Show HN: New Ensō – first public beta
untested.sonnet.io249 points by rpastuszak 5 days ago
249 points by rpastuszak 5 days ago
Ensō is a writing tool that helps you enter a state of flow by separating writing from editing and thus making it harder for you to edit yourself - https://enso.sonnet.io/
After 6 years and 2 million words of daily writing I feel like I've learned enough to make Ensō simpler and more accessible.
Related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38025073
I've always felt that the best part of writing on a computer is the ability to edit while you write, however, I also understand that doesn't work at all for a lot of people, so I think this app is neat even though I personally wouldn't use it. Sometimes forcing yourself "not to edit" allows you to bring out things which are hard to catch and hide in the nooks and crannies of your mind. Brain dumping also works the same way. You write whatever you have in your mind, without even correcting spelling errors. It really brings out things you don't know they are there and bothering you or taking space. You should at least try once. Takes an hour or so. I also use a similar method for drafting my blog posts if I have the idea, but can't bring out the rest of the text. sounds like a write-only stream of thought style, what is then the difference between that and recording yourself talking and then auto transcribing the audio? to me the ability to manipulate thought fragments is the killer feature of writing. If I want to get stuff out without needing to see it immediately, i just record my voice talking Brain dumps are bit more nuanced than that. After finishing the dump, you can work on it. Correct the errors if you want and analyze what came out and ponder on it. I argue that brain mechanisms are different for speaking, typing and writing. Speaking with intent is very powerful, indeed because hearing what you say is very different than an inner dialogue, but from my experience writing and typing has a greater power for dislodging what's in the nooks and crannies of your mind. I can speak my mind, but that path is generally more filtered and shallower than sitting and writing what I have in my mind. Typing is a bit more inferior, but comparable. The trick in writing/typing is it allows "blurts". You dump the initial 10-20 items at a quick pace. Then you start to slow down. This is where magic happens, because while writing/typing you experience small "a-ha" moments and continue writing things triggered by the initial "burst". This small blurts which drive the rest for an hour or so, and you feel tired but relaxed, because now you have a blueprint of what "keeps you up" is in front of you. This is not equally possible with talking + auto-transcribing, because brain needs a different pace for that dumping process to work. >I can speak my mind, but that path is generally more filtered and shallower than sitting and writing what I have in my mind. Are you suggesting that this experience of yours applies to everyone or that it applies to every context (alone vs not alone)? Nothing stops you from voice record 10-20 items and stopping or pausing the recording. The idea that talking plus transcribing does not let you do what you do when typing seems odd and likely not based on actual facts. Stephen Hawkings did not seem to struggle to do highly intellectual work without typing Very nice, I've been wanting to build something like this myself but haven't gotten to it. The coffee shop mode is great! My biggest feature request would be changing the font and cursor. The blinking cursor is both distracting and unnecessary as you should assume that you are at the end anyway (since you shouldn't edit)! noted, thanks! I'm VERY conservative with adding new UI elements, especially those introducing new possible sources of distractions, so I might hide it behind a bunch of menus. That said, I've spent ages yak shaving / working on those problems already :) I really want a fixed-width font. I know most people dislike writing prose with monospace fonts. But I'm a developer, and proportional fonts always feel wrong. I'm on the same camp with you, however when you're writing technical documents, you need both, and Inter [0] is a really nice proportional font. Although, I don't think that Enso as a whole will work for me (I have a very different approach to writting); I love the idea of the coffee shop mode. Want to implement something like this for Obsidian now. I like that idea, too. When I’m at home, I do most of my writing now with voice input. Would somebody please invent a sound cancellation device that will enable me to talk to my devices in coffee shops and on public transportation without being heard by others? This reminds me of https://github.com/maebert/themostdangerouswritingapp Thanks for the shoutout! I think it's funny that it's very similar to ensō in many ways, but also the complete opposite: ensō is calm, mindful, soothing. MDWa is hectic, terrifying, sadistic. Funny how a tiny difference produces products that look almost the same, and feel completely different. huge props to rafal for creating ensō, personally really love it Looks really neat. Took me a few minutes to figure out what it was. A description above the fold (or here!) would be great. Oh man, I saw this once but forgot the name. Tried Googling, asked some LLMs—but alas, couldn’t find it again. Even an HN search didn’t turn up anything useful. So glad to come across it again! Good to know :) At least my https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io gets indexed well, including 100s of AI websites who webscraped it and hallucinated product descriptions. Fantastic work. This is great example of how good execution is what really matters - not just good ideas. I’m sure I’m not the only one who had an idea similar to this at some point - mine was called “nanowriter” and was meant for NanoWriMo (RIP)[0] but I lacked the coding ability and executive function to actually make it.l at the time. Enso is gorgeous and… exists, and therefore is infinitely better. 