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I've known about *WordGrinder* for a long time now, but it's something I've never really used even though I think it's pretty cool. I guess I'm so used to editing as I work in vim and I never felt like grinding out words was really the thing for me... it's not like I write novels or something. I imagine that's sort of the target audience for WordGrinder.
So this is actually the first time I've ever used WordGrinder to write something.
If you've never heard of it, what WG does is it takes up the whole terminal and doesn't display any menus or formatting buttons or anything like that. It's just kind of you and the screen and no distractions. There are pop-up menus you can trigger with the escape key, and configurable hot-keys.
Just now, I had a little romp through the menu because I honestly couldn't remember what sort of formatting options it has. It seems to pretty much have HTML-style formatting; H1, H2, paragraph, bold, italic, etc.
I suppose that might be useful if you export to html, but as I'm writing in gemini's markdown-esque format, those are unused options.
Ok, there's a spellchecker and I haven't seen any errors yet, so I'm thinking that maybe it just doesn't mark those words until you start checking for errors. It could be that that's so you don't waste time on little errors; instead, letting the words flow until you decide to scan the document later for mistakes. I'm going to try it now and see what happens... no misspelled words.
OK, let's try blorghmphlerp. Ah... maybe I need to define the spellcheck program or something. I'll have to check the man page.
Alright, now it's time to save this thing. I know WG has it's own format, but there's a "save as" function, so I'm going to try saving this as blogging_with_wordgrinder.txt and we'll see what happens.
OK, so when I was in the file menu, I ran into some spell-checker options. There's an option to display misspelled words or something. It was off by default. I'm guessing when you have the spellcheck working, misspelled words are highlighted somehow... OK, I set it to use one of the dictionaries and it seems to be working just fine. It still doesn't display misspelled words any differently, but I can live with that. I'm doing this over ssh so that could be a factor.
Alright... it looks like if you use "Save As", it's going to use its own format. But you can export to HTML, ODT, Markdown, Latex, plain text, and some other format. I'll just be exporting as plain text since the markdown-style stuff is already plain text to begin with.
OK, so saving as plaintext only puts one line-break between paragraphs. When typing in WG, it looks like two lines. The way these files get rendered in gemini clients, they look akward that way. It's a quick fix in vim to change this:
:1,$s/$/\r/
So... so far, I'm not seeing a super compelling reason to choose WG over vim, but I'll probably try writing a few posts with it again in the future to see if it grows on me.
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✍️ Last Updated: 2021-11-18