Title: Reviewing some open source distraction free editors | |
Author: Solène | |
Date: 15 September 2021 | |
Tags: editors unix | |
Description: | |
# Introduction | |
This article is about comparing "distraction free" editors running on | |
Linux. This category of editors is supposed to be used in full screen | |
and shouldn't display much more than text, allowing to stay focused on | |
the text. | |
I've found a few programs that run on Linux and are open source, I | |
deliberately omitted web browser based editors | |
* Apostrophe | |
* Focuswriter | |
* Ghostwriter | |
* Quilter | |
* Vi (the minimal vi from busybox) | |
I used them on Alpine, three of them installed from Flatpak and | |
Apostrophe installed from the Alpine packages repositories. | |
I'm writing this on my netbook and wanted to see if a "distraction" | |
free editor could be valuable for me, the laptop screen and resolution | |
are small and using it for writing seems a fun idea, although I'm not | |
really convinced of the use (for me!) of such editors. | |
# Resource usage and performance | |
Quick tour of the memory usage (reported in top in the SHR column) | |
* Apostrophe: 63 MB of memory | |
* Focuswriter: 77 MB of memory | |
* Ghostwriter: 228 MB of memory | |
* Quilter: 72 MB of memory | |
* vi: 0.89 MB of memory + 41 MB of memory for xfce4-terminal | |
As for the perceived performance when typing I've had mixed results. | |
* Apostrophe: writing is smooth and pleasant | |
* Focuswriter: writing is smooth and pleasant | |
* Ghostwriter: writing is smooth and pleasant | |
* Quilter: there is a delay when typing, I've been able to type an | |
entire sentence and being so fast I've been able to see the last word | |
being drawn on the screen | |
* vi: writing is smooth and pleasant | |
# Features | |
I didn't know much what to expect from these editors, I've seen some | |
common features and some other that I discovered. | |
* focus mode: keep the current sentence/paragraph/line in focus and | |
fade the text around | |
* helpers for markdown mode: shortcuts to enable/disable bold/italic, | |
bullet lists etc... Outlining window to see the structure of the | |
document or also real time rendering from the markdown | |
* full screen mode | |
* changing fonts and display: color, fonts, background, style sheet may | |
be customized to fit what you prefer | |
* "Hemingway" mode: you can't undo what you type, I suppose it's to | |
write as much as possible and edit later | |
* Export as multiple format: html, ODT, PDF, epub... | |
# Personal experience and feelings | |
It would be long and not really interesting to list which program has | |
which feature so here is my feelings about those four software. | |
## Apostrophe | |
It's the one I used for writing this article, it feels very nice, it | |
proposes only three themes that you can't customize and the font can't | |
be changed. Although you can't customize that much, it's the one that | |
looks the best out of the box, that is easiest to use and which just | |
works fine. From a distraction free editor, it seems it's the best | |
approach. | |
This is the one I would recommend to anyone wanting a distraction free | |
editor. | |
Apostrophe project website | |
## Quilter | |
Because of the input lag when typing text, this was the worse | |
experience for me, maybe it's platform specific? The user interface | |
looks a LOT like apostrophe at the point I'd think one is a fork from | |
another, but in regards to performance it's drastically different. It | |
offers three themes but also allow choosing the fonts from three named | |
"Quilt something" which is disappointing. | |
Quilter project website | |
## Focuswriter | |
This one has potential, it has a lot of things you can tweak in the | |
preferences menu, from which character should be doubled (like quotes) | |
when typed, daily goals, statistics, configurable shortcuts for | |
everything, writing from right to left. | |
It also relies a lot on the theming features to choose which background | |
(picture or color) you want, how to space the text, which font, which | |
size, opacity of the typing area. It has too many tweaks required to | |
be usable to me, the default themes looked nice but the text was small | |
and ugly, it was absolutely not enjoying to type and see the text | |
appending. I tried to duplicate a theme (from the user interface) and | |
change the font and size, but I didn't get something that I enjoyed. | |
Maybe with some time spent it could look good, but what the other tools | |
provide is something that just works and looks good out of the box. | |
Focuswriter project website | |
## Ghostwriter | |
I tried ghostwriter 1.x at first then I saw there was a 2.x version | |
with a lot more features, so I used both for this review, I'll only | |
cover the 2.x version but looking at the repositories information many | |
distributions providing the old version, including flatpak. | |
Ghostwriter seems to be the king of the arena. It has all the features | |
you would expect from a distraction free editor, it has sane defaults | |
but is customizable and is enjoyable out of the box. For writing long | |
documents, the markdown outlining panel to see the structure of the | |
document is very useful and there are features for writing goal and | |
statistics, this may certainly be useful for some users. | |
Ghostwriter project website | |
## vi | |
I couldn't review some editors without including a terminal based | |
editor. I chose vi because it seemed the most distraction free to me, | |
emacs has too many features and nano has too much things displayed at | |
the bottom of the screen. I choose vi instead of ed because it's more | |
beginner friendly, but ed would work as fine. Note that I am using vi | |
(from busybox on Alpine linux) and not Vim or nvi. | |
vi doesn't have much features, it can save text to a file. The display | |
can be customized in the terminal emulator and allow a great choice of | |
font / theme / style / coloring after decades of refinements in this | |
field. It has no focus mode or markdown coloration/integration, which | |
I admit can be confusing for big texts with some markup involved, at | |
least for bullet lists and headers. I always welcome a bit of | |
syntactic coloration and vi lacks this (this can be solved with a more | |
advanced text editor). vi won't allow you to export into any kind of | |
file except plain text, so you need to know how to convert the text | |
file into the output format you are looking for. | |
busybox project website | |
# Conclusion | |
It's hard for me to tell if typing this article using Apostrophe editor | |
was better or more efficient than using my regular kakoune terminal | |
text editor. The font looks absolutely better in Apostrophe but I | |
never gave much attention to the look and feel of my terminal emulator. | |
I'll try using Apostrophe or Ghostwriter for further articles, at least | |
by using my netbook as a typing machine. |