I would be very worried that there's some random action stealing the focus of the writing app and me just typing letters into the void.

Heh, for that exact reason I'm using it with my screen dimmed as much as possible and even considered adding a night[*] (black to red) mode for OLED screens (I write at night, I'm a vampire).

One of the use-cases I found when I was researching Ensō: there was a blogger who'd split writing into two steps:

1. writing with their screen dimmed as much as possible

2. editing the next day

Also, perhaps a pure-black screen with a simple indicator of the number of characters/words written would work here? You'd still know that the editor is recording your changes. Seems like a nice idea for a little app/toy.

[*]examples, inspiration: https://untested.sonnet.io/Obsidian+for+Vampires (apologies for messy notes, this project is separate from my main site)

The hotkey to return to my window manager is pretty hard to hit by accident. As for the writing app, it's just a python script looping over lines read from stdin and writing them to disk. Not many opportunities to do anything else.

Why not just cat?

Because I am a dummy. This is even better:

cat - > prose.txt

Thanks for the idea.