"Don't stop writing", says the person instructing the writing exercise, "Don't worry about spelling or grammar or coherence. Don't go back and edit. It's okay if it's gibberish, or if it's same three words over and over. The important thing is that you never lift your pen from the paper."
Easier said than done, of course: the three-minute timer starts and your brain betrays you by going completely blank.
Borogove is a scratchpad that solves this problem by being impatient: if you hesistate for too long, it starts writing for you. It does this by choosing the next word based on the last few words you've written down. This model of generative text exhibits all the important features, such as mostly outputting gibberish, and sometimes getting stuck in a loop repeating the same three words.
Since it is difficult to construct a predictive model of your writing based only on what you've written within the span of a few minutes, an option is included to tell the model to pretend that you are Lewis Carroll, Dante Alighieri, Aesop, or The Church of England.
(Also, text corpora imports stack: imported text is added to the model alongside any previous imports, together with everything that's been written in the editor. Importing several things in sequence potentially creates an unholy amalgamation of writing styles.)
The scratchpad only handles appending or deleting one character at a time, is case-insensitive, and confines itself to the tragically Anglocentric character set that is printable ASCII. I could attempt to justify this by saying something about how the absence of limitations is the enemy of art, but it is really because implementing a text editor is hard.
Go to the editor or view the source on github.
Jean Lo, July 2020