Write without distraction.

January 12, 2007 7:37 AM

WriteRoom (for OS X) and DarkRoom (for Windows). Simple, full-screen text editors.
posted by empath (67 comments total)

oh -- via Signal vs Noise
posted by empath at 7:38 AM on January 12, 2007

brilliant. Why didn't I think of that?
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 7:40 AM on January 12, 2007

Personally, I never wrote more than when I was using WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.

There's something to be said for having no escape from the blank blue screen.
posted by empath at 7:41 AM on January 12, 2007 [1 favorite]

I use CopyWrite (os x) for this. $5 more but has some good non-intrusive features for tracking writing.
posted by dobbs at 7:43 AM on January 12, 2007

Ulysses does this as well, and has the additional bonus of cool organising and notes for docs/stories.

And the cost is comparable.

And it rawx too...full screen writing is the way to go...it is amazing how ....distracting everything else is..
posted by das_2099 at 7:46 AM on January 12, 2007

I'm a CopyWrite guy as well. It's a bit more feature rich than WriteRoom, and handles rich text instead of plain text.

Ulysses would be pretty cool were it a buttload cheaper. Even with the educational price, it's US$65, compared to CopyWrite's $30.

das_2099, how on earth is that comparable to WriteRoom or CopyWrite?!
posted by SansPoint at 7:51 AM on January 12, 2007

DarkRoom is free, btw.
posted by empath at 7:52 AM on January 12, 2007

I was looking at (and paid) educational pricing. $65 vs $30 is comparable in my mind, just because of the feature add....but looking back over regular pricing, yeah, not comparable at all, sorry.

I do like it more though :)
posted by das_2099 at 7:54 AM on January 12, 2007

oooooh copywrite is nice though...and cheaper. If I hadn't already bought Ulysses, I would suggest giving them both a download and try...i bet CopyWrite would match most of the features (if not the feel/usage of them..Ulysses notes structure/tabbed docs thing is pretty cool)
posted by das_2099 at 7:55 AM on January 12, 2007

I remember using 'ole MS-DOS EDIT, but frankly realtime spellcheck for text and syntax highlighting and auto complete for code has really spoiled me.
posted by delmoi at 7:55 AM on January 12, 2007

Seems like this would be a nice hack to bolt onto gvim for those of us on un-blessed platforms. I use a bigass fullscreened vim for any intensive writing anyway, but these do look a bit/lot classier.
posted by Skorgu at 8:06 AM on January 12, 2007

BlockWriter:

At its heart, Blockwriter is a crippled text editor. What makes it like a typewriter is that it regards every character you type into it as basically ‘committed’ and permanent. Rather than allowing the flexibility of cost-free deletions and insertions — and the attendant temptation to continually massage text beyond usefulness — this application only allows you to continue typing forward.

To remove a word you’ve already committed, you can use the back button to actually strike-out text — with x’s, dashes or any character you’d like. It’s as simple as it was on a manual typewriter: you’re just ‘physically’ creating a second character impression over an existing one.

This makes for a messy presentation, but I think it’s that messiness that will discourage people from wasting time on refinements and will encourage them to move on to the next idea.

posted by Armitage Shanks at 8:07 AM on January 12, 2007 [1 favorite]

I write tales with brave Ulysses but I prefer the WriteRoom with black curtains.
posted by hal9k at 8:08 AM on January 12, 2007 [4 favorites]

qwerty swlabr shrdlu
posted by Armitage Shanks at 8:09 AM on January 12, 2007

hal9k, you are deep baby. I've been waiting so long, to be where I'm going, in the sunshine of your lu-u-u-u-uuh-u-u-u-uhh-u-u-u-uuuv.
posted by Mister_A at 8:13 AM on January 12, 2007

COLEMAK

And why not just maximize vi?
posted by cortex at 8:14 AM on January 12, 2007

Oh thank you...thank you....brillant!!
Four mother-effin' stars!! ****

When I first got a computer in 1997 one of the first things I did was try and emulate the DOS Pine email client I'd been using at work, A plain green text on a dark terminal- like screen. Simple, functional, soothing on the eyes, no visual noise. A good screen to do some good thinking and writing in front of . Perfect. I used it as a word processor and I did some work I was really proud of on it.

