
Windows/Mac/Linux: Once upon a time, people pounded out their memos and missives on a typewriter. There was no backspace, spell check, or fancy formatting, just forward movement, and muttered obscenities when you screwed up. Typewriter brings some of that ink-stained experience back.

Joey Daoud, the film student behind You 2.0, a documentary on life hacking, found himself musing over the following quote from author Will Self:

Writing on a manual [typewriter] makes you slower in a good way, I think. You don't revise as much, you just think more, because you know you're going to have to retype the entire (flipping) thing. Which is a big stop on just slapping anything down and playing with it.


The idea intrigued him, and he wanted to mimic the process on a modern computer, but failed to find any applications which did so. He found a programmer to help, and a simple Java-based application was born.

Typewriter allows you to type, save to a text file, and print the document. There is no backspace function, no spell check, and no cut or paste functionality. If you want to force yourself to really focus and make every word count, Typewriter is an unyielding tool for forcing your thoughts to take shape before you commit them to the page.

If you like the simple interface and distraction-free writing, but you're put off by the absolute lack of a delete key, make sure to check out similarly edit-friendly tools Write Monkey, Darkroom, and Writeroom. Typewriter is free and works wherever Java does.


Typewriter [You 2.0]