WriteRoom 4.0 (Preview 404)

WriteRoom Releases
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  • Fixed problems entering Markdown format mode
  • Added Help > Acknowledgments for code and ideas
  • Added Beam Rise and Fall slider for the DEC Terminal theme

The DEC theme tries to simulate a DEC terminal. Some of those effects make text appear a little blurry. If you just want as crisp as possible DEC characters then slide all the DEC Terminal theme sliders (Screen Glow, Screen Curvature, Beam Rise and Fall) to the left.

Here’s the WriteRoom 4.0 Preview (Please don’t share widely).

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WriteRoom 4.0 (Preview 403)
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So, spent some time with WriteRoom. I’ve never used the app before, so I don’t know its history or what it was capable of before 4.0, but I have used almost every well-designed plain-text writing app there is out there, so take my feedback with that context in mind.

Initial impressions

Very sleek and tactile drafting app. Even though it supports markdown, I wouldn’t call it a markdown editor (yet), but very much a writing app, one that gets you from Open → Write in zero time.

What I love

  • Generates blank page out of the box when you open (if no other documents are open). Blank page + blinking cursor staring at you, so easy to get started.
  • The DEC theme is really well done. Makes me wish it was a terminal app so that I could have multiple panes open with multiple documents
  • Speed and agility, writing is really a super-tactile experience with this editor
  • The mini-map scroller and the ESC-to-zoom features are great for navigation, and you can avoid a separate TOC feature
  • Typewriter mode is great. Usually I default to Top position in apps that support it; with Writeroom, the fixed top position feels set a little too high ATM (would love to see a little more context above). I also love that it disengages fixed position on scroll and doesn’t re-engage until I start writing again.

What I’d love to see

  1. Keyboard shortcut support for quick-inserting dates and current time (ISO dates in particular)
  2. Indentation character selector → currently defaults to 2 spaces, but I use TAB in all other documents
  3. More mouse avoidance:
  • Ways to move text around
    • Paragraphs up/down
    • Reorder list items
      • Maybe outline aware (move children)? Maybe independent? Discussions with other apps show people want different things
  • Autocomplete brackets and auto-wrap selection in brackets
  • Ways to move caret between headings. Maybe if zoom-out mode was a toggle instead of needing to hold ESC down, it could be good for keyboard navigation?
  • Keyboard shortucts to show/hide additional elements (mini-map, line numbers, sticky headings)
  1. A satisfying progress bar to hit a word-count goal would be super nice. Maybe a timer, too.
  2. An iOS/iPad version :slight_smile:

Things that make me think

Markdown support. I love that it’s there. I love that it highlights syntax, love that it supports checkboxes and that I can toggle them with a shortcut.

I’m not sure about the hiding markdown option. On one hand, I appreciate it’s there if people want a clean-looking document; but I personally hate the exploding aspect of it. Would very much prefer to see a WYSIWYG presentation the same way Bike does it.

This has been a feature request in the Obsidian forums since forever, and recent discussions around Shiny Frog’s new markdown editing app Lettera seem like that’s what other users want too, because there doesn’t seem to be an app on the market that does this well. OTOH, Writeroom a writing app, not really a document/styling editor and viewer. And I guess WYSIWYG comes with its own set of problems. Would love to read how you see it.

Bugs?

  1. If I select a chunk of text and press TAB, it will delete the entire selection instead of indenting, even if I have a whole line selected
  2. De-indenting with Shift+TAB doesn’t seem to work
  3. In 404, the DEC appearance controls (glow, curvature, beam) are very slow to respond, and seem to have pre-determined positions (0, center, full) instead of full-spectrum values

Overall, super excited to see where you take this. And yes, this was written with WriteRoom :slight_smile:

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WriteRoom 4.0 (Preview 405-406)
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Hey hey! :slight_smile: I think my app FoldingText invented (or at least reinvented) this interaction, so I gota keep it!

But more to the point, I think the strength of pure Markdown is that it’s all visible, all under user’s control. It’s also the weakness, but that’s the tradeoff I think.

Generally I’m trying to make the tradeoff one way for Bike and the other way for WriteRoom. Two hats in the ring!

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Very useful and detailed feedback, thanks.

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Jesse,

Thank you very much for taking this up. I both built my workflow around Writeroom and have never reviewed software before.

I’ll start to use the new version as a daily driver now. Let me know if I can help in testing. For now I have two remarks:

  1. This version feels spiffy, more reactive, a bit like a newly installed phone or laptop does. FYI I use an M4 with 16 Gb Ram.

  2. In this version it isn’t possible to open multiple documents. Can we have the ‘plus sign in the upper right corner’ in the new version?

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Thanks for giving it a try.

:slight_smile:

WriteRoom 4 should currently be able to open multiple document via File > Open, or just drag and drop files onto WriteRoom’s icon…

I think you are talking about multiple documents in a single window with tabs? That’s not possible at moment, but I will look into fixing that.

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yup, that’s it. I look forward to the next version.

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Possibly a little early to be testing the WriteRoom 4 CLI, but FWIW I am getting an error message of the pattern:

WriteRoom error 404: 
No open document with id "DC3320B7-AE22-4829-993E-A9573C4FB3FB". 
Ids last for one run of the app; 

`writeroom get documents` 

lists the current ones.

in response to incantations like

 writeroom update document --document "$TEMPID" --text "someText"

where writeroom get documents seems to confirm that the UUID used is current.

Very possible that I am doing something wrong :slight_smile:

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Test away, and thanks!

Check that the ID you are passing doesn’t contain literal quotes around it. I think that’s the issue, because the error message doesn’t add quotes itself. For example this is the error I see when I update document with missing id pizza:

writeroom update document --document "pizza" --text "someText"
Error: WriteRoom error 404: No open document with id pizza. Ids last for one run of the app; writeroom get documents lists the current ones.
1 Like
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Thank you – works perfectly now – the quotes were indeed the problem.

If we extract an .id value from the CLI’s json output with a jq (jaq) incantation like:

TEMPID=$(writeroom create document sample.md | jaq -r ".id")

Then the -r switch (raw) discards the JSON quotes for us, and all works well with subsequent use of $TEMPID.

Homebrew Formulae: jaq

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