Writing

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A specific community for original shortform and longform writing, stories, worldbuilding, and other stuff of that nature.

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What is the absolute most basic typeing/writing app out there? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 3 months ago by Adderbox76@lemmy.ca to c/writing@beehaw.org

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I want to go back to the absolute basics for a while; to see if there's something from my old pre-computer life that I have lost.

When I was a teenager in the early 90s, I wrote like crazy on a giant, loud, electric typewriter. It whirred. It clacked. It needed me to manually hit the carraige return just like the older manual typewriters that it had come from.

The old days. No backspace deletion, no italics. Bold meant backing up and typing over the same word twice for effect.

There are apps like focus writer, etc... But I'm looking for something more

There is an online app called typewritesomething.com, and it has the option of installing it. But when I do, it's sluggish and imperfect. So I was hoping someone knew of something just like that, but in a locally installed program (Linux would be ideal, but WINE allows me to run Windows programs just fine and dandy)

Blank Page. Typewriter sound. No deletion on backspace. When you backup and retype, it has the effect of typing over the previous text. Manual carraige return. Literally no other features.

Any ideas?

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[–] pea@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I own a couple of thrifted typewtiters for precosely this use case. Highly recommend keeping an eye out. And yes, ribbons are still available.

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah. I'm always on the lookout. The older I get, the more I regret not taking that old typewriter with me when I moved out and went to university. If I had, it would likely still be used regularly today.

[–] pea@sopuli.xyz 1 points 3 months ago

Happy searching, may the odds be in your favour.

[–] Quexotic@beehaw.org 1 points 3 months ago

A few years back I found an app called q10. I found that very useful but if you want something even less distracting, look for an alpha smart 2000 or 3000 I forget which one it is you'll find it on eBay they don't make them anymore. Make sure you have the proper USB cable for it you can find those on Amazon

[–] msokiovt@lemmy.today 1 points 3 months ago

I think you might want to take a look at novelWriter if you want a writing app. However, that one uses a markdown-like syntax, and it seems you want either just plain text or rich text.

For that, I use Obsidian with a few plugins and a theme that allows me to focus, that being Zen. Otherwise, that uses markdown, and that might not be a good option for you either.

Doing some Reddit research (I'm reading using Eddrit, though), it seems FreeDOS with something like WordPerfect 5.1 might be a good option, but it isn't Linux. You want Linux, so that isn't viable either.

Someone seems to have recommended Tiny Core and whatever editor (TUI editor) you'd like. For that, I would personally use Vim set up as a word processor, as shown here in one method, but that seems to be something interesting too. The only difference is that I'd want to see if Harper is a package so I could use that instead of LanguageTool.

Wordgrinder is another TUI option, which is a terminal-based word processor, though I hadn't really used it.

Kate is another option, which I've used quite some time back. I don't really care for it, but it could be something more your style.

That's just how I see it, though.