Affordances of a screenless writing interface

# Affordances of a screenless writing interface Source: [https://jamesg.blog/2026/05/07/affordances-of-a-screenless-writing-interface](https://jamesg.blog/2026/05/07/affordances-of-a-screenless-writing-interface) *This post was written first with my*[*screenless writing interface*](https://jamesg.blog/2026/05/07/writing-a-blog-post-without-a-screen)*, and then edited in Ghost, which I use to publish blog posts to this website\. The extent of my edits were fixing typos and reworking the introduction and conclusion a little bit\.* My original concern when brainstorming the idea of a keyboard with which you could type but had no other means of interaction was that the accuracy of writing would be hard to maintain\. This concern is not as significant as I thought now I am using the device\. Indeed, sometimes you need to try a technology out to really build an impression of how it feels\. And so I am also writing this post with my screenless writing setup, both to continue experimenting with the medium but also to capture an idea I had that I wanted to explore: the various affordances of different writing interfaces\. In discussion in a Matrix server I am in about this project, I realised that this device may be more appropriate for creating a first draft of a project\. Even if the technology could automatically correct all typos, there are still inherent limitations: not being able to go back through your writing, for example\. My first sentence in this blog post was so long that I forgot the first clause so I sort of had to guess how to finish the sentence With that in mind, I knew I could go back later\. Thus, this device could be used as a means do author notes, drafts for works, or streams of consciousness\. I can always edit a post later\. Indeed, I found myself more comfortable with the idea of editing a post afterwords precisely because I knew there were limitations that got in the way of making the post as good as it could be the first time around\. This feels like a unique property of this particular mode of writing\. I also started to think about the affordances of typewriters\. Typewriters don't allow corrections in the same way as computers; you can type over a word, but you can't completely erase it \(unless you used Tippex or the like\)\. It would be cool if this system had a button to read out your current paragraph so you remember your context; indeed, I think there is a lot of work that could be done to explore the idea of screenless writing interfaces of this form factor\.*\(Update after publishing: I totally forgot how this paragraph started which is why the context jumped a bit\. I wonder how if this writing form factor makes it harder to compose more complex grammatical structures, such as the sentence with a semi\-colon and parentheses that I wrote before forgetting the start of the paragraph\. Could a tool like this help improve one's memory?\)* Anyway, I think I was talking about the affordances of typewriters\. Typewriters give you a physical artefact\. This means there is distance between what you have written on a typewriter and publishing it online whereas there is a very narrow distance between a text editing program on a computer and publishing one's work\. For this reason, I rarely publish anything I have written on the typewriter: the typewriter is where I like to write personal essays away from my computer, without feeling any obligation to publish what I write\. I also love using my typewriter to type up letters to friends\. This all has me wondering: what are the opportunities of a system that lets you write a blog post without having a display set up? I do feel I type with less regard to editing myself as I go, because I can't easily go back and edit something while I am writing\. I feel a similar way with typewriters too, where I know that because I can't easily discard a line, if I start a line I will try and finish it\. In this way, the typewriter – and the screenless writing interface – pushes me a little bit outside my comfort zone: these mediums make think about how to end a sentence even if I wish I had started it with another word\.