[drop_cap]W[/drop_cap]riting is hard. It’s messy, unresolved, chaotic. You scrape scenes out of your skull and massage syntactical turds until they shine (or get thrown out in the next rewrite).

Code is different. Something either works or it doesn’t. Problems usually have clear paths to solutions.

Prose has no linter. You can’t pre-compile a plot to catch memory leaks.

So this week, after making solid progress with my new book, I “relaxed” by building a writing tool in my spare time. The irony isn’t lost on me.

The Calm of The Void

Staring at a white page sucks. First step? Make it not white. Stop shining a flashlight into your retinas while trying to uncork the unconscious. Next, ditch the Microsoft kitchen-sink ribbons of colorful icons and formatting gizmos. Stop pretending you are a typesetter and fiddling with font sizes instead of dredging up dirt on your characters.

In short, remove everything else except the words.

I’ve always been a huge fan of this type of minimalist approach.

The less I see, the better. For years I’ve bounced between minimalist word processors: WriteMonkey, iAwriter, FocusWriter—always configured the same way: dark background, generous horizontal padding to spare my eyes the long left-to-right trek, a clean mono/duospace font, and a subtle word counter tucked in a corner that only shows when idle.

Notifications off, music on, deep dive. That’s the only way to play this game.

This weekend I thought: why not follow this minimalist approach, but strip it down even further, in the shape of a terminal-based tool. TUIs (terminal user interfaces) are all the rage these days (think ClaudeCode, OpenCode, etc.) and I admit—it’s fun in a deliberately discordant way!

To a “normal” person, this looks like a regression. Why worship 80s tech when we have 4K displays and “video-first” nonsense? Because the glossy browser world is a circus of distractions. I’m trading the gloss for an interface closer to a 1990s BBS or Teletext. No graphics. No animations. No “engagement” loops. Just the brutal, high-contrast reality of text. It’s the ultimate middle finger to the attention economy.

I built it in Python with the Textual library (great starter). It’s mostly done now. Here’s what it looks like, and yes, there is not much to see, which is precisely the point:

Will I use it for long-form books? No. For that, I have a brand-new, custom-built writing and publishing suite that’s a bit too complex to explain here. But for the daily skirmishes—blogging, notes, and scratch-padding—HeloWrite is the perfect tactical blade.

The Secret Sauce: Performance & Paranoia

I realized halfway through Sunday that I wasn’t just building this for the “aesthetic.” I was building it because I’m tired of waiting for my tools to catch up to my brain. Most “modern” note-taking apps are Electron-based resource hogs. They have “loading” states. They index. They bloat.

HeloWrite has a cold start so fast it feels like it was never closed. We’re talking 0.5 seconds from hitting Enter to a blinking cursor. And that’s running from source—no pre-compiled binaries, no bloat, just raw Python and the void. While Obsidian is still busy waking up its Electron dependencies and dragging a heavy browser engine behind it, I’m already five sentences deep.

And then there’s the Git workflow. Obsidian plugins for Git are fine if you want to sync your entire life into a giant, messy pile. But I’m picky. With this, I can selectively commit and push notes into my vault only when they’re ready. It’s a staging area for my mind—a way to filter the noise before it becomes permanent.

Code and Corkboards

There are tons of amazing code editors out there. Vim fanatics can rice their configs until the heat death of the universe. Emacs people have basically built an operating system. Developers are spoiled for choice when it comes to terminal-based workflows.

Writers? Not so much.

We get word processors designed by committee, Scrivener’s sprawling corkboards, or minimalist apps that cost $30 and do less than Notepad.

I wanted something different. Something that understood the writer’s brain, but had the heart of a code editor.

I’ve tried WordGrinder (another TUI word processor) before and loved the general concept, but the workflow never quite clicked. So I built my own, tuned exactly to my quirks.

HeloWrite, pronounced “hee-lo” and named after Karl “Helo” Agathon from Battlestar Galactica includes the essentials:

  • Fully distraction-free mode with an out-of-the-way word counter
  • On the fly adjustable horizontal padding to cut eye strain
  • Custom themes (in addition to Textual’s) including cursor colors
  • Git push to the vault only when the thought is worth keeping

“I fell in love with a machine. That’s stupid. So just call me an idiot, and let’s be done with it.” — Karl Agathon

Clone, fork or hack here: burninc0de/helowrite

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