0: https://storyempire.com/2025/04/28/nanowrimo-closing-what-we... Looks a lot like https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.gitlab.somas.Apostrophe for anyone on Linux These seem likely different concepts to me. Apostrophe is a nice looking markdown editor. Ensō is a minimalist writing tool (I hesitate to call it an 'editor') designed to facilitate a certain kind of writing by hiding text that has already been written and preventing the user from editing it. The focus here seems to be getting the writer to just get the words out and then use a (presumably) different tool to format and edit later. Apostrophe does the same thing, it’s just not really shown on the store page. It provides both distraction free and Hemingway modes. Hemingway mode doesn’t let you use backspace! I read the first few screens and still had no idea what we were talking about. I came to the conclusion that maybe it was a paperwhite display of some sort. Apparently it’s an app. I suppose that blog post is only for people who already know what the app is? Excellent! I made something similar inspired by this few times in the past. I think this is already quite perfect, ambient music I can provide myself. While I did thought of new features, they are really not needed. I especially like coffee shop mode. I often feel self conscious about things I am writing, so hiding text is fantastic. This has its uses. However, I tend to use writing for reasoning about stuff, where you can’t keep everything relevant in your head simultaneously, and then it’s pretty crucial to be able to read what you wrote, even if you have no need to edit it. Longtime Ensō user here. Your update to query interest in a Linux version has given me hope. The last thing someone actively trying to avoid distraction needs is an open browser window! Consider this: Interesting tool. I do something similar when I think it's important to focus on just getting the words out: I close my eyes, or look away from the screen. Huge kudos for omitting analytics tracking for an app like this. Your reasoning totally resonated with me, and I hope more app devs follow suit! The name brought me back to the PS Vita hacking times, I thought it would be something to jailbreak the PS5 or the switch 2. A bit disappointed :( I appreciate the artistic and programming skills of the developer but not the "cleverness" and "quirkiness" of their announcement post. It took me too long to figure out that this is some sort of distraction-less writing app only for iOS and so of no value to me. Less snappy memes, more empathy for me as a visitor, please. Very nice! Looks like OmmWriter. Is it open source? [flagged] Hmm while projects like this is nice. But being it NOT open source such OmmWriter is what stopped me eventually stop using it. Writing in program such as that is a very personal experience, and doing it on a non open source platform just seems off for me. >Based on the GitHub repo at github.com/rpastuszak/enso That GitHub repo URL doesn't exist, nor does the user namespace. Could you please clarify where you are seeing this? The author's GitHub profile appears to be https://github.com/paprikka. Just want to say beautiful website and product. Ensō looks well designed. And your "digital garden" is gorgeous as well. There used to be a really neat application launcher called Enso. Is this related in any way? The imagery on the spalsh page reminds me of Moomin. Nevertheless looking forward to following this project! Oh this is gonna be terrible for me, I love it It's great if you want to "think aloud but with your mouth shut". I wrote 7k words with it just thinking through a problem. The exact word count is meaningless of course -- my main point is that it was really easy to just sit and think with it, without editing myself. I used the Coffeeshop mode for a large chunk of that (plus some Aphex Twin) For a second I thought it was the Enso analytics tool I worked with for a short while (as in “migrating away from it”). I’m glad it’s not. pretty great work and exploring the OP/author's work is a major Monday morning pleasure rpastuszak's work is a consistent source of inspiration and fun. It's what I wanted the web to become. I laughed at the Keanu pun
gonna try It's neither a beta, nor an alpha, more Keanu than Hasselhoff. Hence, it's Ensō sigma! I dont know what Enso is. This page doesn't tell it in first few paragraphs. I wasn't to homepage of this website. That also mentions Enso but without a link. There is a link to roadmap but that doesn't answer this question either. Please describe what Enso is in few lines in a easily discoverable place. Author here: https://enso.sonnet.io Thanks for the feedback, most of my usual readers know about Ensō and it seems I forgot to leave my little bubble when writing this post! We added that subheading text from your website to the text of this post, to make it easier for people to understand what it is. If you want it changed further, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com. This is an interesting one. On one hand it’s hard to disagree with the statement “it should be clear what your product does in a single glance”. In fact there’s a whole meta that’s been developed around this, with well established common wisdom on how to structure your landing page to quickly frame value to prospective users, call them to action, etc. On the other hand it’s kind of fun to stumble upon something and feel like you missed the beginning of the conversation, and to figure things out piece by piece based on context. I was also confused when loading this website but it led me to trying the app and it was kind of fun. Sometimes the most optimized, clearest path isn’t necessarily the preferable one. > Sometimes the most optimized, clearest