Just Freaking Write

Are you the kind of person that spends hours agonizing over a few sentences? Are you sick of ending a writing session with nothing to show for it? Do you wish you could just write an imperfect (but complete) draft? Well today might be your lucky day!

just-freaking-write is a superminimal text editor that prevents backspacing more than a few words. Since it's not meant for you to write a whole document like this, it doesn't save your work to a file. Instead, you just copy the text to your clipboard, which you can then paste into a real text editor for... y'know... editing. Perhaps you can tell by the rambling nature of this paragraph, that it was written using this tool. In fact, I just realized I shouldn't have used a comma in that last sentence, but I CAN"T CHANGE IT NOW. Maybe this will help me finally write on a deadline. Here's hoping!

Instructions

Dependencies

For all operating systems:

pip install prompt-toolkit pyinstaller pyperclip

If running on Ubuntu/Debian, you will also need tp run:

sudo apt install xclip

If on another Linux distro... I'll just assume you can figure it out.

Installation

Clone (or otherwise download) the git repository. From that directory, run

python install.py

The executable will be compiled as ~/just-freaking-write/dist/jfwedit.exe. If you add the dist directory to your Windows PATH (or equivalent) you will be able to execute it simply by typing

jfwedit

in your terminal. If you're in Linux, I will once again assume you know what to do.

Options

There are currently three command-line arguments:

--erasable-depth <num> or -e <num> sets the number of words that you can type before they start locking into place. Default is 2.

--mask-locked or -m covers your text up to the last fully locked sentence. This can be useful to prevent yourself from even reading what you've written before it's time to edit.

--mask-locked-all or -M is a more aggressive masking, that covers ALL text as soon as it's locked in. (In case of masochism, break glass.)