A clinically obese man gave me a FREEWRITE for Christmas

[Dr. Drib]

Actually, I bought this expensive (VERY EXPENSIVE!) gift for myself. So I guess I'm the FAT* dude alluded to in the Heading of this thread.

More posts later on.


* = Not that there's anything wrong with that, except for obvious health issues.

[Dr. Drib]

I lied: It was Santa, but he destroyed the chimney. Unfortunately, the reindeer starved to death, as we spent the next three days extricating him from his prison. The venison wasn't too bad. Added to the chili, it was pretty darn good. Yes, pretty darn good.

Oh, about that Freewrite:

It's advertised as a "distraction free" device writing device. I don't actually feel distracted when I write, but I do labor over sentences until I get them just the way I feel they need to be before advancing to the next sentence.. I don't define this as a distraction, but rather as the way in which I write. This type of writing slows down my momentum, so I wanted to see how it would be if I just kept writing and writing, sort of like an excretory process.

More later....

[skb]

Poor Santa. And then he had to account to the Australian state governments who do contact tracing for Covid for everywhere he'd been. I bet he's now looking on gumtree for replacement reindeer while muttering "never again!".

On the other hand. Ooooh. Freewrite. I've always wanted one since they were a gleam in the developer's eye and called (I think) a Hemingway. The only thing stopping me was the price.

I'll be very interested on the gadget report.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by skb

Poor Santa. And then he had to account to the Australian state governments who do contact tracing for Covid for everywhere he'd been. I bet he's now looking on gumtree for replacement reindeer while muttering "never again!".

On the other hand. Ooooh. Freewrite. I've always wanted one since they were a gleam in the developer's eye and called (I think) a Hemingway. The only thing stopping me was the price.

I'll be very interested on the gadget report.

You're close on the name: It was called the Hemingwrite.

I intent to add a number of posts reviewing and commenting upon this device.

[skb]

Yes! Hemingwrite.

Looking forward to the reviews and comments. I was so close to buying one (I still have my Neo2, so there's no rush to buy).

[GlenBarrington]

Anyone who can't be distracted when they are attempting to write one profundity after another, simply isn't trying HARD enough!

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by GlenBarrington

Anyone who can't be distracted when they are attempting to write one profundity after another, simply isn't trying HARD enough!

I find that if I write in a non-WYSIWYG text editor that I don't get distracted with the format. Words flow better for me. Writing is challenging enough. You shouldn't have to "try harder" not worry about formatting as you go.

But to each their own. I'm not crazy about the near-inability to edit as you write with a FreeWrite, but some people find it liberating. If it works, it works. Not everyone is the same.

[Quoth]

Sometimes at the start I use Notepad++, KATE or Jota as text only editors for a story. Stuff like annotations, characters, events, plot, etc is always in plain text. With spelling checker off if there is one.

I have all superfluous status, rulers, menus and icons hidden.

Even on WYSIWYG I use styles and have the grammar check off till doing a complete check of the document. Mostly stuff is a heading or body text.

I had to use a typewriter for reports in my first job after college. I still have a portable typewriter.

Jota on Android (and I have real keyboards for the phone and tablets) is the minimum for me. Or perhaps Nano on Console Linux. I don't see that being able to screen edit is a distraction. How I hated editors on PCs that were really designed for a paper teletype, such as edlin.

[GlenBarrington]

Originally Posted by rcentros

I find that if I write in a non-WYSIWYG text editor that I don't get distracted with the format. Words flow better for me. Writing is challenging enough. You shouldn't have to "try harder" not worry about formatting as you go.

But to each their own. I'm not crazy about the near-inability to edit as you write with a FreeWrite, but some people find it liberating. If it works, it works. Not everyone is the same.

That was a joke.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

You're close on the name: It was called the Hemingwrite

Does it have a software keyboard that is so slow to use that it forces you to write using short sentences of small words?

[skb]

Originally Posted by GlenBarrington

Anyone who can't be distracted when they are attempting to write one profundity after another, simply isn't trying HARD enough!

Exactly. I can easily get distr

[JSWolf]

Why is it called FreeWrite when it's so expensive?

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by GlenBarrington

That was a joke.

I'm sorry. I'm slow sometimes (more so than less so lately).

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Why is it called FreeWrite when it's so expensive?

I think the inability to edit as you go is supposed to "free" your writing. It would drive me nuts if I looked up and four lines back I used the wrong name and I couldn't edit it. Instead I would have to take a note of it and remember to edit when I got it moved to a word processor. I like simple, but not too simple.

[Quoth]

It's pretty easy to not edit as you go on a text editor with no icons and no highlighting.

Also switch off Autocorrect and Autoformat on EVERYTHING. Though auto-suggestion is OK for texting on a phone, but not for writing on a phone or tablet. Any amount of writing on a phone or tablet needs a USB keyboard unless you have one of the rare BT wireless keyboards with decent key action and that doesn't miss the first few characters due to sleeping.

I'm considering disabling smart quotes as they can be wrong. I can type “ and ” using altGr v and b, also ‘ and ’ is Shift AltGr V and B.

The only thing I need special character input for are prime and double prime (hours, minutes, feet and inches). I could remap « and » as I don't write in French or other languages that use those as outer quotes. I even have Greek via Compose G <letter> or Compose g <letter>

I also find USA physical keyboards that have one key less very annoying, which is almost all of them. I don't mind if the extra key isn't left of Z as long as it's somewhere. Some have an extra key between ] and Enter.

I do only use ¬ (logical not) as temporary replacement on a global search and replace that's going to swap some character. The ` under it on non-US layout should be a dead key to do à ò etc, it's not a single quote.