write 0.2.0

A fullscreen, distraction-free, write-only Markdown editor that fades text away to silence the writer's inner editor.
write-0.2.0 is not a library.

write

write is an opinionated, writing-centric editor whose entire purpose is to silence the writer's inner editor. Text fades from the screen shortly after it is typed, so there is nothing to look back at, nothing to second-guess, and nothing to fiddle with. You simply write.

Output is plain Markdown, appended to a daily file. There is no editing, no deletion, no cursor movement, no selection — once a character is typed it is permanent in the file and soon invisible on screen. When you are done, open the resulting .md in your real editor (Neovim, etc.) to revise.

How it works

  • Fullscreen, borderless, distraction-free. The app takes over the screen with a black canvas and a single centered column of text. No chrome, no menus, no mouse.
  • The fading view. Each glyph stays fully visible for ~30 seconds, then fades out over ~1 second and is gone for good. The active line holds near the vertical center while older lines scroll off the top as you write.
  • Running word count. A small, dim word count sits in the upper-right corner, showing the day's total (seeded from what is already in today's file, so it survives relaunches). It appears once you have written at least two words and only ever grows.
  • Append-only Markdown. Everything you type is appended verbatim to today's session file at ~/Documents/write/YYYY-MM-DD.md (falling back to your home directory if there is no Documents folder). The file is flushed and fsync'd roughly every 30 seconds and again on a clean exit, so your words are durable.
  • One writer per day. Each day shares a single file, guarded by an advisory lock. If a second write is already running for today, the new instance exits quietly instead of fighting over the file.

Keys

Key Effect
any character appended to the file and shown on screen
Enter inserts a paragraph break (\n\n); a second consecutive Enter clears the screen
Backspace does not delete — appends a single space, clears the screen, and shakes the text in protest
Esc opens the menu (day word count); Esc resumes, W toggles windowed/fullscreen, Q quits

Arrows, Delete, Home/End, PageUp/PageDown, and Cmd/Ctrl combinations (paste, undo, …) are intentionally ignored. There is no way to revise text from inside write.

Install & run

Requires a recent Rust toolchain (edition 2024).

cargo run --release

Your writing lands in ~/Documents/write/, one Markdown file per day.

Platform support

write is built on egui/eframe and is portable in principle, but it is developed and tested on macOS first. Other platforms track upstream egui maturity.