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Show HN: New Ensō – first public beta
Ensō is a writing tool that helps you enter a state of flow by separating writing from editing and thus making it harder for you to edit yourself - https://enso.sonnet.io/ https://enso.sonnet.io/
After 6 years and 2 million words of daily writing I feel like I've learned enough to make Ensō simpler and more accessible.
Related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38025073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38025073
- binary132 1y agoUnfortunate naming collision with Enso Analytics (formerly Luna compiler).
- dgfitz 1y agoLooks really neat. Took me a few minutes to figure out what it was. A description above the fold (or here!) would be great.
- rpastuszak 1y agoAdded a link to the article, thank you!
- dkdbejwi383 1y agoIt’s a note taking app, for anyone else wondering.
- webstrand 1y agoYeah had me confused, product link is <https://enso.sonnet.io/ https://enso.sonnet.io/>. Apparently only for mac. Not to be confused with Ensso, maker of fountain pens <https://www.ensso.com/ https://www.ensso.com/>.
- johnisgood 1y ago> You can’t select or edit text, but you can download and review it once you’re done. What? Damn.
- brassattax 1y agoAlso not to be confused with Enso Analytics https://ensoanalytics.com/ https://ensoanalytics.com/ which is also software for Mac (and Windows and Linux)
- Nzen 1y agoNot just for macintosh, there is a link [0] for windows, too. Ah, but it 'ran out' of units, so just a limited beta. [0] https://sonnet.gumroad.com/l/dbiyvs https://sonnet.gumroad.com/l/dbiyvs
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- smusamashah 1y agoI dont know what Enso is. This page doesn't tell it in first few paragraphs. I wasn't to homepage of this website. That also mentions Enso but without a link. There is a link to roadmap but that doesn't answer this question either. Please describe what Enso is in few lines in a easily discoverable place.
- owebmaster 1y agoYeah the article is quite bad for the uninitiated but it seems that is how he talks to its own community. Looks like a text editor
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- xipho 1y agoBut yet I lurked longer than many of other product pages I land on to think about what might be going on thanks to the nature of graphics and the non-standard non-bootstrap template approach. Sometimes providing TLDR means you are providing a way for people to instantly ignore you without further thought. Maybe there is a desire to engage people who think.
- rpastuszak 1y agoAuthor here: https://enso.sonnet.io https://enso.sonnet.io Thanks for the feedback, most of my usual readers know about Ensō and it seems I forgot to leave my little bubble when writing this post!
- tomhow 1y agoWe added that subheading text from your website to the text of this post, to make it easier for people to understand what it is. If you want it changed further, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com.
- rpastuszak 1y agoIt looks great, thank you.
- _elf 1y agoI've always felt that the best part of writing on a computer is the ability to edit while you write, however, I also understand that doesn't work at all for a lot of people, so I think this app is neat even though I personally wouldn't use it.
- bayindirh 1y agoSometimes forcing yourself "not to edit" allows you to bring out things which are hard to catch and hide in the nooks and crannies of your mind. Brain dumping also works the same way. You write whatever you have in your mind, without even correcting spelling errors. It really brings out things you don't know they are there and bothering you or taking space. You should at least try once. Takes an hour or so. I also use a similar method for drafting my blog posts if I have the idea, but can't bring out the rest of the text.
- bossyTeacher 1y agosounds like a write-only stream of thought style, what is then the difference between that and recording yourself talking and then auto transcribing the audio? to me the ability to manipulate thought fragments is the killer feature of writing. If I want to get stuff out without needing to see it immediately, i just record my voice talking
- bayindirh 1y agoBrain dumps are bit more nuanced than that. After finishing the dump, you can work on it. Correct the errors if you want and analyze what came out and ponder on it. I argue that brain mechanisms are different for speaking, typing and writing. Speaking with intent is very powerful, indeed because hearing what you say is very different than an inner dialogue, but from my experience writing and typing has a greater power for dislodging what's in the nooks and crannies of your mind. I can speak my mind, but that path is generally more filtered and shallower than sitting and writing what I have in my mind. Typing is a bit more inferior, but comparable. The trick in writing/typing is it allows "blurts". You dump the initial 10-20 items at a quick pace. Then you start to slow down. This is where magic happens, because while writing/typing you experience small "a-ha" moments and continue writing things triggered by the initial "burst". This small blurts which drive the rest for an hour or so, and you feel tired but relaxed, because now you have a blueprint of what "keeps you up" is in front of you. This is not equally possible with talking + auto-transcribing, because brain needs a different pace for that dumping process to work.
