alt.hn

5/30/2026 at 10:58:41 PM

Cheese Paper: a text editor specifically designed for writing

 https://brie.gay/cheese-paper/

by sohkamyung

5/31/2026 at 2:09:47 PM

I don't get why we get all these kinds of things to support writing in markdown when org-mode already exists and can support pretty much any use-case. Its not that difficult to master.

by vim-guru

5/31/2026 at 6:43:19 PM

Org mode isn't that hard, but Emacs takes years

I'm saying this as an Emacs user.

by marcelox86

5/31/2026 at 5:18:48 AM

What is wrong with spacing text from borders? padding for tabs, padding and margin text blocks? why so many lines? well, I can answer that: if you put two elements two close and you don't want to separate them you need a line between.

IMHO is fitts-law abuse, but is having everthing stuck together a functionallity I fail to recognize? Both in Cheese Paper and in Manustkript are designed using a compressed UI.

by n3storm

5/31/2026 at 6:05:59 AM

Maybe to fit more text?

by scotty79

5/31/2026 at 6:20:49 AM

In ancients times when they needed to fit more text within physical boundaries they invented scrolling, pages, chapters, volumes. They even folded maps and other illustration inside books.

by n3storm

5/31/2026 at 11:35:02 AM

It has scrollbars, but there's benefits to having more on an individual page at once. The tradeoff point seems unclear but everyone must recognize some tradeoff there.

Foldable maps allow for getting everything on one view by having the final display area be enormously larger, which isn't an option on laptop screens.

by esrauch

5/31/2026 at 2:17:49 AM

I'm a fan of Manuskript on Linux. It's similar but has more features and, IMO, looks better: https://www.theologeek.ch/manuskript/

by tlhunter

5/31/2026 at 7:04:20 AM

> 'm a fan of Manuskript on Linux. It's similar but has more features and, IMO, looks better: https://www.theologeek.ch/manuskript/

It's hard to tell about "looks better": the link for "screenshots" takes you to the #team anchor on the page, which is actually the "latest news" section.

The "How to use" link in the download for 0.17 takes you to https://sourceforge.net/u/gedakc/profile/

This does not inspire confidence :-/

by lelanthran

5/31/2026 at 3:40:20 AM

Better documentation (well, actually, more like documentation at all), 100+ contributors, 10 years of contributions.

There's a lot of general hand-waving about its featureset and whatnot - and an odd jab about non-English support - but no explanation of how non-English language support is lacking in other projects and why hers is better. And am I really supposed to believe that her project has better non-English support than than something that has 100+ contributors over ten years?

by KennyBlanken

5/31/2026 at 9:31:10 AM

Cheese Paper is written in rust. That's reason enough to give it a try. Manuskript may have more features if you need them, but it's written in python+js, and has a more obtuse file format.

There's also novelWriter which is also python but at least it uses pyqt.

by harshreality

5/31/2026 at 6:14:59 AM

"Is the text too readable? Colors too pleasant? Not enough whimsy?"

I found text in the theming section quite funny. I think most custom themes for many different pieces of software manage to provide solutions to at least the first two of those questions.

by spaghettifythis

5/31/2026 at 2:01:53 PM

Is "Unexpected Failure Mode" the name of the current story/document or a feature of the editor?

The author already added theme randomization, I'm slightly worried that they could also add a mode that intentionally crashes at random times to encourage people to save often...

by xg15

5/31/2026 at 12:08:34 PM

Looks like NovelWriter which I'm using.

by abricot

5/31/2026 at 2:12:04 PM

I like it too. And I have translated it, its creator is friendly and nice

by longqzh

5/31/2026 at 6:23:30 AM

"We do not want your data. Please keep it to yourself."

(I find that a refreshing perspective.)

by eichin

5/30/2026 at 11:56:00 PM

This looks very interesting! I liked the menu for characters and worldbuilding, I should try this soon!

by gatane

5/30/2026 at 11:54:05 PM

Is this Scrivener but with markdown?

by citizenkeen

5/30/2026 at 11:53:19 PM

I recently picked up writing short stories again. I briefly looked at different editors, but ended up just doing it in vscode (daily driver). I'll make sure to look at cheese paper for the next one, looks like it has some cool features!

A feature that I have been dreaming about is making an editor that treats each paragraph like a unit of work, and the full text is created by linking together different paragraphs. That way you can easily try different ways without deleting any text. Sort of like nodes in a graph.

