Today, my extended writing formula is pretty simple:
The beauty of Writeroom and the other similar, full screen, spartan text editors is there is no margin settings, no font adjustments, and there’s well, basically nothing on screen except for the text (not even the menu bar unless it’s explicitly called via mouseover.) I can’t fully control the outside world but in terms of my machine, at this point, there’s literally nothing between myself and what I want to write. WriteRoom in action Full screen minimal editors Enter the text editor that would change my writing habits significantly: WriteRoom. I wanted a text editor could go one step further and block out these distractions in a quasi-full screen mode. Even in minimized state, I still had a pretty colorful, busy desktop. Closing many of them completely wasn’t a option: I still wanted e-mail notifications, for instance. However, I was still getting distracted with the many apps I had around the main text editor in the center of my workspace.
Everything was also now being saved in plain text, which eliminated Mac vs. No jumping around for special commands for fonts or bullets. I didn’t have an unnecessary set of toolbars, buttons or keyboard shortcuts to concern myself with. With this move my productivity got an immediate bump. However, a few years ago, I realized I wasn’t using 95% of the features or functionality in really any word processing app out there, so I decided to shave down most of my writing to a simple text editor.
Back then I’d usually crack open a full featured word processor like Word, with a bunch of other apps (music players, chat clients, web browsers) going full speed in the background as I’d multi task from time to time.Īpple’s Pages, surrounded by iTunes, Chrome, LittleSnapper For many there’s better, faster, minimalist approach that keeps focus on the task at hand using full screen, lightweight text editors like WriteRoom.įirst, a brief history on how my writing workflow has evolved: Cutting down over the yearsĪs I’ve moved into progressively more creative industries the demands on me to write in a longer format have increased, though I’ve been writing long form, mostly for longer e-mails and creative brainstorms, heavily since my college days. Unfortunately, I’m convinced that many write in a way that’s too unorganized, too cluttered and too prone to distraction. An extended E-mail to the boss, An outline for a presentation, and getting down thoughts from a brainstorming session down are a few common examples. Whether in a work or play setting, we all run into scenarios where an extended writing session on the computer becomes necessary. I’d like to see iCloud syncing, as well, as that would make it easier to use WriteRoom on both a desktop Mac and laptop, but Dropbox is good enough.Writing more with less: Minimalist text entry with WriteRoom Some of the other useful features in WriteRoom include a live word count in the title bar (great for people like me who often write to a word count you can also view character count, page count and more), and Dropbox syncing to the iOS version of WriteRoom. (Plus, I would have expected the default theme to remain the same in both views.) You can of course tweak this appearance, but it doesn’t seem like you should have to. While some people may prefer this theme, I find it hard on the eyes. However, one oddity is that the basic WriteRoom theme-black text on a light-gray background-changes to white text on a dark-gray background when you switch to full-screen mode. WriteRoom is optimized for Lion, including a full-screen view. txt or Markdown files, and the capability to style text-and view styled text-in documents makes WriteRoom a bit more flexible. WriteRoom lets you create and edit documents in either text (.txt) or rich-text (.rtf) formats. (The developer also hosts a collection of user-submitted themes.) I don’t find any of the included themes to be appealing, but you can create your own theme, choosing your favorite font and font size and adding a background color or image. If you don’t want to be bothered with your own settings, you can apply themes, which are combinations of fonts, colors, and backgrounds.