- d-lowl 1y agoAlthough, I don't think that Enso as a whole will work for me (I have a very different approach to writting); I love the idea of the coffee shop mode. Want to implement something like this for Obsidian now.
- tkgally 1y agoI like that idea, too. When I’m at home, I do most of my writing now with voice input. Would somebody please invent a sound cancellation device that will enable me to talk to my devices in coffee shops and on public transportation without being heard by others?
- dabbz 1y agoI know I've seen a handful of them no idea if they're real or not though: https://metadox.pro/ https://metadox.pro/ https://gethushme.com/ https://gethushme.com/
- achairapart 1y agoThis might be useful for a whole browser coffee shop mode: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/obfuscator/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/obfuscator/
- sam1r 1y agoTo the OP: Great product, at least can you update the description text to guide newcomers with some user persona. We don't know what it is based on the description, so even the simplest "Try xyz" or even some goal would help us discover what it is.
- sam1r 1y agoJust trying to maximize your efforts... to optimize for first-time user usability, unveil to yourself regular use cases for your users, etc.
- rpastuszak 1y agoYeah, to be frank, this was intended to be more of a devlog entry for the people who already know my work/follow me on untested and I didn't expect any responses on HN. Still, that's a big lesson for me, I shouldn't have made that assumption posting here. People have been really kind and responsive in my experience. I think this is also a problem of framing.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rpastuszak 1y agoThanks! I've collected a lot of high quality feedback over the years*, plus have defined user personas/problem areas (examples: writers, developers, neurospicy folk, people working on their mental health through journalling/expressive writing, YouTubers, video essay creators, ...). Over the next few weeks/months I will continue writing/thinking about those on untested.sonnet.io (working with the garage door up, so to speak). Then, once I come up with more terse/clear ways of expressing this -- I'll put it on the product page (https://enso.sonnet.io https://enso.sonnet.io) * thanks to relying on an email link over analytics in the app
- jhardcastle 1y ago> Note: if you remove the Edit menu and call it Write, MacOs won't add its AI crap to your settings. Good to know.
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- robert-whiteley 1y ago[flagged]
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- ricokatayama 1y agoI laughed at the Keanu pun gonna try
- rpastuszak 1y agoIt's neither a beta, nor an alpha, more Keanu than Hasselhoff. Hence, it's Ensō sigma!
- mellosouls 1y agoAppears to be Apple only, for anybody spending time on the page trying to work out what it's about.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hmlwilliams 1y agoThere is a PWA at https://write.sonnet.io/ https://write.sonnet.io/
- rpastuszak 1y agoThanks, just bear in mind that the PWA differs from the app and will not be actively developed. I'm planning to maintain it and keep it free.
- yapyap 1y agoOh this is gonna be terrible for me, I love it
- rpastuszak 1y agoIt's great if you want to "think aloud but with your mouth shut". I wrote 7k words with it just thinking through a problem. The exact word count is meaningless of course -- my main point is that it was really easy to just sit and think with it, without editing myself. I used the Coffeeshop mode for a large chunk of that (plus some Aphex Twin)
- varun_chopra 1y agoOh man, I saw this once but forgot the name. Tried Googling, asked some LLMs—but alas, couldn’t find it again. Even an HN search didn’t turn up anything useful. So glad to come across it again!
- rpastuszak 1y agoGood to know :) At least my https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io gets indexed well, including 100s of AI websites who webscraped it and hallucinated product descriptions.
- iNic 1y agoVery nice, I've been wanting to build something like this myself but haven't gotten to it. The coffee shop mode is great! My biggest feature request would be changing the font and cursor. The blinking cursor is both distracting and unnecessary as you should assume that you are at the end anyway (since you shouldn't edit)!
