Writing on mobile is different

Whenever I write here, I do it on my laptop, almost never on the phone. I do have a Bluetooth keyboard that connects to my phone, but it's rare that I remember to bring it with me, and have a moment to take it out of the bag. Plus it's un-ergonomic.

But I also almost never have deep focus time for writing (that's what two young kids and a startup job does to you). So if I want to write at all, it'll have to be on my phone in relatively tiny chunks.

How is this type of writing different?

• Very limited screen space. The on-screen keyboard and UI take 40% of the real estate.
• There are frequent interruptions (the whole point of writing on my phone is to make use of the short moments where I'd otherwise scroll).
• Typing is about 2x slower (roughly 40 WPM on the phone versus 80 on a full size keyboard). Sometimes I might even want to type with one hand.

It's unlikely I would write long essays like this. But capturing a short concept or commenting on some recent news should be totally doable.

What would it look like? Perhaps one should operate on an outline level most of the time. Each paragraph could collapse into a 5-word summary, as soon as you start the next one? So that an outline of what came before is visible all the time.

This would allow keeping more of the post in context during writing - and also make it easy to come back from an interruption by quickly glancing over everything you have so far.

I put together a single-HTML-page app as proof of this concept. It's very unrefined and requires inserting your own API key (I know, it's very 2023 of me). For writing a draft though it looks promising; collapsing paragraphs really does seem to help come back faster.

Editing is a nightmare though, both due to the UX but also because my posts do not have the top level structure that would actually be needed to make it clearly legible. Regardless, I like the concept and will experiment further. If you know of good tools for writing on mobile (that are not pure note taking apps, but actually meant to make something that you want to publish), please tell me -- I'd love to try them!