Addition by subtraction. That was the name of the game this week.
Skrivana is a writing app for novelists and worldbuilders, and the rule I keep coming back to is that the editor should not be a distraction. Over time the editor had started to drift from that. Nothing dramatic, just the usual creep, a border here, a divider there, a row of buttons that had grown into a wall. So I spent the week taking things away.
The toolbar got the biggest change. It used to stretch the full width of the window like a control panel. Now it's a floating pill, only as wide as the buttons it holds, sitting over the page instead of fencing it in. The top bar got the same idea: it was its own strip with a hard line ruled underneath, quietly saying "the app is up here, your writing is down there." I took the line out and matched its color to the page behind it. Everything still works the same, it just doesn't pull your eyes away from your work anymore.
Then I cleared out clutter. The zoom slider, page-margin toggle, and paper-mode switch were all sitting in the open, so they're now tucked into a single View menu. The little dividers between button groups are mostly gone, replaced with plain spacing, and the word count moved to a quiet spot in the corner. The side panels were also getting in the way. Instead of sitting at full strength the whole time, they fade back when you start typing and return the instant you move toward them.
The one that actually felt like a real fix was the cursor. If you wrote past the bottom of the screen, the caret would pin itself to the last visible line, and every new sentence shoved the text up while you stayed glued to the bottom edge. The kind of thing you don't immediately notice but slowly start to hate. There's now a cushion of empty space below the line you're on, so the cursor rests comfortably up the page. And for anyone who wants to go further, there's a new typewriter mode in the View menu that parks the current line dead center while the words scroll up underneath.
None of this makes a feature list. But the slow work of getting a distraction-free writing app out of the writer's way is the part I find satisfying. Check out Why I Built Skrivana if you want to know why I built Skrivana in the first place.
More soon.
— Ben (Skrivana Founder)