Show HN: Turn your fancy, expensive computer into a stupid typewriter

Re:Show HN: Turn your fancy, expensive computer into a stupi... by webel0 on Friday May 22, 2020 @10:32AM (#23272501)

This reminds me of how Jonathan Franzen writes on a giant old laptop with no internet. (Forgot where I read this.) Different dimension of keeping it simple.

Interesting to contrast with the likes of grammarly or google suggestions. I can’t stand having that stuff in my ear while writing. However, I did have a friend who was a non-native English speaker and he liked it because he felt less self-conscious about screwing up grammar elements when writing.

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Re:Show HN: Turn your fancy, expensive computer into a stupi... by linuxftw on Friday May 22, 2020 @10:35AM (#23272528)

My approach is to do heavy writing in a plain text editor, then I paste into a word doc and format. Having to worry about spell correct and auto-indent doing weird stuff, grammar suggestions, all very distracting when you're trying to brain-dump words into a document.

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Re:Show HN: Turn your fancy, expensive computer into a stupi... by codq on Friday May 22, 2020 @11:51AM (#23273382)

Drafts (https://getdrafts.com/) was made for this.

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Re:Show HN: Turn your fancy, expensive computer into a stupi... by eykd on Friday May 22, 2020 @10:39AM (#23272573)

Yes. Markdown formatting was a godsend to me. Just give me the text.

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Re:Show HN: Turn your fancy, expensive computer into a stupi... by eykd on Friday May 22, 2020 @10:35AM (#23272536)

Nice. Some people buy old Alphasmarts off of ebay.

Tools like Grammarly are great, but when I'm writing, I need to be left alone with the words. The squiggles come later, when I'm editing and revising.

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