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editors that dont really delete, or just an excuse to build editors

Idea

Reading good authors' drafts brings insight and transparency to their writing process. Reading people's thought out edits on online fora can bring the conversation to life.

Why not make a forum where everything you delete as you type or edit can still be accessed? The users / writers, aware of this, will write with a different mindset; let's see if it's of any use!

Current solution

Implement one or several POC editors that keep deleted text accessible.

Instead of a full blown history graph, I currently choose to flatten deleted text. The point is not to scroll through history, just to see the accumulated attempts.

For example

Here's a screencast of nano.py in action.

Here's an example of a session in ed:

$ ed
>a
hello world
.
>s/hello/goodbye
goodbye world
>P
hello goodbye world

TODO:

• Everything in ed's help's todo list
• Choose how to append after last line if there is an appendix. (currently doesn't merge appendix as beginning of new text)
• explore non line based storage ?
• explore journaling storage (line-based or not)
• vi