The last time I felt truly productive, typing, was in 1990

Every so often I reminisce about the good old days when MS Word worked on MS-DOS.

No gui. No mouse.

Nothing pretty.

Just words typed on a screen, with underline, italics, and bold.

Save to a floppy disk.
Print to a printer.

Bliss.

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May I introduce you to vi? :wink:

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The VIM text editor with the Txtfmt plugin would seem to get you close to what you had in Word on DOS.

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If you don’t need footnotes, TextEdit is mighty fine. Me, I’m nostalgic for MacWrite Pro.

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If there was way to get rid of the toolbar at the top, TextEdit in RTF mode is a lot like what the OP is asking for. But I couldn’t find a setting that would clear the GUI away.

You can still run WordPerfect in the terminal. If you’re feeling froggy…. Jump!

the roman vi or the unix vi?

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:joy:

Unix. I wrote my first website in it. Still use it in the terminal now and again when I’m in a hurry and don’t need to do much – muscle memory is remarkable. I keep hearing about this newfangled vim, but who really needs an extra letter?

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View/Enter Full Screen hides everything but the ruler,

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I am surprised at how frequently I think of Form Tool.

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Pine is still the best e-mail client ever written!

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At least Pine Is Not Elm

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For years I wrote C++ code just using vi. No keyword highlighting, autocomplete, etc. I really learned the language inside and out this way.

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People who know vi are the only people who should use vi. If you don’t already know it, save yourself now and find something else. Even pen and paper.

I honestly think the closest to the described text-no-GUI is a decent Markdown editor. If you stick to just bold and italic (in fact, more correctly strong emphasis and emphasis) then it’s really very similar.

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Yeah, there are markdown editors that offer very minimalistic modes. I use iA Writer’s Focus Mode.

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Joe or nano from a terminal.
I think some of the key bindings are the same.

But I f you want a real typewriter experience:

cat >my_novel.txt
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Now THAT would be editing on the ragged edge! Especially for a novel-length piece of writing. But don’t forget to append the second time you edit your magnum opus else bye-bye novel!

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Right, I don’t use vi much anymore, even when writing C++ code. For that I mostly use XCode or vscode. But it is still useful to know if you ever have to poke around on a server. So the vast majority of people don’t need it.

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I have, for some reason, recently migrated to a four-pane iTerm with aerc for email top left, vit (using TaskWarrior) top right, nb notes for journaling in bottom left using NeoVim w/ lots of plugins as the default editor. Bottom right is misc. command-line things.

I don’t program, and I’m retired, but I really do enjoy writing in this barebones style. Of course a lot of my early jobs were data entry and word processing, before DOS or GUI became common. Things like Wang and WordStar and WordPerfect. So having a very keyboard-centric approach is nice. Every time I have to reach for a mouse or trackpad I slow down and my concentration is broken.

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Agreed. I was mostly joking, even though I think it mostly fits the bill.

Some of the other options mentioned are definitely good ones, IMO: Nano in the terminal, and of course, any decent markdown editor – Toyota is great if you want a WYSIWYG feel, MultiMarkdown Composer if you do want to customize how it looks.

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