TL;DR - link to my janky little writing tool here
I like writing, but I'd hardly say I'm an expert. I have a lot to learn, and a lot of habits to develop.
A particularly nasty one is the tendency to edit as I write. I'll try getting down a paragraph, but I keep going back and revising specific word choice or language, and by the time I have that one segment written I'm frustrated and burnt out. It kills my enthusiasm a lot.
Just the other day, I remembered a web-based tool I found in school. The catch was, as you typed, it only showed you the most recent letter you entered. It forced you to focus soley on what you were working on, and to avoid lingering on what you'd already written until the end, splitting writing and editing more cleanly apart. I remembered it working pretty well for me! Unfortunately, I didn't remember what it was called.
I did some searching and found ILYS, a tool that did exactly what I wanted. But it was a paid subscription model, with an account system. $11/mo or you could only write 3000 words. No disrespect to ILYS, but that felt... kinda ridiculous, for what amounts to a text editor. Besides, functionally it was pretty simple. In fact... couldn't I just make it myself?
I sat down and, in 30 minutes or so, banged out more or less a replica of what I remember using. I made a few changes, though- instead of showing the most recent letter, it shows the most recent word. You're also allowed to backspace and generally edit your text- you still type in a normal HTML text editor, it's just made invisible. You can see what you've written so far by hitting CTRL+A to highlight everything.
It's nothing crazy, but it works well enough, and I figured it'd be nice to make a little post about it. A few extra notes:
- The whole 'app' is a single .html file, so you can right-click and save the page locally if you prefer to work offline.
- The app doesn't save anything between sessions, so copying your work over to something more permanent every now and then is reccomended.