And here's my a corporate themed short story: https://dahl.dev/capacity

by aleda145

5/31/2026 at 8:32:59 AM

> making an editor

or you could come up with a notation that works in any editor. I have [1].

> That way you can easily try different ways without deleting any text.

Sorry I haven't yet read your story. Here is how I would explore alternatives with my notation. I do this when designing software/algorithms etc.

``` Elias performed at this level for about a year. He was up for a well-deserved promotion to staff engineer. I sent him a meeting invite to go through the updated leveling framework to make sure we didn't miss anything.

#{ #{ Elias declined the meeting. } #{ Elias went to the meeting but he went late.} ... }

```

[1] https://github.com/pratikdeoghare/brashtag

by pratikdeoghare

5/31/2026 at 10:50:12 AM

When each paragraph is one line, you get that for free in any decent editor. Just don't add unnecessary line breaks.

The linebreaks will be added much better by any typesetting algorithm anyway. Like LaTeX.

That's it, no need to overcomplicate things with nodes that are probably the internal memory representation in the text editor anyway.

by Shorel

5/31/2026 at 3:13:16 AM

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "unit of work" but I really like writing in Bike[1] for this reason, it's a hybrid text editor/outliner. It is simply my favorite rich text editor and the outliner functions provide really good affordances for organizing and reorganizing paragraphs.

[1] https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/bike/

by sharkjacobs

5/31/2026 at 7:54:49 AM

I would give that a try if it supported Windows/Linix.

by dbacar

5/31/2026 at 10:16:50 AM

Tool you want is called Essay

by baldai

5/31/2026 at 3:14:20 AM

Is this deliberately borrowing from Herman Melvile's "Bartleby the Scrivener"? If so it might be worth mentioning, rather than just referring to it as "my short story", since it's a nearly identical retelling of it.

by loneboat

5/31/2026 at 11:59:19 AM

“Ah humanity!” Ya, knowing this would have shaped my own reading a lot. I wonder though, if it wasn’t intentional, if the structure came from AI which would have had this in its training data. Asking one for help with outlining a story feels pretty innocuous.

by pitched

5/31/2026 at 6:10:17 AM

> A feature that I have been dreaming about is making an editor that treats each paragraph like a unit of work, and the full text is created by linking together different paragraphs. That way you can easily try different ways without deleting any text. Sort of like nodes in a graph.

You could vibecode it. It's great for prototyping features you've been dreaming about.

by scotty79

5/31/2026 at 11:47:29 AM

[dead]

by pitched

5/31/2026 at 1:51:55 AM

This looks very inspiring! Thank you for sharing it!

by dualboot

5/31/2026 at 1:49:20 AM

Another version of this idea that's been around for a while is CherryTree. I would use it a lot more, but there's not really a way to use your notebook on mobile due to it using a special database format that nobody cares about. I love the idea of this program's data instead being a regular folder of regular plaintext files that you can do anything with. In a perfect world everything would be like this, where your files are just your files, and client programs just help you use those files in more effective ways.

by pooploop64

5/31/2026 at 5:13:17 AM

"for a while" :D was hard to find and github repo only has history since 2021 but actual first release date is 2009.

by n3storm

5/31/2026 at 12:07:42 AM

Maybe it would explain itself better if that said "specifically designed for writing fiction"? (lots of other sorts of writing don't have characters, for example...)

by blacksmith_tb

5/31/2026 at 12:39:34 AM

The first sentence of the first non-bolded paragraph of the webpage is:

>Cheese Paper is a text editor specifically designed for writing, particularly fiction.

I don't think the HN submitter is the author of the software, but if you're just referring to the HN submission title then maybe they'll take you up on your suggestion.

by hoppyhoppy2

5/31/2026 at 3:14:24 AM

I think it would explain itself better if it explained precisely what makes it better or different from what already exists; Manuskript (open source) and Scrivner (closed source.)

by KennyBlanken

5/31/2026 at 3:15:19 PM

There is a section about exactly that on the linked page.

by jantissler

5/31/2026 at 3:37:01 PM

Yes, but the description of the differences is not particularly precise.

by hoppyhoppy2

5/31/2026 at 3:43:34 AM

Can I get it as a vscode plugin?

by buggylearning

5/30/2026 at 11:40:25 PM

As opposed to the other text editors, which are designed primarily for playing Nethack

by personjerry