I recently whipped up a little application called WordWhacker (code).

WordWhacker is a crossplatform desktop zenware text editor written in C++ using Qt. I was thinking about calling it Zentemental but chose WordWhacker instead.

It’s inspired by the old version of WriteMonkey, which was a Windows-only app that I found particularly useful for long form writing. (The new version of WriteMonkey changed and added a lot of stuff I don’t like.)

The “zenware”—as in “zen” applied to software—concept removes clutter. Minimalistic. But maximal in contextualizing UI features.

One of the differences between working on a computer and working on a typewriter is that a typewriter offered far fewer excuses not to do your work. As noted by Jeffrey MacIntyre in a recent Slate article, and by sites such as Lifehacker, a new trend in minimalist software dubbed “zenware” is trying to get around this by minimizing the distractions that litter your desktop.

—Barbara Krasnoff

My little app demonstrates how using Qt allows you create a usuable application—that’s crossplatform and even buildable as WebAssembly—with a small amount of code and single CMakefile.

WordWhacker has some support for Markdown—you can preview a formatted markdown output. But all of the editing in Word Whacker is raw text. There are no databases, all your files are separate text files that you control.

Here it is on MacOS showing Markdown preview:

You can go into fullscreen mode by pressing F11 or using the context menu (as shown in the first screenshot). Here it is in Windows 10 but in windowed mode with the main context menu open:

The WebAssembly version is still pretty janky. You can try it here. Context menus don’t work—however hot keys like Ctrl+O and Ctrl+S do work. And there’s other problems.

Todo

I don’t know how much I’ll add to this program but at the very least:

• Settings
• Autosave, optionally as frequent as 1 second and/or everytime anything at all is changed so effectively you’d never have to manually Save.
• Undo and a big Undo History
• Improve default context menu style.
• Improve default scrollbar style
• Options for Markdown preview should appear if you save the file as .md or .markdown. Presently it only enables that functionality if you Open a markdown file.

And maybe a pseudo-versioning function that just copies the file with a “_vx” appended to the filename base?

I’d also love to have Markdown highlighting in the text editor which would actually be much more useful for me than the Previewer.