Ed Johnson-Williams

Update: I’ve rewritten First Draft from scratch and re-worked it into a totally offline desktop app. It’s now called Draft One. It’s available on macOS so far with Windows to come.

Do you ever find yourself writing a first draft of something but you keep getting bogged down by making little edits?

First Draft is a text editor I’ve created that stops editing from slowing you down. It’s at first-draft.netlify.app.

With First Draft, you can type text. But you can’t remove any characters you type.

No deleting. No backspace. No selecting text to overwrite it. No cutting. No replacing text with spellcheck.

It takes a tiny bit of getting used to. But it really helps you get over writer’s block and procrastination.

When you’ve got your typo-ridden first draft out of your brain and onto your computer, copy your text over into another text editor to clean it up.