There’s a certain type of writer—mostly prose writers, I’d guess, but others too—who don’t want to be distracted by extraneous information from their editor. They don’t want to see the name of the file they’re editing, what line they’re on, or, in Emacs terms, what mode they’re in. They don’t want a mode line or anything else. The metaphor they’re seeking is the blank sheet of paper.
I remember coming across this same idea years ago; so many years ago I was still using WordStar for non-programming editing. I didn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now. Knowledge is power, after all, and I never saw the benefit of unnecessarily doing without it1.
Needless to say, not everyone agrees. A few years ago, Bastien Guerry showed how to achieve a blank screen in Org mode. Now Pete Corey is doing the same thing in Spacemacs (although his approach will, mutatis mutandis, work with any Emacs configuration) using Olivetti. Corey’s approach isn’t limited to Org mode. He likes the blank screen even when he’s coding so he’s arranged for his mode to be active in text-mode and prog-mode buffers.
Most folks probably wouldn’t want such a setup but if you do, Corey shows how easy it is to obtain it with the help of Olivetti.