Show HN: New Ensō – first public beta

I really want a fixed-width font. I know most people dislike writing prose with monospace fonts. But I'm a developer, and proportional fonts always feel wrong.

noted, thanks!

I'm VERY conservative with adding new UI elements, especially those introducing new possible sources of distractions, so I might hide it behind a bunch of menus. That said, I've spent ages yak shaving / working on those problems already :)

Sometimes forcing yourself "not to edit" allows you to bring out things which are hard to catch and hide in the nooks and crannies of your mind.

Brain dumping also works the same way. You write whatever you have in your mind, without even correcting spelling errors. It really brings out things you don't know they are there and bothering you or taking space.

You should at least try once. Takes an hour or so.

I also use a similar method for drafting my blog posts if I have the idea, but can't bring out the rest of the text.

I've always felt the best part of writing on a computer is legibility :)

This might be useful for a whole browser coffee shop mode:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/obfuscator/

I like that idea, too.

When I’m at home, I do most of my writing now with voice input. Would somebody please invent a sound cancellation device that will enable me to talk to my devices in coffee shops and on public transportation without being heard by others?

Good to know :)

At least my https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io gets indexed well, including 100s of AI websites who webscraped it and hallucinated product descriptions.

Thanks for the shoutout!

I think it's funny that it's very similar to ensō in many ways, but also the complete opposite: ensō is calm, mindful, soothing. MDWa is hectic, terrifying, sadistic. Funny how a tiny difference produces products that look almost the same, and feel completely different.

huge props to rafal for creating ensō, personally really love it

Reminds me of Apostrophe actually.

https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.gitlab.somas.Apostrophe

I clicked for the same reason, haha.

These seem likely different concepts to me. Apostrophe is a nice looking markdown editor. Ensō is a minimalist writing tool (I hesitate to call it an 'editor') designed to facilitate a certain kind of writing by hiding text that has already been written and preventing the user from editing it. The focus here seems to be getting the writer to just get the words out and then use a (presumably) different tool to format and edit later.

Consider this:

  cat > ~/my-notes.txt <<EOF
  Type here anything you want. 
  To save and finish, type:
  EOF

Based on the GitHub repo at github.com/rpastuszak/enso, it appears to be proprietary with some open components - the web version uses MIT-licensed libraries but the core app itself isn't fully open sourced.

Added a link to the article, thank you!

rpastuszak's work is a consistent source of inspiration and fun. It's what I wanted the web to become.

It's neither a beta, nor an alpha, more Keanu than Hasselhoff. Hence, it's Ensō sigma!

It's great if you want to "think aloud but with your mouth shut". I wrote 7k words with it just thinking through a problem. The exact word count is meaningless of course -- my main point is that it was really easy to just sit and think with it, without editing myself. I used the Coffeeshop mode for a large chunk of that (plus some Aphex Twin)

Author here: https://enso.sonnet.io

Thanks for the feedback, most of my usual readers know about Ensō and it seems I forgot to leave my little bubble when writing this post!

This is an interesting one.

On one hand it’s hard to disagree with the statement “it should be clear what your product does in a single glance”. In fact there’s a whole meta that’s been developed around this, with well established common wisdom on how to structure your landing page to quickly frame value to prospective users, call them to action, etc.

On the other hand it’s kind of fun to stumble upon something and feel like you missed the beginning of the conversation, and to figure things out piece by piece based on context.

I was also confused when loading this website but it led me to trying the app and it was kind of fun.

Sometimes the most optimized, clearest path isn’t necessarily the preferable one.

Same. I even came to comments to see if anyone has actually written what this is. And, unfortunately, still little. Most people just comment "great stuff". After a few minutes I'm still to learn what this thing is and why does anyone care that it's in beta public.

But yet I lurked longer than many of other product pages I land on to think about what might be going on thanks to the nature of graphics and the non-standard non-bootstrap template approach.

Sometimes providing TLDR means you are providing a way for people to instantly ignore you without further thought. Maybe there is a desire to engage people who think.

Yeah the article is quite bad for the uninitiated but it seems that is how he talks to its own community. Looks like a text editor

Yeah had me confused, product link is <https://enso.sonnet.io/>. Apparently only for mac.

Not to be confused with Ensso, maker of fountain pens <https://www.ensso.com/>.

Haha, I'm actually working on that too! Currently experimenting with a graph based editor.

Also, you might like The Fieldstone Method (Weinberg).

PS. Andy Matuschak's notes: http://notes.andymatuschak.org have some good tips on a similar subject. (My "digital garden" is more of a choose your own adventure book, I'm not married to a single methodology, but I appreciate much of their work)

Is this for non-fiction/business writing?

If so, I recommend looking at Barbara Minto's Pyramid Principle.

https://www.amazon.com/Pyramid-Principle-Logic-Writing-Think...

Thanks!

I've collected a lot of high quality feedback over the years*, plus have defined user personas/problem areas (examples: writers, developers, neurospicy folk, people working on their mental health through journalling/expressive writing, YouTubers, video essay creators, ...).

Over the next few weeks/months I will continue writing/thinking about those on untested.sonnet.io (working with the garage door up, so to speak).

Then, once I come up with more terse/clear ways of expressing this -- I'll put it on the product page (https://enso.sonnet.io)

* thanks to relying on an email link over analytics in the app

Just trying to maximize your efforts... to optimize for first-time user usability, unveil to yourself regular use cases for your users, etc.

I thought it was about this: https://ensoanalytics.com

Enso it pretty overloaded as name for tech things.

There is a PWA at https://write.sonnet.io/

reminded me of _why