LELeoPanthera·May 23, 2026
Consider wordgrinder, a console word processor, as distinct from a text editor.
https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder
In Time to talk about my writerdeckdavidgiven
wordgrinder
Lua2015–2026
davidgiven / wordgrinder
wordgrinder
A word processor which gets the hell out of your way and lets you get some work done.
7Distinct people
10Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.3KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A word processor which gets the hell out of your way and lets you get some work done.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year10 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-12-17 18:13:03 UTC to 2026-05-23 19:34:47 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
What Hacker News says
10 sourcesWordgrinder. https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder
In L123: A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet with modern Excel compatibilitySee also Wordgrinder, a text-mode word processor. (As distinct from a text editor.) https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder
In L123: A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet with modern Excel compatibilityYou had me at "non-HTML-based" ;)
I've been looking for a simple word processor that will let me easily/quickly do basic things and which will let me export to markdown and HTML that isn't terrible like the type word processors create.
I recently found wordgrinder (https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder), which is a terminal-based word processor that's very close to what I've been looking for. A wx-based thing like this might be a bit nicer. So I'll start with one suggestion: support for wordgrinder's .wg format would be real nice :)
In Show HN: A WYSIWYG word processor in PythonWordgrinder is a modern text-mode word processor. (Distinct from a text editor.)
https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder
In A desktop environment without graphics (tmux-like)it's always encouraging to see david given's projects. the choice of opengl and luau is interesting and appealing. the file format is also appealing: https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder/blob/master/README...
In WordGrinder: A simple word processor that runs on the consoleWordGrinder: A simple word processor that runs on the console
105 points · Open discussionWordGrinder: Terminal-based distraction free word processor
143 points · Open discussionWordgrinder: A word processor which gets the hell out of your way
1 points · Open discussionOne thing that make appears completely unable to do cleanly is to build things twice, with different flags. You know, like 'build a release version and a debug version'. I've ended up having to write self-writing makefiles to do that. It's not as nasty as it sounds (but still pretty nasty): https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder/blob/master/Makefi...
Plus, 'set a flag for just this file' is another thing that's appallingly broken. GNU Make has an extension to do that --- but if you use it, it makes your builds non-deterministic. (Flags propagate down the build chain; builds are not in a defined order; each file is built once regardless of the flags for that file; so if a file is reachable via more than one rule with different flags settings, it's pure luck which setting wins...)
In Autotools Mythbuster