HACKER Q&A
📣 dr_dshiv

Is there a text editor that doesn't show what you typed?


I get distracted by my own writing and want to write without the desire to edit. I believe this would help me achieve a more of a flowing form of writing and journaling.

Does anyone know of a service for this? thank you

  👤 fffffff Accepted Answer ✓
Change your text color to match your background.
👤 ksaj
There was once a post here on HN (long enough ago that I couldn't find it just now) that was a text editor that didn't allow anything other than adding text. You couldn't go back, delete, etc. And its purpose was exactly what you are asking for - a productivity tool that let you get your ideas written out without getting sidetracked by tweaking, and you could then use another editor at another time to polish it up.

At the time, I thought it would be cool to make that a particular mode in an editor - kinda like running vi in INSERT mode without readline, but additionally without all the ^Control characters showing up whenever you accidentally try to do something other than typing straight ahead.

Hopefully my description will jog someone's memory.

👤 j-rom
Hey I came across this about a week ago and the idea sounded pretty cool! I ended up making an MVP of this: https://flowtyping.herokuapp.com/

It was pretty fun and I'll most likely start adding more features to it: saved notes, words per minute, improve layout, etc...

Let me know if you end up using this or if you have any feature you'd like to see :)

Edit: I posted a link to another HackerNews link that showed a whole bunch of related tools that did similar things but I wanted to take a crack at it myself.

👤 garaboncias2
Just switch off the monitor
👤 KJLJon
I don't know anything, but curious about it.

How far back would you want to see?

Should it hide after a letter or word is typed? Or a sentence? Or paragraph?