Benjamin Sloan's WareWoolf Is a Raspberry Pi-Powered Machine Dedicated to Novel Writing
Designed to minimize distractions while putting digital pen to paper, the WareWoolf is a kiosk system booting into an open source app.
Self-described amateur programmer and writer Benjamin Sloan has decided to take a practical approach to the distractions of modern electronics: Build a machine, the WareWoolf, dedicated solely to writing.
"WareWoolf is designed for one thing: Writing fiction," Sloan explains of the project. "It is intentionally simplified: You cannot change the font, line spacing, or color. But it has everything you need to organize, edit, and revise a novel — and you don't even need a mouse."
The WareWoolf project is split into two key parts. The first is the software, a custom-written open source text editor designed around a split three-panel interface: Chapters, Editor, and Notes. "That's it," Sloan explains. "There is no toolbar with twenty buttons cluttering the screen. There isn't even a file menu unless you summon it. All formatting is done with shortcuts."
The other part of the project is hardware, a wood-encased machine with mechanical keyboard and a portrait-format display designed to mimic the appearance of a page in a book. "It's an LCD," Sloan explains. "E Ink [ePaper] is the dream, and looks like it might finally be feasible with things like Inkplate, but I have a good bit to learn before I can try it. For now I just turned the back light down as low as it will go to make the screen more friendly on the eyes.
"[The case is] red oak and I stained it with a dark walnut color. I was blown away by how much it brought out the grain — this is the first time I've stained wood like that. I plan to put a Raspberry Pi 4 in it, since it runs an Electron app and I don't know how well the less powerful [Raspberry] Pis could handle it."
For now, with many Raspberry Pi models still hard to find from official resellers, Sloan is running the device from a Raspberry Pi 400 — but using his own mechanical keyboard rather than the Raspberry Pi 400's own.
More details are available on Sloan's Reddit thread, with instructions on duplicating the software stack — which includes Raspberry Pi OS Lite, the Matchbox window manager, and Sloan's WareWoolf software — available in a separate post. WareWoolf itself, meanwhile, is published on GitHub under an unspecified open source license.