Hello, folks. Yes, unfortunately, you read the email subject line right.

We’ve hit one of a really serious family health issue. Without getting into the private details, suffice it to say: it’s big, and hard, and it’s taking up pretty much all of my mental and emotional bandwidth at this point, and there is zero way to know if or when we’ll come through to the other side of it.

I was going slowly enough before we hit this. As things stand, I see no viable path to completing this project unless things unexpected and dramatically change with this family health issue, and again: there’s just no way of knowing. Maybe we get a pleasant surprise and get through this, and I get to pick this back up in six months. Maybe it’s never. We just don’t know right now.

Hello there! This is a semi-regular update on rewrite—my attempt by (that’s me!) to build a best-in-class research writing environment: reference management, note-taking, authoring, and publishing. You can always unsubscribe either via this link right here or the one at the bottom of the email. Thanks for following along with this project!

A short little update, folks, because I started thinking about this and wanted to get it out of my system in a way that would actually be profitable—

I’m working with my existing library tonight, which is in BibTeX. Unfortunately, tonight I’m trying to add a translation to the library (Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, if you’re curious). The pain point: BibTeX and BibLaTeX only understand the idea of translations. The tooling is extremely extensible—because around LaTeX is hyper-extensible—but it isn’t very .

Hello! This is a semi-regular update on rewrite—an attempt by Chris Krycho (that’s me!) to build a best-in-class research writing environment. You can always unsubscribe either via this link right here or the one at the bottom of the email. Thanks for following along with this project!

I’m going to get this out of the way right up front: I have very little progress to report. This is a philosophy-of-building-this-thing kind of email, not a look-at-the-shiny-demo kind of email. (The bits I promised in my last email, back in September, should be coming your way in a week or two.) For the last two months, I have been traveling—a lot, at least for me. Conference, team on-site, Thanksgiving… add in the fact that I’m pushing through a real slog of a task at my day job, and I just haven’t made a lot of progress on the programming front. That should pick back up in December, though: that slog of a day-job-task will be blessedly done, and I have a few weeks off where a big part of how I want to recharge is going after . Here’s hoping. 🤞🏻

Hello, good people interested in my research writing software project! When I started in on this update, I was planning to send you a missive in two parts:

1. A progress report, a.k.a. screenshots and some assorted commentary!
2. An answer to the question:

1. I’m Highly Motivated Right Now

I have spent the last several weeks doing a lot of research and writing, as I have been teaching in my church—and it has been an absolutely infuriating experience. Not the teaching part, but the research part. Over the course of this project, I’ve used a mix of BibLaTeX for a reference library, Bear for my notes, and and and for the actual drafting of the materials. Bear is a great little notebook, but the fact that there’s just integration with my reference management system has been annoying to say the least. iA Writer and Ulysses both do some things well, and miss out on things that are essential to me:

Hello, good people interested in rewrite!

As I suggested in the first of these project updates, the last few months were primarily focused on clearing the deck for this project. As many of you know, I concluded my podcast project in late May. That effort took a massive amount of my time every month! New Rustacean also existed of : I started learning Rust, and then started a podcast to help myself learning Rust, explicitly for this project.

Hi there! I’m Chris Krycho, and this is the very first update on rewrite: an attempt to build a truly great app for —whether it’s a college paper or a Ph.D. thesis, a journal publication or a magazine article, a scholarly blog or a big book.