging the computer.
I still to this day have problems with various MS Office products failing to save or not auto-saving on the latest Office for Mac. So I spam that Cmd+S button as often as I can.
I moved to using an IDE. Everything is saved and always. There isn't even a save button. I also moved from vi/vim quite painlessly and never find ':wq' or 'hhhjjjj' in documents that I have edited, this was a genuine danger once.
With the right tools - an IDE with version control - the quaint notion of saving files can be mostly forgotten and the fear of losing unsaved work banished. Even if over 30 adaptation is possible so long as it is an easy, downhill path with less to do instead of new stuff to learn.
It used to be 'Jesus saves' but now, for me, my motto is to just use an IDE.
I do this for ctrl-C copying, because for a short while, years ago I had a keyboard where the C-key would occasionally fail. I have long since replaced this keyboard, but the habit of just hitting ctrl-C more than once is not entirely gone.
In university, we did programming exams on machines with no hard disks, which booted from DOS floppy disks.
The teacher recommended at the beginning of the exam to save often, especially before running our programs, because if they got stuck, we would have to reboot, losing everything.
Of course, there was still a guy that typed for a whole hour without saving. Upon running his program, it obviously crashed and he lost all his work.
I got the habit of saving constantly pressing ctrl-s ever since. I do it even in apps that don't save anything, getting annoying sounds from my computer.
I also find myself hitting ctrl-s in Firefox in an online ERP system we use when I really need to find and hit an Export To... button. I sit there for about two seconds staring at the Save As dialog wondering where it came from.
Been using this system for over two years now but I still find myself doing it at least once a week.
Using kdenlive for video editing on Linux has served has a good reminder many times to save often.
Cloud and mobile apps are often very good at taking this task away from a user, but it's worth remembering to take responsibility for saving/backing up files that have value.
Last week my colleague and I were sharing screens while he was writing a document. 10 minutes in and some good wording put into the document I asked him: "Are you saving this?". He answered, "yes, I do Ctrl+S while typing, I mean, between words". And I couldn't even notice it. That's level 5 in the craze scale.
Better than CTRL-C though. We used to have an Microfocus COBOL app (in the twin-floppy days) that would happily let you spend the entire day entering data, then fail to trap an accidental CTRl-C (it's close to "S", obvs). The developers had never allowed for that. Soul destroying..
And then you work on an interface like Confluence's page editor where for no good reason, Ctrl+S is mapped to exiting the edior. It saves your edits in the background while you type, so you don't lose anything. But you get interrupted in a big way. Changing that would be trivial, but Atlassian deprioritized it to the bottom of the stack.
That one unorthodox hotkey mapping is just the tip of the iceberg. Confluence's interface is a super special, highly unique dumpster fire of an editor. God forbid anyone actually know what Markdown syntax is. Plus, you can only disable some of the hotkeys - you're stuck with several awkward site-wide ones. There's an open Atlassian support ticket filled with souls wistfully begging for the ability to disable ALL Confluence hotkeys.
I hope they fired the intern that wrote it.
Outlook for Windows has alt-S and control-Return mapped to ‘Send’. The Mac version ‘betters’ that by using command-S and command-Return. Luckily, one can change that.
Some online editors are still struggling with that. Lost a whole day of work just because I had an IP change and Thrive Architect for Wordpress did not save my edits.
Yup. A few years ago I tried to reduce my dependence on the computer by writing more things down by hand, only to discover my left hand had developed a nervous tic that resulted in me attempting to hit command-S on the paper.
My wife is a user of Illustrator and Photoshop. A high cadence routine of SaveAs and Command-S on a regular basis has saved her from having to re-do hours of work so, so many times in 2019 alone.
Now I am really surprised. I knew that Xenix was a Unix that belonged to Microsoft, but I didn't know Word worked on a Unix. And I didn't know that Xenix was bought by SCO later. Looked up wikipedia on Xenix [0], and there are a lot of interesting facts in there, that for me put some aspects of the PC and Unix history in new lights. For example:
"Microsoft hopes that XENIX will become the preferred choice for software production and exchange", the company stated in 1981.[8] Microsoft referred to its own MS-DOS as its "single-user, single-tasking operating system",[31] and advised customers that wanted multiuser or multitasking support to buy XENIX.[31][32] It planned to over time improve MS-DOS so it would be almost indistinguishable from single-user XENIX, or XEDOS, which would also run on the 68000, Z8000, and LSI-11; they would be upwardly compatible with XENIX, which BYTE in 1983 described as "the multi-user MS-DOS of the future".[33][34] Microsoft's Chris Larson described MS-DOS 2.0's XENIX compatibility as "the second most important feature".[35] His company advertised DOS and XENIX together, listing the shared features of its "single-user OS" and "the multi-user, multi-tasking, UNIX-derived operating system", and promising easy porting between them.
