dead-simple-text icon indicating copy to clipboard operation
dead-simple-text copied to clipboard

Minimalist plain text editor for the web

Dead Simple Text

Sometimes you just need plain text:

https://www.breck-mckye.com/dead-simple-text/

Dead Simple Text is a web-based text editor with minimalistic design inspired by MS DOS edit / QBASIC. It can open files from the user's filesystem and save them back to a user-specified downloads folder.

I wrote this for myself as an aid for writing notes, stories, blog posts etc. It's shared here in case anyone else would like to play with it.

image

I wrote DST for fairly simple reasons: I wanted a cross-platform 'distraction free' text editor, and the ones that existed never quite satisfied me aesthetically.

Usage

  • New clears the workspace
  • Load opens from the local machine
  • Save saves to the downloads folder
  • TAB indents the selection
  • SHIFT+TAB unindents the selection
  • F6 untraps the tab key (for visually impaired users)

Setting the save location

If you want to save a file to a location other than your 'downloads', you'll need to configure your browser to ask you for a location every time a website downloads anything. Unfortunately this option is all-or-nothing: if you want it, it'll affect other websites too.

In Chrome the config item is labelled Ask where to save each file before downloading.

How do I set a filename?

The filename is in the top right - click to edit it.

Building locally

npm run build

License

Dead Simple Text is offered as open source software under the AGPL license . Copyright Jimmy Breck-McKye 2021