The editor should be boring

The editor is where the writing happens. I want to keep it calm, predictable, and a little boring for as long as I can.

It has one job

The editor has one job. It should give you a place to write.

That sounds obvious, but editors have a habit of collecting things. A button might save you a trip somewhere else. A new panel might put useful information closer to the page. Each idea can make sense on its own. Put enough of them together and you are suddenly managing your writing instead of writing.

I am always a little hesitant when I think about adding something to the editor. Even when it sounds handy, it also asks for space and attention. It becomes one more choice to make when you were trying to finish a sentence.

Everything else in Spleen is somewhere you pass through. The editor is where you stay.

Boring means predictable

When I call the editor boring, I do not mean empty or unfinished. I mean that the cursor goes where you put it. Undo undoes what you just did. Pasting text does not bring half of another app with it. Nothing moves underneath a sentence while you are still writing it.

There are useful things in there. Spleen saves while you write. You can use simple formatting, attach a remark to a passage, look back at a snapshot, or hide the rest of the workspace in Zen Mode. The tools appear when they are useful and try to disappear when they are not.

That is the kind of boring I want. You should not have to learn the mood of the editor before you can trust it.

The work that does not show

A small mismatch in the code beneath the editor once made every change fail. The page still looked like a place you could write. It just stopped doing the one thing it was there for.

Much of the work on the editor is about preventing that sort of thing. Saving should happen without interrupting you. A toolbar should not make the text jump when it appears. Leaving a document should not lose the last sentence. These are not exciting features, but they matter more than another button.

The best version of that work is almost invisible.

Useful is not enough

Every new feature also brings another button, shortcut, setting, or rule. It has to work with a keyboard and on a phone. It has to behave when you undo, paste, save, leave, and come back. Even a small addition can make the editor less calm or less dependable.

So being useful is not quite enough. A feature should help with the act of writing, and it should stay out of the way when you do not need it.

That does not mean the editor is finished. I am open to suggestions, especially from people who use Spleen for real work and keep running into the same missing thing. But I want the first question to remain simple: does this help someone write?

If the answer is yes, there may be a place for it. If the answer is only that it would be nice to have, I would rather wait.

I want to keep the editor boring for as long as possible. The interesting part should be what you write in it.