IdeaWell

Project ideas from Hacker News discussions.

“I just chose words carefully”

Original Article

Hacker News Discussion

📝 Discussion Summary (Click to expand)

Three prevalent themes in the discussion

  1. Personal satisfaction from tweaking text layout
    Many commenters describe a habitual, almost compulsive pleasure in avoiding widows/orphans or re‑wording to achieve clean margins.
  2. “I just realized I have nearly always avoided widows and orphans because it felt bad to write that way.” – xerox13ster
  3. “It's a guilty pleasure of mine, spending a few minutes to clean up the aesthetics of docstrings and comments.” – boothby

  4. “I have never felt more seen. I do this with comments all the time, rewording things to look nice on that 80 or 100 column mark.” – lanyard-textile

  5. Nostalgia for historical typesetting tools and practices
    Users reminisce about WordPerfect’s widow/orphan protection, monospace game guides, and the manual effort once required for nicely formatted text.

  6. “Those who lived through the (text‑mode) WordPerfect era may remember 'widow and orphan protection' as being one of the features…” – Leonard_of_Q
  7. “Text mode WP is the reason I hate almost all word processors, everything else is tepid goat piss by comparison.” – nosioptar

  8. “The Super Metroid guide is the kind of thing that AI will render obsolete, which makes me sad.” – gkoberger (referring to the hand‑justified FAQ)

  9. Ambivalence toward automation/AI replacing manual text craftsmanship
    While some admire the efficiency of AI‑driven formatting, others lament the loss of human‑centric care and view it as a trade‑off.

  10. “suckerpinch has a great video where he uses an LLM to do this same thing automatically.” – ivw
  11. “AIs these days are pretty good for the 'find prior art and related work' part … treat their output like that of an over‑eager but somewhat unreliable intern.” – eru
  12. “But lots of technology has rendered formerly human‑lead things obsolete, and I'm sure we'll find new ways to express creativity.” – gkoberger

🚀 Project Ideas

JustiText: Automatic Monospace Justifier

Summary

  • CLI tool that rewrites plain text to eliminate widows/orphans and achieve full justification in a monospace width via synonym substitution and line breaking.
  • Core value: Saves writers hours of manual wordsmithing while preserving meaning and producing visually clean, rectangle‑shaped paragraphs.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Technical writers, game FAQ authors, scriptwriters, anyone producing monospace‑formatted docs
Core Feature Input text + target width → optimized output with no widows/orphans and equal line lengths (or minimal raggedness)
Tech Stack Python, Click (CLI), spaCy/WordNet for synonyms, optional LLM API for paraphrasing
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Hobby

Notes

  • HN users described the pain of manually rewording to avoid widows (cpterso: “you're struggling with his OCD”) and admired full justification in monospace (rectang: “forming every paragraph of dialog into perfect rectangles”).
  • Could spark discussion about the trade‑off between linguistic purity and aesthetic constraints, and be released as an open‑source utility for HN’s developer‑writer crowd.

WidowWatch: Live Editor Plugin

Summary

  • Editor extension (VS Code/Emacs/Vim) that highlights widows and orphans as you type and offers one‑click synonym‑based fixes.
  • Core value: Gives immediate visual feedback, eliminating the guesswork and iterative tweaking currently required for clean monospace layout.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Developers, writers, anyone editing READMEs, code comments, game guides, or any monospace‑constrained text
Core Feature Real‑time detection of widow/orphan lines based on configured column width, with inline suggestions to reword or substitute words
Tech Stack Language Server Protocol (LSP) or tree‑sitter for parsing; editor‑specific APIs (e.g., vscode extension host, Emacs elisp); optional UI via webview
Difficulty Medium‑High
Monetization Hobby

Notes

  • Commenters like lanyard‑textile (“I do this with comments all the time…”) and boothby (“spending a few minutes to clean up the aesthetics of docstrings”) would love automated suggestions that keep their workflow flowing.
  • The plugin could become a focal point for HN discussions on balancing readability with visual neatness in code and documentation.

ScriptFit: Web Service for Dialogue Layout

Summary

  • Web app where users paste a script or dialogue, set a line width, and receive a version with no widows (each paragraph ends exactly at the margin) via constrained rewriting, plus side‑by‑side preview and export options.
  • Core value: Automates the “no widows” rule that Chris Carter famously enforced, letting writers focus on story rather than manual line‑length fiddling.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Screenwriters, playwrights, game dialogue writers, anyone needing precise visual layout for monospace or typeset scripts
Core Feature Optimize dialogue to avoid widows/orphans and achieve visual rectangles; offers original vs. optimized view, export to plain text, PDF, or Fountain
Tech Stack Frontend: React/Vue; Backend: Node.js (Express) or Python (FastAPI); Optimization engine using heuristic search or LLM‑guided word substitution
Difficulty High
Monetization Revenue-ready: Subscription model (free tier with limited length/exports, paid tier for unlimited use and API access)

Notes

  • The Gillian Anderson interview sparked curiosity about Chris Carter’s “no widows” rule (cpterso: “look, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has”), and users expressed desire to see the actual formatted scripts.
  • ScriptFit would give the HN community a tangible tool to experiment with constrained writing, likely generating discussion about creativity vs. automation in visual text layout.

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