I believe this is a interesting issue to post it here because it's very difficult to get writing tools outside the English language. That's exactly why I ended up starting this project. If it's not allowed, I apologise in advance.

I'm a linguist and technical writer (tech writer, dev writer, documenter, technical editor, etc.) and I've always used Hemingway for my English writing. The problem was that I'd never found a text editor capable of suggesting possible improvements to a text in Brazilian Portuguese.

Years passed, and this week I had time to create a fork of Techscriptor with some interface improvements and adapt it to Brazilian Portuguese. That's how version 0.1 of Verbalize was born.

What does it do?

In a basic and summarised way, you can upload a file from your computer (in md or txt, for now) and the editor, besides allowing you to actually edit, will give you hints on how to improve the text (long sentences, complex words, jargon, adjectives and other things we should avoid in texts, especially technical ones).

Once edited, you can download the file in md format.

Access

The application can be installed (Electron), accessed through the web, or you can download the code from GitHub and run it locally in your browser.

• Live version
• Source code

Improvements

I have a few 'next steps' in mind:

• Google Drive/Onedrive integration.
• Possibility to upload a custom rules file.
• Allow it to be used offline as well.
• Improve the GUI.

Recently I’ve been growing dissatisfied with my current workflow (Obsidian and iA) and looking to try something new, and someone recommended emacs, as long as I was up for the challenge. I figure it can’t hurt to try, and if I don’t implement it, well, I’ll have learned something.

I’m fairly comfortable with CLIs, but will likely use a GUI, and will be using on a Mac.

Anyone have advice for a total novice?

From Hacker News:

Founder of Atom here. We're building the spiritual successor to Atom over at https://zed.dev.

We learned a lot with Atom and had a great time, but it always fell short of our vision. With Zed we're going to get it right. Written in Rust, custom native UI framework, engineered to be collaborative. Just starting our private alpha this week, so the timing of this announcement feels quite fitting.

A while back I developed a desktop-based text editor (Scrivenvar) that uses the Chain-of-Responsibility design pattern to help me author fairly involved text documents. The editor's high-level architecture resembles the following diagram:

https://i.imgur.com/8IMpAkN.png

Am I reinventing the wheel here? Are there any modern, cross-platform, liberal open-source (LGPL, MIT, Apache 2), text editor frameworks (such as xi or Visual Studio Code), that would enable (re)development of such a tool?

Scrivenvar is written in Java, but to my chagrin, Java 9+ no longer bundles JavaFX. The text editor was based on MarkdownWriterFX, itself based on JavaFX. This means there's no easy upgrade path, so I'm looking to rebuild the editor either as a cross-platform desktop application or as a web application.

I know there are similar products I could buy in the US that would give me this experience, but I'm not in the US and I don't have much money.

In the old days, my father had some kind of machine that was not a proper laptop and not a proper typewriter. It opened instantly to a text editor. As far as I remember, there was no noticeable boot time. It had a keyboard and an entry for a floppy disk. You typed your stuff, saved it to the floppy disk, probably to send via email or to print in another machine. I loved that machine.

I love these little gadgets that do one thing and one thing only. And, as someone with severe ADHD, they're often a necessity. If my Kindle had Youtube I would never read a book. If my PS4 had Emacs I would never play a game. The list goes on, but the principle is this: a lot of things are useful to me precisely because of what they cannot do.

And that is why I wanna recreate my father's crazy computer-typewriter.

Because I know how to use the command line, it really needs to be in total lockdown: I open it up, it shows a very simple text editor (with a few handy features that make it works even more like a typewriter) that I cannot configure, tinker or alter in any way. It's focused on writing (not editing) literature because that's what I need and other kinds of writing require an internet connection.

It would save and back up automatically (like a typewriter) to one or more drives at your choice.

There would need to be a few options because of different screen sizes, the number of screens etc, with an interface to make it easier.

So the idea is an ultra-minimal, kiosk-mode Linux distribution that can either go on a flash drive or be installed on an old laptop. No package management, no internet connection, no access to the command line, no configuration files, no distractions whatsoever. I wanna forget I'm even using Linux. I wanna recreate my father's typewriter/computer that he never let me touch.

How do I do this?

This is of course the age old debate, which on other sites has been known to quickly devolve (one of the Internet ‘holy wars’ of yore). Nonetheless, I am curious.

I personally use vim. Part of the reason is surely that it is just the first one of the two that I happened to use, and thus by the time I tried emacs I was used to vim. But more broadly, I enjoy using vim because once you get over the hump of ‘weird’ commands and modes, I feel that vim most closely emulates the feelings and thought process that you have when building something with your hands. You can pick up different tools, yank pieces out and rearrange them, turn the object around in your hands to see different parts, etc etc. Once you internalize the movement and editing you really start flying around. At that point the interface seems less like a barrier between you and the text and more like a way to ‘hold’ it.

Of course, people have different preferences.