Bruce Blog

softwares for typing

I denounce metablogging and writing about writing and now its my turn to do it myself. This is my swamp.

Softwares for typety typing

As far as software, it was interesting to read on bearblog a bunch of people's lists of defaults. With writing I want to just do the task itself and not get bound up in customizing or other flashy features that arent the main goal: put words on a page.

When I used windows everyday, I used notepad and just typed in plain text. One file per day. Ive been Ubuntu for the last 5 years and its been painful at times but overall worth it. I've tried quite a few different writing softwares. I've also started using markdown since starting my bearblog. In my digital journaling I wanted

  1. some inline markdown rendering, and/or a full preview pane,
  2. a customizable font,
  3. some keyboard shortcuts for bold and italics.
  4. very minor autocompletion for things like lists

Not a long list but surprisingly this cut out a lot of programs. Good old gedit was very nice, no nonsense, no rendering lag, just type and its there. There is no support for a markdown preview pane with Ubuntu 24. The extension seems to no longer be updated. If that extension worked I'd probably use that just for simplicity's sake. There is also no ctrl-b for bolding, i found some other third party extensions but none worked. Theres a nice margins plugin that makes fullscreen much better. I did try downgrading gedit 46 to 44 which was supported by the markdown extension but it was a nightmare and I dont want to deal with it :) Overall very close but i need a bit more features than a totally barebones text editor.

So I tested a bunch of others. Some were just so full of features I didnt care about that it was overwhelming. Like obsidian. So youre telling me i have to pay a monthly fee to move text files between two devices? and my notes are in some weird vault thing not just text files? Also the keyword linking thing? Does anyone really use that? I put a tag or two on my posts as a filter to pin on my different pages but I cant imagine when I would care to look at my writings in a spiderweb bordering on a red-string filled conspiracy board. Obsidian was also quite laggy for me and sometimes the rendering would break or the scrolling would have a delay and jump around. Maybe there were fixes for all that, that i could cook up for my specific hardware but I dont want to deal with it :)

Apostrophe was very close. But the dynamic text size bugged the shit out of me, its built so that no matter how large the program is, the same number of characters appear per line. So if you make the window bigger, the text gets bigger rather than the margins. And you cannot zoom in or out. Thats a choice for sure, but would never be mine. If I chose 12 point font, I dont think im crazy in expecting it to be a certain small size on my screen and not get bigger when I go full screen or windowed.

Ghostwriter is very good, it has partial rendering in the main editor and a full preview pane. But really i just use the main editor and like to see bolded words as bolded when i type them. Theres a bunch of themes, easy to change from the gui, the font can also be changed independently. The thing just works, no lag, just words on a page. I think my only gripe, which is very petty, is that the ghost logo is a bit childish. It reminds me of the masked ghosts in the ballroom of Luigi's Mansion.

Lastly there is Typora. Overleaf is to latex as Typora is to Markdown. Typora supports alot of auto-complete and formatting and pictures and whatever really. I havent been able to find something it cant do that you'd otherwise see in markdown. It is a paid app with a 15 day free trial, its not very secure and you can just download it again or find a crack but thats besides the point. Its a small project of people that have bills too, they’re not Adobe. I think its good, but its almost too much? Sometimes I have to fight the rendering to change the heading level from ## to ### or vise versa. It has every keyboard shortcut you could possibly need. The cons I guess are directly editing the source text can be difficult at times, I find that the autocompleted lists are hard to get back into or to terminate. And the themes/fonts i have no idea how to change, theres 5 built in and some template files where you can make your own but i just want the background a nice offwhite with black text in my monospaced font of choice: Courier 10 Pitch. Could I set that up by digging through the templates and learning whatever weird format they got? Yes but I dont want to deal with it :)

So for now its ghostwriter, maybe if gedit gets a bit more extension support Ill go back to that. In summary,

-Bruce