So I fiannly get a swank new home PC (a Micron with all the bells and whistles...no expense spare. I'd waited long enough and did not want to deal with a BS PC). Oh how I tried to get Word to do that. I mean how friggin' hard could it be to get a plain dark screen with text on it. Whoa...what a major Mother-effin' pain in the ass and I had to jump through hoops, you have to create a table on the page and change the background color and woe unto you if you just want to cut and paste some text somewhere else. So I gave up dammit...and now I've come back to the promised land Hallelujah. I didn't realize there were others out there who felt this way....We should start a Yahoo club.
posted by Skygazer at 8:18 AM on January 12, 2007

I started using Backdrop for the Mac recently. It blanks everything out (change the default from white to black) and you have to switch apps to have one pop "above" the backdrop, so you can single-task when you need to.
posted by mathowie at 8:25 AM on January 12, 2007

I'm still using WriteRoom 1.0, because its main feature (other than the brilliance of fullscreen writing) is that you never saved anything. It kept its own little documents in its own little folder and never bothered you with saving here or there; you never had to keep up with anything. Just open WriteRoom, and everything you'd been working on popped right back up.

I used it to keep track of articles/emails/posts I needed to get done, sort of like sticky notes that expanded into a writing space when I needed them.

WR 2.0 sacrificed that ease for the ability to edit RTF; 1.0 was just plain text. I'm going to stick with 1.0.

But yes, what an abfab program!
posted by ancientgower at 8:27 AM on January 12, 2007

I've been scripting quite a lot of late and I use DarkRoom for getting a lot of the rough ideas down. It's handy, but the lack of formatting options doesn't help me much at all when it comes time to actually get things in a readable-for-the-artist order.

Does anyone know of an inexpensive full-screen editor that'll allow me to have formatting options (such as paragraph sizes, etc) maybe using Macros to set indents and such on the fly? Part of me just wants to go install an ancient version of Word...
posted by beaucoupkevin at 8:28 AM on January 12, 2007

This will work for my upcoming movie called "The May Tricks," where my character Neil is a computer hacker and when he's asleep a message comes up on his computer in a green font on a black background that says "WAKE UP, NEIL, FOLLOW A RABIT." AND I THINK I'LL USE THIS SOFTWARE FOR THAT PART.
posted by Milkman Dan at 8:31 AM on January 12, 2007 [2 favorites]

I mean, this looks like it will work very well for entering into an author-appropriate trance while writing great literature.

Incidentally, speaking of text-only things, does anybody recall the web tool that lets your browser look like a text editor?
posted by Milkman Dan at 8:35 AM on January 12, 2007

Thank you very much for the link. I'm going to have to try this out.

As someone who cut his teeth on WP 5.1, I can say that it is only through sheer self-discipline and bizarre social engineering with other writers (where the writers cannot leave until they've done their work) that I've managed to write anything at all (and specifically I speak of Microsoft Word here). Yes, there's that full-screen mode in Word. But it simply doesn't feel right. Particularly when I am aware of the distractions that lie beyond the window. And particularly when the window can be easily disabled through one keystroke or one can easily Alt-Tab between windows. This is probably why I do a lot of rewriting by hand because there is absolutely nothing distracting that trusty conduit between the text and my brain. (This was the only way I could finish a large project a few years ago: taking the whole damn thing on paper with me into a cafe, sans laptop, and working on it for hours by pen.)

I am not certain if these two programs entirely solve the problem, unless it's incredibly difficult to escape from the text editor and retreat to the other windows. But there's something to be said about the psychological differences between working with a word processing program that you must call up from a command line and one that can be fired up from a shortcut. I can only speak for myself here, but I wonder if other writers have seen the focus of their writing shift because of these software environmental conditions. MeFites who are interested in this kind of subject might want to read Richard Powers' essay on how the National Book Award winning writer (a very articulate man indeed) switched entirely to speech recognition for his writing output:

What could be less conducive to thought’s cadences than stopping every time your short-term memory fills to pass those large-scale musical phrases through your fingers, one tedious letter at a time? You’d be hard-pressed to invent a greater barrier to cognitive flow. The 130-year-old qwerty keyboard may even have been designed to slow fingers and prevent key jamming. We compose on keys the way dogs walk on two legs. However good we get, the act will always be a little freakish.