AT&T started selling System V,[37] however, after the breakup of the Bell System. Microsoft, believing that it could not compete with UNIX's developer, decided to abandon XENIX. The decision was not immediately transparent, which led to the term vaporware.[38] It agreed with IBM to develop OS/2,[4] and the XENIX team (together with the best MS-DOS developers)[citation needed] was assigned to that project. In 1987, Microsoft transferred ownership of XENIX to SCO in an agreement that left Microsoft owning slightly less than 20% of SCO (this amount prevented both companies from having to disclose the exact amount in the event of a SCO IPO). When Microsoft eventually lost interest[clarification needed] in OS/2 as well, the company based its further high-end strategy on Windows NT."
As I vaguely recall, it typically went like this. You're editing some document. Something bad happens, and the system goes down. You reboot, and get the CHKDSK prompt. If you cancel out, sometimes your document is corrupted. If you run CHKDSK, sometimes your document is entirely gone. Unless you've been saving a revision history.
this is nuts but i like it. no time to think
no time to caps
not time left to write
this is all bull shit
but you gotta know it
dissappearing text
make me worry right at what i write
this may be most fun i had writing
hjhhhh
ohoh and i gotta cold and sneezing at work
run some laps in the beach in the rain at 5.30 morning
had to suffer?
she didnt choose me
why universe ?
why am i like this ?
will i ever find out ?
will i ever be with person i love the most ?
this is nuts
this app is nuts
but i like it
its just the thoughts that flows through your mind through fingers
type on
i am out of words but she is my princess jasmin
and i need a friend like genie
Lawyers. WP was really, really common amongst the legal profession for a while, and from what I've heard, being forced to migrate to Word is still much lamented. But it's quite a bit harder to pull a GRRM there.
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.
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.
> Scribes would often leave space before paragraphs to allow rubricators to draw the pilcrow. With the introduction of the printing press, space before paragraphs was still left for rubricators to draw by hand; however, rubricators could not draw fast enough for printers and often would leave the beginnings of the paragraphs as blank. This is how the indent before paragraphs was created.
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 and it seem to be quite performant, I wonder what sort of tehcnology they were using to do it? Just pure JS maybe, I mean it is not that complicated but the concept is interested. I What else should I say, I wish there was a little typewriter sound but then maybe it wouldn't be nice, or actually maybe it ithere but I just cannot see it because I don't have my headfphones on me. And by see it I mean har it because of course you do not see sounds except if you are like super high. This is probably how people like Nietwszhe write and what the fuck how hard is that name to write without feedback.
ok lets do ths. I have no idea what is happening or how long i can go without typing before all that i ahve typed before will be lost: I feel like im making way more mistakes than i usually do, which is weird because I usually dont have to look at what Im typing as much either. I dont know. I have basically nothing left to say. And i am scarted to lose this challenge. It seems only one minute is over so far. So we have some ways to go. Quite a while actually. Closing in on half, but not really if i look at it properly. This bprogress bar at the top is really stressing me out. I feel llike Keanu Reeves in Speed. Or Sandra Bullock. Or ... What this guys name again. The one from dumb and dumber... ah commonm you know this! Dennis Hopper is the bad guy. Ah... I cant believe I'm blanking on the name. He was in Newsroom, which was not quite as good as it was supposed to be. Actually quite a lot less -... goood? I guess. Well, anywaya. Araron Sorkin is kind of hit or miss if you think about it. For example Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was ver y entertaining but the "high-stakes" scenarios they went for near the end of the season just didn't really work for a TV show setting. But overall I enjoyed it quite a lot I guess. Almost done!
This is probably the most dangerous writing application ever, removing your progress if no input is received within (probably) 10 seconds out of minutes-long session (by default 5 minutes, minimum of 3 minutes I think) and your progress is gone. Thankfully you can delete words and that does count as a progress, so you can technically possible to add and remove a word back and force to keep your precious writing ever. Of course it only means that you keep progressing, not producing a quality writing. In the hard core mode this is amplified by having your all progress being blurred out and you can only concentrate on the last word or two, meaning that you are just writing as your mind guidesf.... I accidentally removed the last word and can't remember what it was, see? This is pretty hardcore indeed. But I'm nearing the completion and I guess this is done.
