Of course, there’s also Ulysses if you want a full-screen writing tool - although it’s explicitly targeted at creative writing, and is not free.

I just wish that they author of Megazoomer would fix it. I’d pay $50 for it if it worked properly (which it almost does already.)

Running Textmate, Terminal and Safari (without page reloads) fullscreen was just toooo nice. The bugs in the SMBL extension make all sorts of things break, though. :(

Merlin: maybe you can convince the Textmate people to make full-screen zoom a reality. You are, after all, all-powerful and named Merlin.

Well, I have to ask - Is there a windows equivalent?

Brilliant. Thanks so much for posting this. Journos like yours truly love this kind of writing environment - it’s like old-school newsroom software. :)

Jennifer

There are a couple of other Mac-centric (well, Unix-centric, but the two run together these days) ways of getting the same thing.

1) Maximize a Terminal window, type (minus the quotes) “cat > file.txt” at the prompt, and start typing your text. Press Ctrl-D when finished. This is the real virtual typewriter — once you’ve entered a line, there’s no going back to edit it. If you want something slightly more luxurious, try the “pico” editor. Type “man pico” at the command line to see how it works.

2) If you have your login set up where you type both your name & your password (instead of clicking on a user name), enter >console with no password. This puts you into a text-only mode, white text on a black screen, with a login prompt. Enter your user name & password where prompted, and then type “cat” or “pico” as above.

For the other kind of operating system, you could reboot into safe mode and use “edit.”

Refreshingly pure and fun to use. Down with multitasking! I wanna go home…

I found this via Subtraction and it’s a great candidate for a Quicksilver trigger. I have it bound to F7 which allows me to put my Powerbook into writing mode in, uh, 2 seconds. There goes another excuse for delayed writing projects.

I like this app a lot. Very beautiful. Thankfully you can change the colors and default font. It’s fabuloso!

Ahh, perfect for what I need. I’ve been using TextEdit for nearly everything because I work best in plain text. This is much nicer.

You know, I’m still trying to decide whether I hate the fact that it can’t edit a text file in-place.* On the one hand, irritating. I LIKE being able to open the same file in a series of text editors, depending on what I need to do with it at the time. On the other hand, well… it’s clearly trying to fill a niche that nothing else is really filling for the nonce. And maybe that niche is something I want filled. We’ll see, I guess. Anyway, it is kind of cool. And I’m reminded of that Neil Gaiman quote:

“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”

Given that on day one—at the start of a chapter, in your First There Was Nothing—you’re not going to have much use for the features of a real text editor in the first place, you might as well just own up and face the blank sheet of paper with some amber-on-black panache. And you gotta love the fade-in/fade-out on the scrollbar. STYLIN’.

• I DO know that I hate Ulysses. (The app, I mean.) That bundle file format, where it hides all of your text in a labyrinth of directories, throwing away your nice descriptive filenames and adding in a bunch of confusing and unexplained duplication? You know, the file format that’s no better than any other undocumented binary black hole of a word-processing format? Where you have to individually export all of your files from within the app if you want to edit them with any other tools? Yeah, wasn’t super impressed with that.