“We want it to really confuse people, but also really make people happy.”

I often link to John Gruber’s Daring Fireball posts with a nod, but this time around I want to offer an opposing point of view. About a month ago, Gruber linked to a Markdown editor written by Sean Malseed in 2026 for the early 1980s Macs, and commented: I absolutely love that this exists. I don’t like the actual app at all. I guess “full screen” mode is the point of some “distraction free” editors, but I for one would never look twice at a Mac app that didn’t use windows. Full-screen mode just wasn’t a thing back then, except for games. ArtfulType is not a Mac-assed 1984 Mac app. I posit: It doesn’t have to be. It’s not 1984, after all. I actually really loved the creator of ArtfulType bringing back a few pieces from the future into the past: the fullscreen/​distraction-free editing, the dark mode menu bar, the shy scrollbar. Those anachronisms felt exciting to me. They made me wonder: What if dark mode was invented decades earlier? What if Mac had a different windowing mechanism?…