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
Hardcore mode blurs every thing you type, so you have no idea if you are writing correctly. All you have to go by is your judgement and the belief that you do not misspell your words. And even if you did, you are willing to edit it all out later.
I can see the appeal of doing this for people who worry too much about what they are writing and constantly go back to edit their words and spellings. However, this is a stupid idea because going back to make minor edits allows the brain to formulate the next thought and frame it into better sentences.
By vomiting everything in one flow, you are simply increasing the amount of work required in terms of editing and re-writing the incorrect parts. Not to mention the large amount of proof-reading work that will inevitably follow all your work.
Does hardcore mode allow pauses? Let's see. Five potatoes to figure it out... Yes it does. Same five-potato time-limit.
Ah, too many potatoes.
-------
I was sweating buckets the whole time. I hate the idea of my writing vanishing, so the pressure was quite high to keep typing...
This is a solution to my problem: as writing for me is always a struggle due to the tendency to keep more focussed on optimizing previously written text then on continue writing new. This app allows me to write like a flow.
This tool reminds me of the advice once given to NaNoWriMo participants (National Novel-Writing Month, super fun if you've never tried it in November). If you can't think of anything to write, just repeat "Ninja. Ninja. Ninja…" over and over again until you think of something. Just be sure to get words out and keep your mind-to-fingers connection nimble when first-drafting.
On mobile at least, you can simply press space every couple of seconds.. And backspace.. so just a tad shy of what it says on the tin if you ask me.. ;)
Wow, this is insane that I cannot even see what I ma typing... I don't understand why would somebody ever create something like that? Are you actually insane or is it just a pet project? Is it even built in react or have you been fully with the vanilla javascript we all miss so much?
Oh I thought I could stop whenever I wanted but not even possible to go back in time nowl. I am forced to carry on while watching that progress bar, darkp rogresss bar, slowly progressing.
Oh, and I have Grammarly installed as a CChrome Extension...... and I can see the red underlined text so that's not a great sign quite frankly. It's a tad stressful now as I do feel I am typing without aking any mistake(s) so it's weird I see red on my screen.
Ok, well, now I am just typing for the sake of seeing the results – most likely poor. I do enjoy this, though. Quite a fun excercise. I am so confused with the spelling of exercise right now.
Ok few seconds remaining, and the ordeal will be over. YAY!!!! Cannot wait for that last second!
Ok, so this is 3 minute typing in hardcore mode. I'm a little confused as to why I can't see the text... but oh well. I probably should have tested what happens if you stop typing in this mode. The idea here of the app is quite interesting. I think if it didn't really delete your text then that would be nice.... but then I guess it loses the point. I'm not quite sure though I understand the point of delteeing the text. But here we are. I think I can type pretty quick so apologies hackernews people if this is a really long ramble lol. This app could be really useful though when having to write a bunch of text for work or study or just to get your thoughts out there uninterrupted. I am really struggling now to know what to write. Any other features I can think of that would be useful? well I think if we had a goal of what we want to achieve and then could somehow indicate tht we had reached that goal - perhaps that would be useful. But I'm
From the title I guessed it would be something with a typing pattern or keyboard shortcuts that were a fast way to RSI.
I'm curious if anyone has a story about a particular writing application (could even be from the typewriter era and have a custom terrible keyboard!) that caused physical injury?
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.
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.
Now I have to pas this with other things. On mobile it does not auto scroll down and if I do it manually I can’t see the progress bar anymore. And now I don’t have anything lef to say so I just write this enormous sentence while I wait until the counter dies. As I have scrolled down I really don’t know when this will end but am now too invested in the first part of this comment... should I just try to quick copy paste the whole thing before it’s lost?
> 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!
>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.
It has a feature like that, just click on "Words" on the same thing that lets you change amount of minutes. If you want to do less than 150 words you can change the limit in URL to anything you want to too.