- rpastuszak 1y agonoted, thanks! I'm VERY conservative with adding new UI elements, especially those introducing new possible sources of distractions, so I might hide it behind a bunch of menus. That said, I've spent ages yak shaving / working on those problems already :)
- ryanianian 1y agoI really want a fixed-width font. I know most people dislike writing prose with monospace fonts. But I'm a developer, and proportional fonts always feel wrong.
- tecleandor 1y agoWell, talk to a script writer, they only write on Courier typeface
- bayindirh 1y agoI'm on the same camp with you, however when you're writing technical documents, you need both, and Inter [0] is a really nice proportional font. [0]: https://rsms.me/inter/ https://rsms.me/inter/
- jlarks32 1y agoJust want to say beautiful website and product. Ensō looks well designed. And your "digital garden" is gorgeous as well.
- pedsmoreira 1y agoVery interesting take on writing
- urig 1y agoI appreciate the artistic and programming skills of the developer but not the "cleverness" and "quirkiness" of their announcement post. It took me too long to figure out that this is some sort of distraction-less writing app only for iOS and so of no value to me. Less snappy memes, more empathy for me as a visitor, please.
- endymion-light 1y agoi love this
- nilirl 1y agoI didn't understand what this was from the link posted; why choose cute over clear? But when I clicked around I found what the app was and I liked it. Here the cuteness was charming. Great work!
- rubyfan 1y agoreminded me of _why
- desireco42 1y agoExcellent! I made something similar inspired by this few times in the past. I think this is already quite perfect, ambient music I can provide myself. While I did thought of new features, they are really not needed. I especially like coffee shop mode. I often feel self conscious about things I am writing, so hiding text is fantastic.
- _0xdd 1y agoGot excited for a second, I thought this was about HENkaku Ensō [1] for the PS Vita. [1] https://enso.henkaku.xyz/ https://enso.henkaku.xyz/
- ModernMech 1y agoI thought it was about this: https://ensoanalytics.com https://ensoanalytics.com Enso it pretty overloaded as name for tech things.
- Chris2048 1y agoYep, thought it was going to be about Humanized Enso https://signalvnoise.com/posts/228-humanized-enso https://signalvnoise.com/posts/228-humanized-enso
- fermigier 1y agoI thought for a second that it was about the Enso programming language (https://modeling-languages.com/enso-dont-design-your-programs-program-your-designs/ https://modeling-languages.com/enso-dont-design-your-program...) :)
- bodge5000 1y agoTurns out there's a lot of Enso's, my first thought was the looper (https://www.audiodamage.com/products/ad049-enso https://www.audiodamage.com/products/ad049-enso)
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- gavmor 1y agoNow if only someone would invent a tool to do the opposite. I have too easy a time of forgetting what I wrote, and penning new lines in obliviousness. It's a habit from many years of stream-of-consciousness writing a la The Artist's Way and https://750words.com https://750words.com. The hard thing, I find, is structuring text so that each paragraph has a purpose in relation to the others. I was once taught this in school, but I haven't kept up with my practice. So, maybe a tool that takes previous paragraphs and--contrariwise to letting them recede into obscurity--shoves them repeatedly in my face? Anyway, very elegant and pleasant. Like a foggy quayside cafe.
- rpastuszak 1y agoHaha, I'm actually working on that too! Currently experimenting with a graph based editor. Also, you might like The Fieldstone Method (Weinberg). PS. Andy Matuschak's notes: http://notes.andymatuschak.org http://notes.andymatuschak.org have some good tips on a similar subject. (My "digital garden" is more of a choose your own adventure book, I'm not married to a single methodology, but I appreciate much of their work)
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoIs this for non-fiction/business writing? If so, I recommend looking at Barbara Minto's Pyramid Principle. https://www.amazon.com/Pyramid-Principle-Logic-Writing-Thinking/dp/0273710516 https://www.amazon.com/Pyramid-Principle-Logic-Writing-Think...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- teucris 1y agoFantastic work. This is great example of how good execution is what really matters - not just good ideas. I’m sure I’m not the only one who had an idea similar to this at some point - mine was called “nanowriter” and was meant for NanoWriMo (RIP)[0] but I lacked the coding ability and executive function to actually make it.l at the time. Enso is gorgeous and… exists, and therefore is infinitely better. 0: https://storyempire.com/2025/04/28/nanowrimo-closing-what-went-wrong-what-will-replace/ https://storyempire.com/2025/04/28/nanowrimo-closing-what-we...
