Author copy · photograph
by June Miyata · 152 pages · epub + pdf · November 2025
A short history of thinking tools — the typewriter, the index card, the text editor, the repl. Six case studies on the machines we use to think, how each quietly reshaped the paragraph, and what the next one might do to us if we let it.
There is a kind of history we rarely write — the history of the small machines we use to think. We know the factory, the plough, the printing press. Those earn the textbooks. We know less about the typewriter on the writer's desk, the index card in the historian's shoebox, the text editor on the engineer's laptop. And yet those objects have done as much to shape how we think as any mill or engine.
This book is six short studies. Each takes one small machine and asks: what did it let its user do that the previous tool didn't? What did it quietly forbid? And what does the paragraph written with it look like, once you know what to notice?
I am not arguing that our tools determine us. Only that they shape us more than we usually admit — and that the shaping is most visible after the tool is gone.
Exactly what was on the tin. No upsells, no tier gates, no "contact us for pricing" once I was in. Shipped in an afternoon and the docs were readable by a human.
I've bought half the catalogue at this point. The voice is consistent, the prices are honest, and the updates actually land. It's what indie shipping should look like.
Did what the page said it would do. Knocked off half a star because I wish there was a Windows native build — I'm on WSL and it works but feels like a workaround. Support replied to me in four hours.
I bought it at 11pm, downloaded it at 11:01pm, had it running at midnight. That's the whole review. Email went to a person who answered the next morning.
The amount of thought in the copy alone makes this worth the price. And that's before you get to the actual product. Rare to see this level of care at indie prices.
Swapped out my previous tool for this one last sprint. Fewer features, honestly — but the ones that are here are the ones I actually use. Don't miss the rest.