Making an Animated Text Editor

Writing text might be the primary use of computers. Yet, innovation has largely stagnated. Notepad.exe, TextEdit, and HTML <textarea> have all converged on the same experience. Besides cursor support, they don’t add much to terminal-based text editors. The cursor instantly moves. Text instantly appears and disappears.

Computers and screens tend to make people depressed. Software does not behave like the real world. Everything is 2d on screens, things appear and disappear instantly, and humans did not evolve to spend consecutive hours with screens. But, I think we can help alleviate this by making software feel more natural.

Why not make things animated? Software can benefit from juice. It makes things more intuitive and enjoyable to use.

I’ve been doing some experimentation. What if text editors were animated?