All the various "let me save you from editing" programs I've seen over the years have been well-meaning, but...<p>Okay. Look: here's an actual snippet from the first chapter of a novel I wrote a few years ago. It's not unusual for dialogue to be written like this: short paragraphs, one or two sentences each, right?<p>---<p>If he’s based on Panorica or one of the half-dozen platforms that have a compact with them, he could lose his license for that. Or worse. But a lot of the private yachts berth at places where space law is more space suggestion. “Who else have you called?”<p>“Just you. I’m pretty sure the ship’s completely dead. The crew either got out already or didn’t make it.”<p>“Jesus, Randall.” She runs a hand through her hair, stopping outside the bar. Could she lose her license for following up on this? “If it’s dead, how’d you find it?”<p>“I picked up an emergency beacon. It stopped before we made visual contact.”<p>“What kind of ship is it?”<p>“The beacon data was for a Horizon class freighter.”<p>“A Horizon went missing and nobody noticed? When was this?”<p>“Yesterday. Maybe fifteen hours ago. I’ll send you the telemetry data.”<p>---<p>Now: imagine trying to write that <i>when every paragraph immediately disappears after you type it.</i><p>I'm sorry, but that's just not going to be helpful. Writers don't need to have their past paragraphs hidden from them; we may, in fact, need to see those lines for context. If you want to <i>grey them out</i> the way iA Writer does in "focus mode," fine, although I confess I remain skeptical about how much benefit that truly brings. If I'm actually typing, like I am at this moment, my eye is following the cursor and I'm focused without the extra benefit of disappearing text; if I stop typing, it's because I need to think about what I'm going to write next, and I may need to, you know, read what I've just written in order to do that. If it so happens that I notice a typo in the previous sentence -- or even, heaven forbid, the previous paragraph -- I don't actually feel like my editor is <i>helping</i> me if it prevents me from doing that.<p>And this is the problem I have with an awful lot of these "let me help you write by being super super minimal and throwing in one neat trick you haven't seen before that makes this <i>even more minimal</i> than those other minimal" editors. I sincerely appreciate the ideas and the work and, yes, the aesthetics. This particular one is <i>really</i> elegant and I don't want to take away from that. But it's part of a whole class of editors that feel, at least to me, like they're kind of solutions in search of problems.