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WriteRoom: Free full-screen writing app for OS X

Submitted by Merlin on June 30, 2006 - 6:16am.

WriteRoom | Hog Bay Software

O, how we distraction-prone people pine for persistent and ubiquitous full-screen mode. And it looks like the good folks at Hog Bay have come up with an elegant freeware app to help save the beleaguered writer from him or herself.

For Mac users who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world. WriteRoom is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, WriteRoom is just about you and your text…

It’s a primitive application, to be sure – I suspect completely by design – but it may be just what the doctor ordered if you need to get your head out of your butt and put some words on the page. I can see myself spending a lot of time in WriteRoom.

[ via RickP_in_AZ on the board ]

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You know, I'm still trying...

Submitted by Nick Fagerlund (not verified) on June 30, 2006 - 3:00pm.

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.