● WordGrinder Controls

466 2026-08-06 note ♑︎ ♎︎

WordGrinderAn old ThinkPad, wiped down to headless Ubuntu Server: no desktop environment, no display manager, boots straight to a login prompt over SSH or a bare tty. The single purpose is longform writing, a novel draft, a poetry chapbook, a… hides its menu by default, Esc or a right-click brings it up, and every command lives somewhere in there. The shortcuts below skip the menu entirely, all of them are also visible next to their matching menu entry if a key is forgotten.

Selection works differently than in most editors: mark one end with Ctrl-space, move the cursor to the other end, then apply an operation, there's no click-and-drag equivalent in a terminal. Every keybinding here is stored per-document rather than globally, so a custom binding is included in the .wg file rather than a dotfile.

Advanced

Templates save a keybinding set and starting content together: File→Save as template writes the current document set to WordGrinder's template directory, File→Create from template loads one into a fresh, unsaved document. A template named default.wg autoloads for every new document, useful for a chapbook's recurring front matter.

Autosave is off by default. File→Document Settings→Autosave turns it on with a configurable interval and filename pattern, snapshots only fire once typing pauses and only while there are unsaved changes.

The spellchecker underlines misspellings as you type. Edit→Spellchecker→Find next misspelt word jumps between them, Edit→Spellchecker→Add current word to dictionary writes to a per-document set user dictionary rather than the system one, so a manuscript's invented names don't need retyping past every check.

A single .wg file holds multiple documents, called a document set, visible via the tab-like document list. Word count shown in the status bar covers either the whole document or, with an active selection, just the marked range.

See Micro ControlsMicro is the editor for plain prose on the writerdeck. No modal states to fight, every binding is a Ctrl or Alt shortcut you'd expect from a GUI editor. Everything below is rebindable via ~/.config/micro/bindings.json, but the defaults great as-is.… for the other editor on the writerdeck, and WriterdeckAn old ThinkPad, wiped down to headless Ubuntu Server: no desktop environment, no display manager, boots straight to a login prompt over SSH or a bare tty. The single purpose is longform writing, a novel draft, a poetry chapbook, a….