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aleda145yesterday at 11:53 PM7 repliesview on HN

I recently picked up writing short stories again. I briefly looked at different editors, but ended up just doing it in vscode (daily driver). I'll make sure to look at cheese paper for the next one, looks like it has some cool features!

A feature that I have been dreaming about is making an editor that treats each paragraph like a unit of work, and the full text is created by linking together different paragraphs. That way you can easily try different ways without deleting any text. Sort of like nodes in a graph.

And here's my a corporate themed short story: https://dahl.dev/capacity


Replies

pratikdeogharetoday at 8:32 AM

> making an editor

or you could come up with a notation that works in any editor. I have [1].

> That way you can easily try different ways without deleting any text.

Sorry I haven't yet read your story. Here is how I would explore alternatives with my notation. I do this when designing software/algorithms etc.

``` Elias performed at this level for about a year. He was up for a well-deserved promotion to staff engineer. I sent him a meeting invite to go through the updated leveling framework to make sure we didn't miss anything.

#{ #{ Elias declined the meeting. } #{ Elias went to the meeting but he went late.} ... }

```

[1] https://github.com/pratikdeoghare/brashtag

Shoreltoday at 10:50 AM

When each paragraph is one line, you get that for free in any decent editor. Just don't add unnecessary line breaks.

The linebreaks will be added much better by any typesetting algorithm anyway. Like LaTeX.

That's it, no need to overcomplicate things with nodes that are probably the internal memory representation in the text editor anyway.

sharkjacobstoday at 3:13 AM

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "unit of work" but I really like writing in Bike[1] for this reason, it's a hybrid text editor/outliner. It is simply my favorite rich text editor and the outliner functions provide really good affordances for organizing and reorganizing paragraphs.

[1] https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/bike/

baldaitoday at 10:16 AM

Tool you want is called Essay

loneboattoday at 3:14 AM

Is this deliberately borrowing from Herman Melvile's "Bartleby the Scrivener"? If so it might be worth mentioning, rather than just referring to it as "my short story", since it's a nearly identical retelling of it.

scotty79today at 6:10 AM

> A feature that I have been dreaming about is making an editor that treats each paragraph like a unit of work, and the full text is created by linking together different paragraphs. That way you can easily try different ways without deleting any text. Sort of like nodes in a graph.

You could vibecode it. It's great for prototyping features you've been dreaming about.

pitchedtoday at 11:47 AM

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