• 230 words
Is there an authoring environment for longform texts that actually provides both a convenient editing experience and is free from distractions? Well, distractions come in many forms, but when I take my current setup into account: I write these notes in VS Code as HTML file and don't bother too much to separate text from markup. The default of the autocomplete is sensible for actual HTML, but this tries to make a tag out of every other word, so while writing, I usually switch the file to plaintext mode. I'd like to use a editor which could filter out all presentational concerns while still writing in a proper markup language under the hood (be that TeX, HTML, AsciiDoc or what have you). The main point: I'd like to be able to pretend that I write a plaintext file to not bother with technical minutiae while writing. Also, it would be great if this were web-based, so that it could accessed from anywhere. Oh, and some kind of management of material/references would be great. A wiki would come to mind, but the problem with these is that you'd need one per writing project, for otherwise the amassed unrelated material starts to become a distraction quickly. Ah, well, all that, or I just initialize a repository, write plaintext until everything is ready to be typeset in an additional step.