Hi! I'm Ansgar! 👋 You probably got an email from me.

If you're like me, you get a lot of email.

I noticed, over time, that I spent a growing and appreciable portion of my time with email on grammar, formatting, and misspellings.

Typos.

But is that time well spent? I don't think so. Email's ingrained expecation is that every paragraph be well formatted and every sentence error free. I abhor that expectation.

At first, I added Sent from my iPad to mollify any mewling about my emails' brevity or mistakes. (I've never owned an iPad.) But I came to want something beyond blunting email's onerous expectation.

So I built Typo. It's an Emacs major mode that purposefully makes my emails a little worse, but just so, in return for celerity.

Here's how it works:

• Mispelled words aren't highlighted nor autocorrected. Typos remain.
• The first word of short, standalone sentences is uncapitalized. E.g. Great! See you at 2pm becomes great! see you at 2pm.
• Backwards searches (C-r in Emacs) now have a contrived 1 second delay to deter correcting text already written.
• The trailing period of every paragraph's last sentence is removed. They're unnecessary.
• Apostrophes in obvious contractions are removed. E.g. Don't sweat it! becomes dont sweat it!.

In short, Typo is a little tool to retrain my brain to get my point(s) across swiftly and get back to other things.

I hope my emails remain intelligible.

If you have any thoughts on Typo, please email me (irony intended 🙂) and let me know.