See the parent document: Using the Terminal as a Daily Driver for more about terminal productivity applications.

WordGrinder

WordGrinder is a very simple word processor. Simplicity is its superpower. It is minimal and gets out of the way of writing. It is excellent at supporting a workflow of write first, edit second, format last. I evaluated version 0.8. Currently version 0.9 is available, but not sure of the changes.

File Menu

It includes basic text formatting like bold and italics, basic paragraph styles, smart quotes, and spell checking. It also imports and exports to various file formats: odt (LibreOffice), HTML, Markdown, plain text, LaTeX (export), and troff (export).

WordGrinder has a feature it calls “Document Sets” which are actually multiple documents contained within one file. This has some interesting possibilities. First, implements “User Dictionary” that contains custom terms for spell-checking. Second, you could use document sets to contain each chapter or section of a book. This would help organize a larger writing project.

One potentially exciting feature is that it uses the Lua language to extend itself. I did not explore that. I did find the menus to be very sluggish which was annoying.

Could you use WordGrinder as a daily driver word processor? Maybe. Here are some obstacles to consider.

The formatting options are limited. If your document requires extensive formatting after it is written, then it would be difficult to go back and revise your prose because it would require going through the formatting process again with each revision.

Not sure how well it would work if you require LaTeX for technical documents. That may get into the extensive formatting challenge.

Right now, it doesn’t have enough features to make it compelling for me to use all the time. To take it to the next level would require a few things that word processors do that distinguish them from text editors. This would include things like:

  • Headers and footers with page nos.
  • Text justification (left, center right for paragraphs)
  • Insert date / time
  • Changing case of characters (upper, lower, proper)
  • Some basic font assignments
  • Maybe integrate a grammar checking tool (in addition to spell checking)
  • Math related functions like LaTeX
  • Maybe some kind of text merge / mail merge capability
  • Ability to set page properties like orientation and margins
  • PDF and RTF export
  • Read color themes in from a file so we could have our catpuccin or nord or Gruvbox or Tokyo night or whatever them easily.

So, if your looking for a simple distraction free word processor, WordGrinder may be a good fit. I’m hoping the developer and contributors continue to improve and make if a robust tool.

Right now for me, Using Markdown in a text editor and converting them to Word docx format with pandoc gives all the functionality I need.

Alternative: Markdown to Document Conversion

There is an alternative that does not involve needing a word processing application at all.

Here are the steps involved:

  1. Write your document in Markdown using your favorite text editor.
  2. Convert the document into the desired format using pandoc (e.g. docx, PDF, odt).

Markdown

To do this, you will need to learn Markdown as your source format. Markdown is a lightweight markup language used to format plain text documents. It allows you to add elements like headings, bold, or italic text, lists, and links using simple syntax, making it easy to create structured documents that can be converted to HTML, PDFs, or many other file formats using pandoc.

Markdown has proved incredibly useful in many different ways. I use it take notes in Obsidian. This website is created using Markdown formatted text files which are converted to HTML. Application README files are often written as Markdown documents. Since they are just text files with some simple annotations added, they are application independent, easily saved, and archived.

Pandoc

Pandoc is a utility that is able to convert documents between formats. This usage is fairly simple, but pandoc is a powerhouse conversion utility that is well worth exploring.

# Converting a markdown file to docx format.
pandoc -o term-app.docx -f markdown -t docx terminal-app.md

If it became a need to do this often, using templates to aid in formatting your documents would be a real boon.

Additional References: