Ask HN: Did anyone write a book in Nano?

Didn’t GRRM use Word Star?

https://www.reddit.com/r/freefolk/comments/s770y1/this_is_th...

> I discovered that some people deliberately choose to write stories in terminal-based text-editors like Nano or Vim

Vim and nano couldn't be more different, the only similarity is that they are terminal editors.

I wrote my thesis in vim + LaTeX (along with most of university assignments).

I find it does make it much easier to focus on the content. I setup some basic layout at the start, write all the content and then maybe tweak the layout towards the end.

Since it's plaintext, you can use git for version control. Plus vim has a great history tree (rather than being linear), which saved my ass a few times.

Disclaimer: vim is basically my religion ;)

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i love micro in this space of simple terminal base editor, is like nano but whit more modern commands like Ctrl + s to save or Ctrl + x to cut https://micro-editor.github.io/

You say “story” so I guess you’re writing linear, narrative fiction? In which case sure, try Nano. If the story lacks any hierarchy or structure that you’d like to indicate with typesetting, why not use Nano.

If on the other hand you are writing a book with nested hierarchical headings, sidebars, illustrations, etc, Nano will be no help at all. As another poster in this thread noted, you could use Nano to write LaTeX. But LaTeX certainly isn’t going to get out of your way.

So this is really an issue of picking the right tool for the job. If your job is simple, a simple editor will work. (But so would a complicated editor: I use Word for simple documents all the time. You don’t have to fiddle with the knobs just because they’re there.)

The basic premise is that separating content and presentation lets you focus on just the content (or presentation).

This idea is frequently used by computer programmers.

Do you do your editing while writing ? If yes, just stop. Problem solved. Just start a day with editing, and only editing, previous day work.

Maybe look for a distraction-free (which usually means "fullscreen + bars removed") plugin for your editor.

A famous Swedish author still types on typewriter for this reason. However, I assume his editor cleans ups his scripts in ways others can't count on.

Try a markdown editor sometime and never fiddle with formatting, fonts, font sizing, layout, etc again, at least not during the writing stage. I like Typora, obsidian, and especially ulysses

Mostly, the only formatting you don't want to put off can be taken care of with <p> and <h#> tags. Depending on the genre, style, and so forth, maybe the occasional <blockquote>.

I wouldn't want to do non-fiction though... that'd just be torment.

I don't know if it will make you more productive, but it won't make you any less.

"AppEndText" - Ctrl+d to exit:

  v=;while read -rN1;[ "$REPLY" != $'\04' ];do clear;v="$v$REPLY";echo "${v: -1}";done;clear;echo "$v"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24739220

To eliminate the temptation of editing while writing I recommend Enso: https://enso.sonnet.io/ as it forces you to separate writing from editing. And regarding anecdotes let me quote an advice form mashup artist Aggro "mix drunk, master sober". It catches the spirit of division between creation and correction perfectly.

I haven't personally written a book during Nano, but I know a friend who did. She found the experience both challenging and rewarding. The intense writing pace boosted her productivity and creativity. The editing process was indeed a bit messy, but she appreciated the raw creativity that poured out during Nano.

I like to use notepad for drafting written work. Just plain text, no distractions.

I use vim for programming. I used to use it for writing (generally in markdown) which I then convert to html. But recently I (sacrilegiously) started doing my writing in word. I actually find this less distracting. I use only the most simple formatting and then convert to html or whatever the end format is.

I use Ghostwriter in Linux and iA Writer on a Mac and iPad. These are distraction free Markdown editors with excellent Markdown support. I use Vim for programming but don’t care for it for writing articles. For finishing I use Pandoc to convert Markdown to Word format, HTML, or TeX.

FWIW, there's a community around Emacs that focuses on writing. Lots of articles have been written about it and there are some "famous" authors that have written books/novels in it. Yes, you can use Emacs in the terminal if you want (which I do cause I like using tmux for my workflow). But then, I don't see the issue with using Google Docs (you can just treat it as nano) unless you care about a local workflow and don't want to store in the cloud.

I've been writing a technical book slowly over the course of the past little while. It's split into fairly small sections so each one has a file that's technically markdown, but it's mostly just headings and lists for things that aren't raw text and code samples. I use vim since it's easy and light for work on my laptop, and I just like it for plain text editing at this point.

More productive? Not by a notable amount I'd say. Editing is straight forward - 1 sentence per line makes finding things easy.

I'd also say that the tool you use for most things doesn't matter as much as the act of doing (age old advice here on HN). If you get distracted a lot then maybe it's worth a shot, but by no means is Google Docs not up to snuff if you just want to get some words written down.

I wrote a manuscript in vim a couple Novembers ago, for NaNoWriMo. I used a couple plugins, primarily Goyo [1] to add some margins, but otherwise, yeah, plain vim.

I don't think it was really any more productive than my current workflow in Obsidian. Vim keybindings are more useful for editing than for writing (and for editing code in particular, where the changes you're making are much more structured). The extra features afforded by Obsidian don't really make a difference during the actual writing process, but I find they're really useful for outlines and other preliminary work, which is something of a point against a vim-only workflow unless you want to use vimwiki [2] or something.

Granted, Obsidian is still a markdown-based tool, so there's still some level of minimalism going on there, but by that point we're really discussing markup vs word processors, which is its own conversation—and to my mind, a much more important one. I much prefer working in markdown (via pandoc) than in a word processor, because plain text is easy to edit and process through the terminal, and because it lets me separate style choices from content.

I find that the markdown live preview that editors like Obsidian and Typora provide (and which vim doesn't) is a really nice compromise between a slick composing experience and the technical affordances of markup. Between that and Obsidian's hypertext features, I think I'll stick with Obsidian for the foreseeable future.

[1]: https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim

[2]: https://vimwiki.github.io/

I use Sublime with word count and grammar plugins. It is nice because I have tons of color schemes for different types of stories.

Vim is a very good editor in the simple task of editing text files of every size. Wrote master thesis with it

I wrote a book and two movies in Emacs.

Yes, way more productive. One movie was a collaboration too... he also wrote in a plain text editor, but I think it was TextMate on the Mac.

One thing I also like about writing in plain text (later using Fountain, a Markdown variant) is that I can ignore formatting rules completely. Also, we were saving everything to Dropbox, and I had a server checking out the Dropbox folder and monitoring it. After a while of no changes it would "compile" a new version of the project by concatenating the files and generating a PDF using pandoc and other tools.

I expanded upon it a bit more here: https://usesthis.com/interviews/matt.lee/

I don't use Nano but I've considered it. It seems like writing on a tty would be the closest digital equivalent to using a typewriter, though, and I've found that a single-function device for writing reduces distractions significantly.

Not really the same as Nano/vim, but I recently switched to using Obsidian/IAwriter and writing everything in plaintext markdown. I haven't used a "real" word processor more than 10 times in the last few years I'd say, and then only for professional stuff. The reduced overhead is something I don't see myself ever going back from. Similarly, I think Nano-only would be a viable approach.

ahaha using the question as a dumb detector.

Ahaha using the question as a dumb detector.