write 0.5.0

A fullscreen, distraction-free, write-only Markdown editor that fades text away to silence the writer's inner editor.
write-0.5.0 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 cursor movement and no free editing; deletion is bounded to recent corrections only — Backspace may walk back at most the last two words to fix a fresh typo. Once text is two-plus words in the past 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 deletes a single character, truncating the file — but only within the last two words and never below the file's length when the session opened; older text is permanent and out of reach
`\` / `Esc` opens the menu (day word count); Esc resumes, W toggles windowed/fullscreen, D toggles a darker (dimmer) text mode for the session, `\` inserts a literal backslash, Q quits

Arrows, Delete, Home/End, PageUp/PageDown, and Cmd/Ctrl combinations (paste, undo, …) are intentionally ignored. Beyond fixing a fresh typo with Backspace, there is no way to revise text from inside write — older text stays put.

Install & run

Requires a recent Rust toolchain (edition 2024).

The easiest way to install is from crates.io:

cargo install write

Or build and run from a checkout of this repository:

cargo run --release

Running write with no arguments launches the fading fullscreen TUI for today's session.

Two subcommands operate on today's file without launching the TUI (and without taking the session lock):

write edit   # open today's session file in $VISUAL/$EDITOR/vi
write show   # print today's session file to stdout verbatim (nothing if it doesn't exist yet)

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.