Cleartext only lets you write with the 1,000 most common words

Writers who work on children’s books or are looking for a unique challenge might be intrigued by Cleartext, a barebones text editor for Macs that doesn’t allow you to use anything other than the 1,000 most common words in the English language.

Seen by Product Hunt, Cleartext forces you to write simplistically, and if you try to type any words beyond the 1,000 most common, it will stop you in your tracks. Words like “intrigued,” “challenge,” necessary” and more are forbidden. If you try to type them, they will be highlighted and you’ll have to type in a more common word to move on.

Cleartext pulls its 1,000 words from Google’s list of the 20,000 most common, featuring such classics as “you,” “and,” and, of course, “the.”

Cleartext is influenced by the book Thing Explainer by xkcd creator Randall Munroe, which only uses the 1,000 most common English words. Munroe released Simple Text last year, of which Cleartext is an almost exact copy of, except that it highlights uncommon words and lets you continue without changing them.

In Cleartext’s settings, you can turn off the feature that automatically selects and makes you change your uncommon word, allowing you to move on. The app will still make a noise, but it won’t highlight the word in any way to remind you to go back and change it, so you could easily forget about some uncommon words when you go back to edit. Cleartext also doesn’t have spell check, so a simple misspelling will just be treated as an uncommon word.

Cleartext’s code is available to check out on GitHub, and is completely open source. It probably won’t replace your regular text editors, but it’s an interesting exercise in challenging yourself to write in an even simpler style than Ernest Hemingway.

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