okay what the hell is this application? Like... what's the point? I don't get it. The front page doesn't explain! And now I'm doing it. I'm doing whatever it wants me to do. See: I'm typing like a good little monkey at a typewriter, generating a stream of conciousness. So why am I participating in this. I don't know. Perhaps curiosity. Perhaps sheer stubborness. Possibly self-loathing. Maybe it's the scientific mind, wanting to learn about human capability. Maybe it's introspection: I just want to know what I'm capable of, whether I'm up to the challenge or not. But lets be honest: I'm a lazy bum, and now I'm just doing this because I'm too invested, not because I can actually be bothered. Hmm... I wonder if the 5 minutes is up yet, it certainly feels like it's approaching. Maybe another minute? I want to look at the clock, but I can't do that and type at the same time. I need a break, my arms are starting to hurt, which is just embarrassing for someone who normally types several hours a day. Now I'm thinking how many typos have I made so far? Two? Three? More? I'm doubting my own English education, which is ironic because I hated English in high school. I hated it with a passion. I jumped with joy when I finished my last English exam, and I vindictively told my English teacher this fact: I will never need to use these skills ever again! Never! I'm going into Science. Cold, hard science, the world of numbers and equations and facts. No wishy-washy feelings or emotions, opinions and perspectives. Just graphs and numbers. How wrong I was! My current net worth owes a lot to my English skills, which is now probably a hundred times more important than anything I ever learned in Science...
We’ve reached peak programming, where now code is too perfect so we need to add artificial constraints. Flappy bird, Snapchat, etc. recently we had the 5% battery life chat, and now this!
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadhttps://outline.com/D7aP8s
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.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...
Also the habit of saving multiple copies, as a revision history. Because Word occasionally wrote garbage to files, while crashing.
[1] https://orgmode.org/
[2] https://orgmode.org/manual/Exporting.html#Exporting
[3] http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/orgmode-wordprocess...
[4] https://magit.vc/
But if it's local, what's the advantage vs saving as a file? Simple revision history management?
I use git for any important private projects, and don't often use it online.
For some long lived documents I keep a "release branch" and make branches for playing around. If a direction or section isn't fruitful I can leave it on a branch without fear of losing "something good", and go back to mainline. I can also tag shared/published versions easily.
Oh and push a backup to another machine easily or automatically.
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.
My kids are getting to the age where they are doing projects on a computer and I'm constantly telling them to "save early, save often."
I guess it's some form of PTSD from computing in the 90's.
I got the same advice from my grandfather, who grew up in the Great Depression. I think it was PTSD on his part, too.
And my reaction was: how do you forget to save? That's muscle memory for me, man! Command-S gets hit five times in as many minutes.
Oh wait, I did--in the DOS based editor I wrote in High School in 1991, mine auto-saved and flushed the data to disk. Not sure what was so hard about that feature. Although with caching in various places, it was still possible to lose data. I even demo-ed the feature in class by unplugging the computer.
With the right tools - an IDE with version control - the quaint notion of saving files can be mostly forgotten and the fear of losing unsaved work banished. Even if over 30 adaptation is possible so long as it is an easy, downhill path with less to do instead of new stuff to learn.
It used to be 'Jesus saves' but now, for me, my motto is to just use an IDE.
3 hours later...
Now, I save whenever I am happy with a single edit.
The teacher recommended at the beginning of the exam to save often, especially before running our programs, because if they got stuck, we would have to reboot, losing everything.
Of course, there was still a guy that typed for a whole hour without saving. Upon running his program, it obviously crashed and he lost all his work.
I got the habit of saving constantly pressing ctrl-s ever since. I do it even in apps that don't save anything, getting annoying sounds from my computer.
I even have a script to delete all HTML in my Download folder.
I also find myself hitting ctrl-s in Firefox in an online ERP system we use when I really need to find and hit an Export To... button. I sit there for about two seconds staring at the Save As dialog wondering where it came from.
Been using this system for over two years now but I still find myself doing it at least once a week.
Cloud and mobile apps are often very good at taking this task away from a user, but it's worth remembering to take responsibility for saving/backing up files that have value.
Even clouds can get blown away some times.
But then again I don't think it was more than a month ago that some coworker lost work because Photo Shop crashed and they hadn't saved in a while.
I still do it reflexively after every significant change.
"Microsoft hopes that XENIX will become the preferred choice for software production and exchange", the company stated in 1981.[8] Microsoft referred to its own MS-DOS as its "single-user, single-tasking operating system",[31] and advised customers that wanted multiuser or multitasking support to buy XENIX.[31][32] It planned to over time improve MS-DOS so it would be almost indistinguishable from single-user XENIX, or XEDOS, which would also run on the 68000, Z8000, and LSI-11; they would be upwardly compatible with XENIX, which BYTE in 1983 described as "the multi-user MS-DOS of the future".[33][34] Microsoft's Chris Larson described MS-DOS 2.0's XENIX compatibility as "the second most important feature".[35] His company advertised DOS and XENIX together, listing the shared features of its "single-user OS" and "the multi-user, multi-tasking, UNIX-derived operating system", and promising easy porting between them.
