

Show HN: First Draft (beta) – distraction-free writing for first drafts - wildermuthn
http://beta.firstdraft.io

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selectout
Just wrote my first blog post using this and it was actually a nice refreshing
experience. Much easier to write I found.

My one gripe is when I export to Google Docs for further editing, it has some
weird formatting. The words don't get wrapped, and adding new lines of text
pushes everything down a new line, not sure how to get rid of that.

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wildermuthn
That is odd. Working on it.

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rhythmvs
Probably because you inject &nbsp; (no breaking spaces) instead of regular
word spaces — so lines can’t be wrapped.

Also, the editor does not accept accented letters (Ä Ö Ü ä ö ü etc.), no Greek
(Δεν Έλληνες), in short no Unicode, and not even full ASCII (common
punctuation marks like — –).

It seems the app is listening to keys and basically re-implementing the whole
typing input — which means you’d be in for some very heavy very low-level
stuff (support for all of the 128k Unicode codepoints)…

I guess you’d had to do such a workaround to wrap the lines yourself, and move
them up steps-wise, one line at a time (instead of the native scrolling
behaviour). Though I really like the typewriter effect, one could ask if that
isn’t at a very big expense (both in implementation effort and multi-language
support).

The idea of the app (and it’s adequate name) is nice, though: stripping down
even the most basic editing features (cursor moves) effectively forces one to
focus on the writing at hand. Love it.

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wildermuthn
Google Docs works now — you pinpointed the problem exactly.

It was a huge pain to recreate a textarea, but worthwhile in that I could
finely tune the editing experience. I started out with a textarea, but as I
tried to disable certain parts, it just became very apparent that I couldn't
hack it to death. Better to start over and fake it. It was very interesting
learning about the logic behind word-wrap!

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stoolpigeon
I like the idea quite a bit. Though I would like to be able to look back at
what I've done more easily, even if I can't edit it. If I'm writing something
longer I may need to go back periodically to refresh my memory (yes, even as I
am writing). It messed with my flow to have to go up and use the menu button
thing at the top.

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wildermuthn
I like the idea of being able to scroll up but not being able to edit. Thanks
for the feedback.

For now, I've added a cmd-L or ctrl-L shortcut to open up the last page view.

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babo
My screen is vertically oriented, having only a dozen lines visible is a huge
waste. I understand your purist design decisions but that feels bad for me.

Another note, line endings and text handling is somehow broken in the final
google docs.

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wildermuthn
I built this for myself, for two different reasons:

1) I wanted to learn Common Lisp. CL does indeed rock.

2) I wanted a way to finish my first drafts, usually for short stories, but
also for novels.

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munchor
Ctr+A and then Backspace doesn't seem to be working. Ctrl+ArrowKeys and
Ctrl+Backspace doesn't work they way it usually works either.

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wildermuthn
Thanks! Ctrl-A, along with many of the other typical editing shortcuts, have
been disabled in order to keep me from editing. All you can do is backspace
one letter at a time, for minor annoyances like spelling and such.

The idea is that I'd like to dump the words out with as little editing as
possible. If I can do that, I'll have a better chance of actually finishing
the first draft.

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aghillo
Actually, I really like the simplicity of this - will give it a try! It would
(of course) be nice to save locally thought.

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wildermuthn
That'd be a nice feature. If there's interest in First Draft, I have a desktop
version based on nodewebkit that I can release.

Right now, it can export your file to Google Docs, and from there you can save
locally.

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babo
That would be awesome! I tried the online version, feels good as a writing
tool, like an old fashioned typewriter.

