It's been done. ;-)

Personally, I prefer a simple text editor when I'm writing. About the only extras I like to have are some simple formatting options (style, font, tabs), search and replace, and basic spell checking. Being able to paste in a graphic is handy sometimes. Everything else just gets in the way. The one I like best right now is TextEdit (comes with OS X), but I have used TexEdit (great shareware app) a lot, too.

I like writing on paper, too. If I had some kind of magic paper with undo, cut and paste, and spell checking, that would be ideal. It would have to look and feel just like pen and paper. Electronic tablets and styluses don't feel right to me (so far). Too slippery, too disconnected, and handwriting recognition is too unreliable..

I used typewriters when I was young (thank goodness I learned how to type), but they were not very conducive to writing for me. I loved the tactile qualities, though.

Speaking of typewriters, Prof Micheal Twyman, of all people, claimed on Monday that they're making typewriters again - anyone heard anything about this?

Si

my absolute favourite is scribble papers (pc only):
http://www.scribblepapers.de.vu/

I like Arachnophilia quite alot, especially because you can change it to do just what you want. Plus, since it's a Java program, it looks and works the same on my Mac, PC and Sun machines.

Arachnophilia is a good example of open software design -- a design the user can change in the field to meet requirements the programmer (me) cannot possibly think of himself, including new requirements that do not exist at the time of development. By the way, Arachnophilia is a descendant of my classic best-seller "Apple Writer," an early word processor for the Apple II that also was field-extendable by way of a macro language (in an era when macro languages were virtually unheard of

Si,

What kind of typewriters? I know they still make basic low end electrics.

E