All the various "let me save you from editing" programs I've seen over the years have been well-meaning, but...
Okay. Look: here's an actual snippet from the first chapter of a novel I wrote a few years ago. It's not unusual for dialogue to be written like this: short paragraphs, one or two sentences each, right?
---
If he’s based on Panorica or one of the half-dozen platforms that have a compact with them, he could lose his license for that. Or worse. But a lot of the private yachts berth at places where space law is more space suggestion. “Who else have you called?”
“Just you. I’m pretty sure the ship’s completely dead. The crew either got out already or didn’t make it.”
“Jesus, Randall.” She runs a hand through her hair, stopping outside the bar. Could she lose her license for following up on this? “If it’s dead, how’d you find it?”
“I picked up an emergency beacon. It stopped before we made visual contact.”
“What kind of ship is it?”
“The beacon data was for a Horizon class freighter.”
“A Horizon went missing and nobody noticed? When was this?”
“Yesterday. Maybe fifteen hours ago. I’ll send you the telemetry data.”
---
Now: imagine trying to write that when every paragraph immediately disappears after you type it.
I'm sorry, but that's just not going to be helpful. Writers don't need to have their past paragraphs hidden from them; we may, in fact, need to see those lines for context. If you want to grey them out the way iA Writer does in "focus mode," fine, although I confess I remain skeptical about how much benefit that truly brings. If I'm actually typing, like I am at this moment, my eye is following the cursor and I'm focused without the extra benefit of disappearing text; if I stop typing, it's because I need to think about what I'm going to write next, and I may need to, you know, read what I've just written in order to do that. If it so happens that I notice a typo in the previous sentence -- or even, heaven forbid, the previous paragraph -- I don't actually feel like my editor is helping me if it prevents me from doing that.
And this is the problem I have with an awful lot of these "let me help you write by being super super minimal and throwing in one neat trick you haven't seen before that makes this even more minimal than those other minimal" editors. I sincerely appreciate the ideas and the work and, yes, the aesthetics. This particular one is really elegant and I don't want to take away from that. But it's part of a whole class of editors that feel, at least to me, like they're kind of solutions in search of problems.
Okay. Look: here's an actual snippet from the first chapter of a novel I wrote a few years ago. It's not unusual for dialogue to be written like this: short paragraphs, one or two sentences each, right?
---
If he’s based on Panorica or one of the half-dozen platforms that have a compact with them, he could lose his license for that. Or worse. But a lot of the private yachts berth at places where space law is more space suggestion. “Who else have you called?”
“Just you. I’m pretty sure the ship’s completely dead. The crew either got out already or didn’t make it.”
“Jesus, Randall.” She runs a hand through her hair, stopping outside the bar. Could she lose her license for following up on this? “If it’s dead, how’d you find it?”
“I picked up an emergency beacon. It stopped before we made visual contact.”
“What kind of ship is it?”
“The beacon data was for a Horizon class freighter.”
“A Horizon went missing and nobody noticed? When was this?”
“Yesterday. Maybe fifteen hours ago. I’ll send you the telemetry data.”
---
Now: imagine trying to write that when every paragraph immediately disappears after you type it.
I'm sorry, but that's just not going to be helpful. Writers don't need to have their past paragraphs hidden from them; we may, in fact, need to see those lines for context. If you want to grey them out the way iA Writer does in "focus mode," fine, although I confess I remain skeptical about how much benefit that truly brings. If I'm actually typing, like I am at this moment, my eye is following the cursor and I'm focused without the extra benefit of disappearing text; if I stop typing, it's because I need to think about what I'm going to write next, and I may need to, you know, read what I've just written in order to do that. If it so happens that I notice a typo in the previous sentence -- or even, heaven forbid, the previous paragraph -- I don't actually feel like my editor is helping me if it prevents me from doing that.
And this is the problem I have with an awful lot of these "let me help you write by being super super minimal and throwing in one neat trick you haven't seen before that makes this even more minimal than those other minimal" editors. I sincerely appreciate the ideas and the work and, yes, the aesthetics. This particular one is really elegant and I don't want to take away from that. But it's part of a whole class of editors that feel, at least to me, like they're kind of solutions in search of problems.