[jszymborski]

What I really want is a small editor that prohibits me from deleting things, as a typewriter dies. I switched to pen and paper for my drafts and it's all but ended my incessant self-editing that plagues my writing process. I'm sure a real typewriter would be more paper efficient.

Now I just stick with what's on the page and edit what I dislike later.

It would be handy for a digital version of that though.

[jonjacky]

You could just use the old 'ed' line editor which is already installed on any Unix-like system, including Linux and Mac OS. ed was written around 1970 to support printing terminals like teletypes.

It's easy: at the command line, type ed draft.txt (or whatever file name you want). Then on a line by itself, type the a command (for append). Then, just type your draft. When you are done typing, type a period . on a line by itself. Then type w to save the draft in the file. Then type q to exit ed. Your draft is in the file draft.txt. In the old days, you would then have a scroll of teletype paper with your draft on it, that you would tear off and take away to review. Nowadays, you can use another command to print the draft.

Later you can do ed draft.txt again and use other ed commands to make corrections/revisions if you like.

Or, even simpler, just use the cat command. At the command line, type cat > draft.txt. Then type your draft. When you are done, type ctrl-D. That's it. Your draft is now in the file draft.txt. You can use cat draft.txt (without the > ) to see what is in the file.

To append more text later, type cat >> draft.txt - be sure you type two >> , if you type just one > you will erase what you have written and start over.

[ngcc_hk]

In the old days of ICL and msdos … it was dreadful (imagine to edit your cobol or asm on that) … but you make it sounds like fun!

[jszymborski]

might have to give that a shot!

[sacredSatan]

It is not exactly what you're looking for but this might be a middle ground. It does let you delete things, but after a certain length, you can't do it anymore.

This is the web version of the app: https://write.sonnet.io/

[jszymborski]

Super clever idea, but ironically my biggest issue re: self-editing is often the first sentence of a draft haha

[kickaha]

I made an Emacs mode that provides this functionality, only to find that someone else had done it better:

https://github.com/emacsmirror/draft-mode

(It was still worth it: huge fun and I learned a ton.)

[staplung]

Wait, let's enshitify it!

We could build an editor that allows you to type but more advanced editing features like deletion would require a subscription on in-editor virtual currency. We could sell loot packs with randomly selected editing features so encourage users to buy lots of loot packs to get exactly the editing features they needed.

We could make billions! Trillions!

[Yen]

Another approach I've found useful for this - turn off your monitor, or turn your brightness down to 0.

You can often do this pretty easily, with keyboard shortcuts or hardware buttons, and it does a lot to limit your temptation to re-read your draft while you're still writing, and makes editing (temporarily) impossible.

[techer]

write or die 2 w/ typewriter mode or momentum writer. both a bit old.