- layer8 1y agoThis has its uses. However, I tend to use writing for reasoning about stuff, where you can’t keep everything relevant in your head simultaneously, and then it’s pretty crucial to be able to read what you wrote, even if you have no need to edit it.
- fitsumbelay 1y agopretty great work and exploring the OP/author's work is a major Monday morning pleasure
- grantmuller 1y agorpastuszak's work is a consistent source of inspiration and fun. It's what I wanted the web to become.
- lowwave 1y agoVery nice! Looks like OmmWriter. Is it open source?
- ethan_smith 1y ago[flagged]
- lowwave 1y agoHmm while projects like this is nice. But being it NOT open source such OmmWriter is what stopped me eventually stop using it. Writing in program such as that is a very personal experience, and doing it on a non open source platform just seems off for me.
- gen6acd60af 1y ago>Based on the GitHub repo at github.com/rpastuszak/enso That GitHub repo URL doesn't exist, nor does the user namespace. Could you please clarify where you are seeing this? The author's GitHub profile appears to be https://github.com/paprikka https://github.com/paprikka.
- mycocola 1y agoInteresting tool. I do something similar when I think it's important to focus on just getting the words out: I close my eyes, or look away from the screen.
- Fuzzy1000 1y agoVery playful website - I love it.
- rbanffy 1y agoFor a second I thought it was the Enso analytics tool I worked with for a short while (as in “migrating away from it”). I’m glad it’s not.
- handedness 1y agoLongtime Ensō user here. Your update to query interest in a Linux version has given me hope. The last thing someone actively trying to avoid distraction needs is an open browser window!
- nine_k 1y agoConsider this: cat > ~/my-notes.txt <<EOF Type here anything you want. To save and finish, type: EOF Zero software to install, no editing except maybe backspace, no selection, no spellchecking, no formatting, no distractions on the screen.
- Velorivox 1y agoThis reminds me of https://github.com/maebert/themostdangerouswritingapp https://github.com/maebert/themostdangerouswritingapp
- maebert 1y agoThanks for the shoutout! I think it's funny that it's very similar to ensō in many ways, but also the complete opposite: ensō is calm, mindful, soothing. MDWa is hectic, terrifying, sadistic. Funny how a tiny difference produces products that look almost the same, and feel completely different. huge props to rafal for creating ensō, personally really love it
- spookie 1y agoReminds me of Apostrophe actually. https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.gitlab.somas.Apostrophe https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.gitlab.somas.Apostrophe
- WD-42 1y agoLooks a lot like https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.gitlab.somas.Apostrophe https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.gitlab.somas.Apostrophe for anyone on Linux
- pdabbadabba 1y agoThese seem likely different concepts to me. Apostrophe is a nice looking markdown editor. Ensō is a minimalist writing tool (I hesitate to call it an 'editor') designed to facilitate a certain kind of writing by hiding text that has already been written and preventing the user from editing it. The focus here seems to be getting the writer to just get the words out and then use a (presumably) different tool to format and edit later.
- WD-42 1y agoApostrophe does the same thing, it’s just not really shown on the store page. It provides both distraction free and Hemingway modes. Hemingway mode doesn’t let you use backspace!
- pdabbadabba 1y agoThat's great to know! I'll have to give it a try.
- whirlwin 1y agoThe imagery on the spalsh page reminds me of Moomin. Nevertheless looking forward to following this project!
- xandrius 1y agoThe name brought me back to the PS Vita hacking times, I thought it would be something to jailbreak the PS5 or the switch 2. A bit disappointed :(
- opan 1y agoI clicked for the same reason, haha.
- seabass 1y agoHuge kudos for omitting analytics tracking for an app like this. Your reasoning totally resonated with me, and I hope more app devs follow suit!
- jnsie 1y agoThere used to be a really neat application launcher called Enso. Is this related in any way?
- raylad 1y agoI read the first few screens and still had no idea what we were talking about. I came to the conclusion that maybe it was a paperwhite display of some sort. Apparently it’s an app. I suppose that blog post is only for people who already know what the app is?
- unvalley 1y agoLove your art. Great work!