| In theory this is a great idea, but not a single implementation I've seen fits my needs. I'm not going to use a writing tool that requires me to change my entire workflow. This (and every other tool I've seen that does something similar[1]) requires me to use their editor. If I want to do something like edit a comment on HN, it requires copy/paste to do that. More crippling than that, these editors don't support anything besides the writing simplification features. HTML breaks it, markdown breaks it, and it can't do WYSIWYG (Hemingway does this last, but not well). I don't mean to criticize the tools too harshly: linguistic processing of any kind is hard and they do a good job at that. I can certainly see how this would be useful for someone who writes more seriously than I do and can take the time to write first and mark up or format in a different editor later. And the effort to make it something I would use is large. I would probably want a browser plugin that watched my text areas and handled markdown, and a vim plugin. :) But for me, not having integration with my workflow makes it too complicated to use and the value it provides isn't large enough for me to change my workflow. [1] http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ |
What programming language would a library for this have to be in for it to be especially useful? I'm doing it in JavaScript for now, since I can think of immediate cases where I can embed it. Elisp will come immediately after that, since I compose my emails in Emacs most of the time. Next on the docket might be a C version, with the intent that you could add it to GTK+ apps.