AT&T started selling System V,[37] however, after the breakup of the Bell System. Microsoft, believing that it could not compete with UNIX's developer, decided to abandon XENIX. The decision was not immediately transparent, which led to the term vaporware.[38] It agreed with IBM to develop OS/2,[4] and the XENIX team (together with the best MS-DOS developers)[citation needed] was assigned to that project. In 1987, Microsoft transferred ownership of XENIX to SCO in an agreement that left Microsoft owning slightly less than 20% of SCO (this amount prevented both companies from having to disclose the exact amount in the event of a SCO IPO). When Microsoft eventually lost interest[clarification needed] in OS/2 as well, the company based its further high-end strategy on Windows NT."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
As I vaguely recall, it typically went like this. You're editing some document. Something bad happens, and the system goes down. You reboot, and get the CHKDSK prompt. If you cancel out, sometimes your document is corrupted. If you run CHKDSK, sometimes your document is entirely gone. Unless you've been saving a revision history.
i am out of words but she is my princess jasmin and i need a friend like genie
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.
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.
> Scribes would often leave space before paragraphs to allow rubricators to draw the pilcrow. With the introduction of the printing press, space before paragraphs was still left for rubricators to draw by hand; however, rubricators could not draw fast enough for printers and often would leave the beginnings of the paragraphs as blank. This is how the indent before paragraphs was created.
Amazing. Had no clue.
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 and it seem to be quite performant, I wonder what sort of tehcnology they were using to do it? Just pure JS maybe, I mean it is not that complicated but the concept is interested. I What else should I say, I wish there was a little typewriter sound but then maybe it wouldn't be nice, or actually maybe it ithere but I just cannot see it because I don't have my headfphones on me. And by see it I mean har it because of course you do not see sounds except if you are like super high. This is probably how people like Nietwszhe write and what the fuck how hard is that name to write without feedback.
ok lets do ths. I have no idea what is happening or how long i can go without typing before all that i ahve typed before will be lost: I feel like im making way more mistakes than i usually do, which is weird because I usually dont have to look at what Im typing as much either. I dont know. I have basically nothing left to say. And i am scarted to lose this challenge. It seems only one minute is over so far. So we have some ways to go. Quite a while actually. Closing in on half, but not really if i look at it properly. This bprogress bar at the top is really stressing me out. I feel llike Keanu Reeves in Speed. Or Sandra Bullock. Or ... What this guys name again. The one from dumb and dumber... ah commonm you know this! Dennis Hopper is the bad guy. Ah... I cant believe I'm blanking on the name. He was in Newsroom, which was not quite as good as it was supposed to be. Actually quite a lot less -... goood? I guess. Well, anywaya. Araron Sorkin is kind of hit or miss if you think about it. For example Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was ver y entertaining but the "high-stakes" scenarios they went for near the end of the season just didn't really work for a TV show setting. But overall I enjoyed it quite a lot I guess. Almost done!
So, yeah, I think I like it.
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
It seems all apostrophes in your message are replaced by ’ (a with hat, euro symbol, TM symbol).
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Hardcore mode blurs every thing you type, so you have no idea if you are writing correctly. All you have to go by is your judgement and the belief that you do not misspell your words. And even if you did, you are willing to edit it all out later.
I can see the appeal of doing this for people who worry too much about what they are writing and constantly go back to edit their words and spellings. However, this is a stupid idea because going back to make minor edits allows the brain to formulate the next thought and frame it into better sentences.
By vomiting everything in one flow, you are simply increasing the amount of work required in terms of editing and re-writing the incorrect parts. Not to mention the large amount of proof-reading work that will inevitably follow all your work.
Does hardcore mode allow pauses? Let's see. Five potatoes to figure it out... Yes it does. Same five-potato time-limit.
Ah, too many potatoes.
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I was sweating buckets the whole time. I hate the idea of my writing vanishing, so the pressure was quite high to keep typing...
On mobile at least, you can simply press space every couple of seconds.. And backspace.. so just a tad shy of what it says on the tin if you ask me.. ;)
Wow, this is insane that I cannot even see what I ma typing... I don't understand why would somebody ever create something like that? Are you actually insane or is it just a pet project? Is it even built in react or have you been fully with the vanilla javascript we all miss so much?
Oh I thought I could stop whenever I wanted but not even possible to go back in time nowl. I am forced to carry on while watching that progress bar, darkp rogresss bar, slowly progressing.
