I've played around with a similar idea with a less attractive UI, using Vim or Emacs.
With sufficient adjustments, you can reduce the GUI versions of Vim or Emacs to a single line of text. That way you can just write, but can't see what you've written one it's left that line, until you expand the window to see the full document.
It gives a good sense of flow, although I find that if I'm just forcing myself to write and push forward, it's easy to get into a situation where I'm just pushing text, and not really enforcing any kind of structure on my thoughts.
It's useful to get me into a mode where I'm thinking about new stuff, but I have to be ok with producing a lot of noise that I have to sift back though. Eventually that sifting starts to wear me out.
If 90% percent of everything I write is crap, sorting back through to find the 10% that's good and useful, is more effort than I can make myself keep doing on a regular basis.
With vim, one can go from single setting[1] to something more complex[2] or use one of the available plugins (e.g. typewriter-vim[3] or vim-goyo[4] or vim-focus[5] or Lite-DFM[6] or zen-mode[7] etc.)
> With sufficient adjustments, you can reduce the GUI versions of Vim or Emacs to a single line of text. That way you can just write, but can't see what you've written one it's left that line, until you expand the window to see the full document.
I recommend Olivetti for focused writing with Emacs. It is a simple mode but somehow it takes me back to days of writing on a typewriter. Occasionally I add a focus mode to fade out the other sentences or paragraphs. Maybe I’ve just conditioned myself because I typically only use these modes for documents that require flow over a long period of time. Emacs is excellent for the editing part of course, as is vi; plain text navigation and editing are their core values. And being in Emacs with my 100 active buffers, it super easy to combine disparate ideas, though that can mess with the flow.
With sufficient adjustments, you can reduce the GUI versions of Vim or Emacs to a single line of text. That way you can just write, but can't see what you've written one it's left that line, until you expand the window to see the full document.
It gives a good sense of flow, although I find that if I'm just forcing myself to write and push forward, it's easy to get into a situation where I'm just pushing text, and not really enforcing any kind of structure on my thoughts.
It's useful to get me into a mode where I'm thinking about new stuff, but I have to be ok with producing a lot of noise that I have to sift back though. Eventually that sifting starts to wear me out.
If 90% percent of everything I write is crap, sorting back through to find the 10% that's good and useful, is more effort than I can make myself keep doing on a regular basis.