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Show HN: Vapor – A notepad that fades away as you type

(enda.sh)
48 points dduplex | 1 comments | 04 Sep 25 09:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.224s | source

Hello HN,

I made this simple notepad for writing down whatever comes to mind. The goal is to force you to not get hung up on what you’ve already written. There’s no formatting, you can’t edit what you’ve typed, you can’t select text or move your caret around. There’s no backspace, delete, undo/redo, or paste. You can’t even see any words except the one you’re currently typing, and when you’re done with it, it fades away.

The text is all still there, just invisible. You can save everything you’ve written as a .txt if you want, or just empty your thoughts and let them disappear forever.

The idea was to encourage myself to do more stream-of-consciousness writing. I tend to edit while I write. This forces me to just keep moving forward, and I’ve found it very helpful so far. I was going to build this into my other writing tool, Drift, but I didn’t think it fit with the idea of the project, so I just made it its own thing. I’m calling it Vapor for now.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

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treetalker ◴[05 Sep 25 17:44 UTC] No.45141361[source]▶
Great name.

I accidentally reloaded the page on my phone, thus losing all my (meaningless, auto-complete generated) text. So maybe an auto-save would be better?

Years ago there was a lightweight app for the then-current version of Mac OS X called Grandview. When invoked, it would fill your screen with a background color and you would see only a huge version of the single word you were currently typing. (I don't remember, but I think it might have displayed the entirety of the last sentence after you ended it too.) It also deactivated your backspace key so you could only keep typing. That was peak focused writing, and it was an awesome app. I miss it, and similar, small apps that did one thing incredibly well.

replies(2): >>45142150 #>>45145391 #
1. magic_hamster ◴[05 Sep 25 18:46 UTC] No.45142150[source]▶
If this was Windows or Linux you could probably keep using it until the heat-death of the universe. One thing Apple does incredibly poorly is supporting their old software. To me it's a form of instability. You just can't trust any long term process on a mac (well, unless you completely forgo updating your OS).