path isn’t necessarily the preferable one. Untested is my playground/a place where I "work with the garage door up", so generally I allow myself for more flexibility, especially since this post is more of a devlog entry than a one-glance product page (that would be https://enso.sonnet.io). That said, I had a break from writing, so ended up putting too much content in one place, which made it harder to edit. What's going to happen in the next few months is this: I'll post more dev/design-log style posts on untested.sonnet.io, then extract some of this information into the product page. I'm glad that you had some fun with the app! Same. I even came to comments to see if anyone has actually written what this is. And, unfortunately, still little. Most people just comment "great stuff". After a few minutes I'm still to learn what this thing is and why does anyone care that it's in beta public. Yeah the article is quite bad for the uninitiated but it seems that is how he talks to its own community. Looks like a text editor But yet I lurked longer than many of other product pages I land on to think about what might be going on thanks to the nature of graphics and the non-standard non-bootstrap template approach. Sometimes providing TLDR means you are providing a way for people to instantly ignore you without further thought. Maybe there is a desire to engage people who think. It’s a note taking app, for anyone else wondering. Yeah had me confused, product link is <https://enso.sonnet.io/>. Apparently only for mac. Not to be confused with Ensso, maker of fountain pens <https://www.ensso.com/>. Not just for macintosh, there is a link [0] for windows, too. Ah, but it 'ran out' of units, so just a limited beta. > You can’t select or edit text, but you can download and review it once you’re done. What? Damn. Also not to be confused with Enso Analytics https://ensoanalytics.com/ which is also software for Mac (and Windows and Linux) Now if only someone would invent a tool to do the opposite. I have too easy a time of forgetting what I wrote, and penning new lines in obliviousness. It's a habit from many years of stream-of-consciousness writing a la The Artist's Way and https://750words.com. The hard thing, I find, is structuring text so that each paragraph has a purpose in relation to the others. I was once taught this in school, but I haven't kept up with my practice. So, maybe a tool that takes previous paragraphs and--contrariwise to letting them recede into obscurity--shoves them repeatedly in my face? Anyway, very elegant and pleasant. Like a foggy quayside cafe. Haha, I'm actually working on that too! Currently experimenting with a graph based editor. Also, you might like The Fieldstone Method (Weinberg). PS. Andy Matuschak's notes: http://notes.andymatuschak.org have some good tips on a similar subject. (My "digital garden" is more of a choose your own adventure book, I'm not married to a single methodology, but I appreciate much of their work) Is this for non-fiction/business writing? If so, I recommend looking at Barbara Minto's Pyramid Principle. https://www.amazon.com/Pyramid-Principle-Logic-Writing-Think... To the OP: Great product, at least can you update the description text to guide newcomers with some user persona. We don't know what it is based on the description, so even the simplest "Try xyz" or even some goal would help us discover what it is. Thanks! I've collected a lot of high quality feedback over the years*, plus have defined user personas/problem areas (examples: writers, developers, neurospicy folk, people working on their mental health through journalling/expressive writing, YouTubers, video essay creators, ...). Over the next few weeks/months I will continue writing/thinking about those on untested.sonnet.io (working with the garage door up, so to speak). Then, once I come up with more terse/clear ways of expressing this -- I'll put it on the product page (https://enso.sonnet.io) * thanks to relying on an email link over analytics in the app Just trying to maximize your efforts... to optimize for first-time user usability, unveil to yourself regular use cases for your users, etc. Yeah, to be frank, this was intended to be more of a devlog entry for the people who already know my work/follow me on untested and I didn't expect any responses on HN. Still, that's a big lesson for me, I shouldn't have made that assumption posting here. People have been really kind and responsive in my experience. I think this is also a problem of framing. Got excited for a second, I thought this was about HENkaku Ensō [1] for the PS Vita. I thought it was about this: https://ensoanalytics.com Enso it pretty overloaded as name for tech things. Yep, thought it was going to be about Humanized Enso I thought for a second that it was about the Enso programming language (https://modeling-languages.com/enso-dont-design-your-program...) :) Turns out there's a lot of Enso's, my first thought was the looper (https://www.audiodamage.com/products/ad049-enso) Appears to be Apple only, for anybody spending time on the page trying to work out what it's about. There is a PWA at https://write.sonnet.io/ Thanks, just bear in mind that the PWA differs from the app and will not be actively developed. I'm planning to maintain it and keep it free. > Note: if you remove the Edit menu and call it Write, MacOs won't add its AI crap to your settings. Good to know. I didn't understand what this was from the link posted; why choose cute over clear? But when I clicked around I found what the app was and I liked it. Here the cuteness was charming. Great work!
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Zero software to install, no editing except maybe backspace, no selection, no spellchecking, no formatting, no distractions on the screen. cat > ~/my-notes.txt <<EOF
Type here anything you want.
To save and finish, type:
EOF
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