Oh, and I have Grammarly installed as a CChrome Extension...... and I can see the red underlined text so that's not a great sign quite frankly. It's a tad stressful now as I do feel I am typing without aking any mistake(s) so it's weird I see red on my screen.
Ok, well, now I am just typing for the sake of seeing the results – most likely poor. I do enjoy this, though. Quite a fun excercise. I am so confused with the spelling of exercise right now.
Ok few seconds remaining, and the ordeal will be over. YAY!!!! Cannot wait for that last second!
Ok, so this is 3 minute typing in hardcore mode. I'm a little confused as to why I can't see the text... but oh well. I probably should have tested what happens if you stop typing in this mode. The idea here of the app is quite interesting. I think if it didn't really delete your text then that would be nice.... but then I guess it loses the point. I'm not quite sure though I understand the point of delteeing the text. But here we are. I think I can type pretty quick so apologies hackernews people if this is a really long ramble lol. This app could be really useful though when having to write a bunch of text for work or study or just to get your thoughts out there uninterrupted. I am really struggling now to know what to write. Any other features I can think of that would be useful? well I think if we had a goal of what we want to achieve and then could somehow indicate tht we had reached that goal - perhaps that would be useful. But I'm
I'm curious if anyone has a story about a particular writing application (could even be from the typewriter era and have a custom terrible keyboard!) that caused physical injury?
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.
Now I have to pas this with other things. On mobile it does not auto scroll down and if I do it manually I can’t see the progress bar anymore. And now I don’t have anything lef to say so I just write this enormous sentence while I wait until the counter dies. As I have scrolled down I really don’t know when this will end but am now too invested in the first part of this comment... should I just try to quick copy paste the whole thing before it’s lost?
I've found Otter.ai to be somewhat useful for this.
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!
It has a feature like that, just click on "Words" on the same thing that lets you change amount of minutes. If you want to do less than 150 words you can change the limit in URL to anything you want to too.
okay what the hell is this application? Like... what's the point? I don't get it. The front page doesn't explain! And now I'm doing it. I'm doing whatever it wants me to do. See: I'm typing like a good little monkey at a typewriter, generating a stream of conciousness. So why am I participating in this. I don't know. Perhaps curiosity. Perhaps sheer stubborness. Possibly self-loathing. Maybe it's the scientific mind, wanting to learn about human capability. Maybe it's introspection: I just want to know what I'm capable of, whether I'm up to the challenge or not. But lets be honest: I'm a lazy bum, and now I'm just doing this because I'm too invested, not because I can actually be bothered. Hmm... I wonder if the 5 minutes is up yet, it certainly feels like it's approaching. Maybe another minute? I want to look at the clock, but I can't do that and type at the same time. I need a break, my arms are starting to hurt, which is just embarrassing for someone who normally types several hours a day. Now I'm thinking how many typos have I made so far? Two? Three? More? I'm doubting my own English education, which is ironic because I hated English in high school. I hated it with a passion. I jumped with joy when I finished my last English exam, and I vindictively told my English teacher this fact: I will never need to use these skills ever again! Never! I'm going into Science. Cold, hard science, the world of numbers and equations and facts. No wishy-washy feelings or emotions, opinions and perspectives. Just graphs and numbers. How wrong I was! My current net worth owes a lot to my English skills, which is now probably a hundred times more important than anything I ever learned in Science...
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Soon, I will master this.
Soon, I will be able to just let my ideas flow.
Soon there will be no need for huge edits while typing.
Soon there will be shape in the words as they come out.
Maybe I should just delete the words myself and start over.
Or may I should just let the words be even if I don't like them.
Soon, I will master this.
Soon, I will be able to not stop.
Soon, I will be able to say what's really on my mind.
I wonder why there is friction between the words.
I wonder why the ideas in my head does not get reflected into words as I see them inside me.
Is it really true that I have ideas in me, or is it just an illusion?
Why are so many of the things I think I'm thinking about don't really just come out once I start trying to record them?
Do my ideas really exist? Or am I just imagining having them?
Do ideas matter if they are not told? Even to oneself?
Soon, I will get the answer to these questions.
Soon, I will master this.
Soon, I will survive the grueling task of coming up with ideas.
I am a writer.
I am a writer because I write.
I could write without having to think first.
My ideas will just come right out of me into words.
My ideas are real.
Soon, I will master the art of coming up with ideas.
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I think it came out kind of alright.