CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@TheEvilSkeleton @nekohayo It's weird to me that Linux Mint seems to always be the recommendation for beginners. I hope GNOME OS becomes stable soon, such that it may seriously start getting pushed as the beginner-friendly distro.

@hipsterelectron I could probably talk for hours about all the subtle choices I made in the app. Some were spur-of-the-moment tweaks that stuck because they felt good, some were extremely deliberate choices that I had made before writing the first line of code.

@lerothas Parchment is primarily focused on presenting text with proportional type, and nearly every other choice I made with the app is in service of that goal.

@VATVSLPR FAQ is something I've considered, yes. I'll probably do so sooner than later, but to summarize the many reasons to prefer proportional over monospace for code: I believe monospace is a distraction.

FWIW, when I use Parchment (for most of my programming and all of my writing), I use the system default sans-serif font. That is how I expect most users to use it as well.

@tris I don't know if the two apps are too comparable; Other than the surface level of being plain text editors, both apps have very different goals. G•T•E is concerned with compatibility and fitting in with how users would expect a text editor to lay out text, whereas Parchment is utterly unconcerned because my goal was primarily to enable too plain text editing using proportional type. The consequences of that difference are significant.

@mkhl Afraid not. Though Acme was an inspiration (Parchment started as a Sam clone, believe it or not), there's no command-running in Parchment. Instead, I achieve a similar result to what you ask by using Telepipe's clipboard redirection. See this document: https://codeberg.org/vtrlx/telepipe/src/branch/main/docs/Clipboard%20Redirection.md

Parchment is "maximally minimalist" in scope; It contains only the features it needs and nothing more. Despite this relatively small size, Parchment has been over two years in the making. This is in part because I wanted to release a complete, finished app but also because I believed it was important to get it right. Other projects I've started and completed in that time served as exercises in determining what Parchment needed, and what it didn't. The result is what you see today.

Parchment is now available.

Parchment is a plain text editor for #GNOME that delivers a clean and distraction-free writing experience. It stays out of your way and allows you to focus on what really matters: writing.

I have written dozens of blog posts and several software projects using Parchment, including Parchment itself.

Writeup ⇒ https://www.vtrlx.ca/posts/2026/parchment-now-available/
Get it on Flathub ⇒ https://flathub.org/apps/details/ca.vtrlx.Parchment
Source code ⇒ https://codeberg.org/vtrlx/parchment

@hipsterelectron You're missing out—I've found em-dashes to be excellent for reducing the number of parentheses in my writings (because I digress so much (ADHD)).