Trying out WordGrinder - A writing app in the console!

Sometimes, I feel that Linux users are a little strange - not in any strange way, but they seem to be pretty fanatic about something and hold their opinions pretty strongly. Don't believe me? Take your tin foil hat and stay in the Discord Linux server for a day and you will start questioning why some people responded with an "ew" when someone mentions Ubuntu. Not only that, you can see hate about systemd, hate towards NVIDIA (well, that is fully justified, I can explain if you need me to), hate towards Windows (I can explain this too :3), and probably a few more that I don't really remember (at one point I saw someone saying "Wi-Fi is a mistake" and my brain disconnected for a quick moment before I manage to read his explanation on that). Probably it's because Linux gives its users a little too much freedom to do whatever they want in their own way, and humans...yeah, they can be pretty insane and fanatic when they want to.

I'm also a Linux user but I don't really have issues with most stuff, but I do have the urge to do things in my own way. Some years back, I was a super big fan of hot corners. They are little features of some desktop environments that allow you to run a program or commands or do something special by just colliding your mouse cursor with one of the corners of your screen. elementary OS had that feature and guess what, I never press Alt-Tab again until I reboot back to Windows. Slap the cursor to the lower left, and instantly choose one of the opened windows that gets populated on the screen nicely as huge and easily clickable panels. To some extent it feels more organized and is somehow faster than hitting Alt-Tab continuously to find that one window when you have around 6 of them hanging around, and I loved it that way. Most importantly, I enjoy using my computer more because it works exactly how I want it to work. That more or less contributes to productivity, right?

Now, I'm using Arch Linux, and the way I am trying to do is the terminal way. In Linux the terminal (have no idea what is it? Try running Command Prompt in Windows) can do literally everything, so I'm basically trying to find ways to abuse it and see how far I can go. A music player, a web browser, a file manager, a code editor, video playing and image viewing, what else do I lack?

Well, a writing app.

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Of course, I can write with Vim. Nano is also an option, but they just feel like Notepad on Windows. Something just feels off and is a little distracting, and I can't tell what is wrong. Probably it's the same reason I don't use Visual Studio Code to write posts on Windows? It just feels like using the wrong tools to do the wrong things. I resorted to LibreOffice Writer for some time, but things changed after I discovered this.

WordGrinder is a neat little document editor that works on Unix systems (including Mac OS) and Windows. At first I was not too interested in it, but then...it branded itself as something like this.

It is designed to get the hell out of your way and let you get some work done.

Kinda reminds me of Quilter that once accompanied me through tons of assignment writing, with the exception that WordGrinder is not specifically made for Markdown. Whatever, I quickly grabbed a copy and fired it up to see how it plays.

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Getting this on Arch Linux is super easy, as we have some killer feature called the Arch User Repository. In short, someone already did the dirty job of packaging it up and writing scripts to help you get the target app on your computer, and all you have to do is just run a few, or even a single command to get it working.

I use aurman to handle these for me, so one single command will do.

aurman -Syu wordgrinder

It is a tiny little software that only takes...around 3 MB including dependencies? In short, you can get it in a split second. For other Linux distros, try the instructions on their website or just consult your distro's forums or something like that.

When opening it up, you get greeted by an empty window and two lines that represent the start and the end of the document. Looks ugly? You can disable that, but we'll get to that later. There is literally nothing to do before you start typing - if there is, then it would be getting your mind ready and put your hands on the keyboard. No keys to press, no extra configs or something, you just start typing right away. If you tell your terminal to go fullscreen like I do, then it is really a 0 disruption typing world. The only thing that might be the status bar at bottom, but you can also disable that. Like really, there is really nothing stopping you from writing to your hearts content. With an environment like this, you have 0 excuse to say that something is distracting you. Not even one.

At first I thought that I need to configure a few more things with some configuration files like I had to do for Vim, but no. Almost every configuration I need in this app is already handled inside the app - press ESC and a menu will pop out. Use the arrow keys to navigate, Enter to view the submenu or have a configuration window, then further instructions will be given there. Basically, as long as you are willing to read, everything is already explained. If you need the shortkeys' manual again, just hit open the menu and go to the Navigation submenu, it's there for a purpose :)

Another cool thing this thing can do is text styling. Yep, underlines, italics, bolds, etc. The survival guide said that I can mix and match all of these, but it seems that I can only use at most two at once. Probably it's an issue with my terminal, so I'll leave it there. Because honestly, I have not really saw anything in the terminal that uses three styles at once...probably the styles are still there if I export it out, but nope I didn't test it.

One interesting thing about this writing app is, it saves things in its own format. At first I thought that I will have the option to directly open up ODT files or something like that and start working directly, but nope. You need to import by converting it to its format first according to the survival guide linked above. When it saves your stuff, it goes into something with a .wg file extension, so if you need it in other formats you need to export it again. That's a little annoying, but if you are writing something super long you probably don't need it to be .txt all the times anyway, but it will indeed be troublesome when you want to share it to others.

Now let me try a few exports - I mean, I have to do so, my post is written in this app as you have seen in the screenshots...

As you can see, it does not really convert my Markdown things to their respective HTML code or ODT stuff, and that is pretty much expected anyway, WordGrinder is not really a Markdown editor. But I guess it will perform pretty well if I use its built-in italics and stuff like that. Want a fun fact? It can export things to Markdown too (but I guess I will be happier writing Markdown code myself eh). Can't really test importing stuff, it just happened to me that...I don't have anything to import at the time of writing.

Now probably we can do some conclusions :)

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It's a pretty cool writing app - no distractions, sufficient features to make it a word processing program, and is capable of exporting stuff to quite a number of formats. ODT can be read by Microsoft Office so it's a plus I guess? It's also highly configurable according to the survival guide, and the best part is you can live without even touching the extra configurations. Most common key bindings already work out of the box as you would expect (including Ctrl-C for copy, Ctrl-S for save, etc), so the learning curve is pretty flat. Certain keybindings also help you to fly around your documents like a boss, like Ctrl-Up and Ctrl-Down allows you to fly between paragraphs while Ctrl-Left and Ctrl-Right makes your cursor jumps by words instead of letters, and it's totally up to you to learn it or not. The ability to configure it and access almost every function directly from inside is also pretty great, you don't need to mess around with command line options and configuration files and hence is pretty foolproof :)

The bad side? You need to import and export all the time to make sharing easy for others (unless your friend also uses the same app then that's another story). And mouse support is not there, you cannot scroll and click on text to teleport your cursor there, and hence you cannot click on the menu as well. The menu also takes a little time to appear because it will wait for additional inputs you might want to give (shortcut keys), so it is a little annoying if you don't use them. But, it can be bypassed by tapping on Esc followed by any arrow key immediately. Quite a hidden trick but it works, a little annoyingly anyways.

But still, I kind of enjoyed writing in this thing. Definitely worth a try.

Hope you enjoyed the read and see you next time!

--Lilacse