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.
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.
May I introduce you to vi
?
The VIM text editor with the Txtfmt plugin would seem to get you close to what you had in Word on DOS.
If you don’t need footnotes, TextEdit is mighty fine. Me, I’m nostalgic for MacWrite Pro.
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?
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?
View/Enter Full Screen hides everything but the ruler,
Pine is still the best e-mail client ever written!
At least Pine Is Not Elm
For years I wrote C++ code just using vi. No keyword highlighting, autocomplete, etc. I really learned the language inside and out this way.
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.
Yeah, there are markdown editors that offer very minimalistic modes. I use iA Writer’s Focus Mode.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.