Owl

A word processor for the netbook in your closet.

That machine is not too slow to write on. Writing never got heavier; the software did. Owl is what is left when you take a text editor and remove everything that is not the page: full screen, one centered column, the line you are typing held in the middle of the display, and no chrome asking you to make a decision.

Why old hardware first

Because keeping a working laptop out of a landfill is a better outcome than replacing it, and because writing is the one job those machines never became too slow for. Owl targets 32-bit hardware first rather than as a courtesy port, which is a constraint on everything above it: a feature that needs a faster machine is a feature Owl does not have.

The pleasant side effect is that it is very fast on a new machine too. We have never found that to be a coincidence.

Three ways in

The appliance boots full screen on the bare console with nothing underneath it. The terminal version is the same editor rather than a lesser one: keys a terminal cannot deliver get bindings that suit the medium instead. And the browser build is the editing core compiled to wasm, with no framework behind it and no network required.

Your manuscript is a file on your disk, in a format you can open with anything. Owl carries its own backups because these machines fail, and it would rather you kept a copy on a USB stick than trusted us with it.

Still being built. There is nothing to download yet.