I am interested in the idea of mimesis in the creation of an artistic work.  How do you practice a craft? For many fine artists, you copy drawings of the old masters, or for writers, you try to write in the style of various writers. BUT what if you wrote exactly what a writer wrote, but the difference was in the way that you wrote it.  Everyone would write in a different way. Their typing speeds would be different, the way they used delete. If they mistyped certain words etc. Colin (I think), at RC, told me that you can use typing style as a personal signature – like a finger print.

Anyway, There is a story by Borges, called Pierre Menard  – about someone who rewrote Don Quixote – and it is about how difficult it is to recreate the act of rewriting as if you were the original author.  Read the story it is like  6 pages.

In any case, I always wanted to write, I suppose you could call it a key logger, but something at would record and play back, in a graphical beautiful and comparative way, how people rewrote different pieces of writing.  Rather than do this as a stand alone app I decided to do this as a plugin. First I looked at vim, but I did not want to spend much time on this, and did not want to learn vimscript. I could have done something lispy in emacs, but I just went with sublime because the API it is well documented and I could use python.

I plan on putting an elm front end, with possibly D3 to visualize this and I have an intuition that I would like to use text layering.  The keystrokes are logged to a text file to theoretically anyone could write a front end for this.

Other additions I could add would be to upload the text files to an s3 bucket and make it a fully fledged microservice running on K8 because why not use a sledgehammer to hang a picture on the wall. The git repo is here.