I also wonder if there's something inevitably lost in the transition from typewriter to computer. Yes, typing out stuff was a pain in the ass in the analog days. But it was also a pain in the ass to strike out a section with whiteout. Nevertheless, this was good for wishy-washy writers who sometimes have to revert back to previous ideas in an effort to pursue them again. These days, if it's deleted (and not, say, copied to another text file), it's gone. Which is why I'm sometimes a slow writer. It takes some work to keep track of the various textual fragments. One, of course, develops a more authoritative voice after a while. But these technological distinctions do make me wonder about how a writer's consciousness develops with the tools given to her.
posted by ed at 8:37 AM on January 12, 2007 [1 favorite]

I like the sentiment of WriteRoom but lost interest when the Edit in WriteRoom input plugin stopped working. This plugin is supposed to permit editing any Cocoa text input box in a new WriteRoom window.

As it is, I find the cognitive load of having different editors for every different task to often be a bit much. Since I need aquamacs for hacking lisp, python, and LaTeX, I tend to use aquamacs for my first-draft writing as well.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 8:38 AM on January 12, 2007

Oh, NOW you think its all cool and shit. Fuck you.
- Doogie
posted by hal9k at 8:42 AM on January 12, 2007 [5 favorites]

This is probably going to make me unpopular but i really, really like what Microsoft have done with Word 2007. All the crap is still there, but it's nicely kept out of the way.
posted by Artw at 8:47 AM on January 12, 2007 [2 favorites]

Real men use Emacs.
posted by christopher.taylor at 8:54 AM on January 12, 2007 [1 favorite]

In a related vein, my Creative Writing professor used to have us do (a quite common) exercise where we turned off the monitor on our computers and did our writing, so we would not be tempted to edit as we wrote, not even for spelling.

It seems like such a simple thing, but it is fantastically hard to unlearn edit-as-you-go.

My Rhetoric professor preached incessantly of the importance and value of post-composing editing. I think she went as far as saying writing is not actually a skill in itself, it is worthless without the editing and revision that gives a work its value.

But dammit it is hard to write first and edit later, at least for me, even after a few years of purposeful effort towards that ideal.

I figure both professors would be horrified at most of my writing today. I blame the corporate world, where creativity, levity, wit, and style are not only detested but punished. The first time someone tells you on the job, in complete seriousness, to "stop using such big words", that's the day everything changes; you begin viewing your "fellow man" with a different shade of skepticism, and you start to die a little each paycheck.
posted by Ynoxas at 8:55 AM on January 12, 2007 [4 favorites]

ed. I found speech recognition to be more awkward than using a keyboard, or even using a typewriter. (And sometimes I think I'm one of the last people in the world who actually appreciate the aesthetic value of using a good typewriter. Using a good typewriter is like using a good pen.) But then again, I wasn't one for white-out, preferring a rough and dirty draft with proofreading marks, and using white-out only for the rare error on the final draft.

There was actually a great study done in the early days of word processors that found word processors were not necessarily faster for business correspondence, or produced more error-free copy. Typewriter users tended to work with a two-draft process. Word processor users spent more more time at the keyboard fiddling with nuances of word choice. The error rate was similar between the two, but involved different types of errors. Typewriter users had more letter transpositions, double letters and dropped letters. Word processor users had more problems with redundant and repeated phrases.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 9:00 AM on January 12, 2007 [2 favorites]

@christopher.taylor

Only people with seven fingers on each hand use Emacs.
Everyone else uses VI.
posted by leapfrog at 9:05 AM on January 12, 2007

KirkJobSluder writes "Word processor users had more problems with redundant and repeated phrases."

I can see that, I often end up doing a complete rewrite because I've massaged a piece of text into incomprehensibility.
posted by Mitheral at 9:15 AM on January 12, 2007

Real men who don't suffer from self-loathing use Emacs.
posted by christopher.taylor at 10:54 AM CST on January 12

Fixed.

Actually, I find the emacs/vi thing to be amusing, having left both behind long ago. At the time, for my menial needs, I considered emacs to be much more useful.
posted by Ynoxas at 9:31 AM on January 12, 2007

I have used emacs/vi/pico/text edit/textmate/notepad/notepad2, visual studio, ed, and teh list goes on and on.

WriteRoom is cool. It does let me concentrate like crazy when I have to pound out something that is in my head. I wish it would use strikethru instead of delete for writing, though.
posted by YoBananaBoy at 9:35 AM on January 12, 2007

oooh, editor fight, editor fight! let me mention UltraEdit, then. the most recent version includes a nicely integrated telnet/ssh client as well as file transfer. feature creep, no doubt, but useful.
(and if I needed to pretend I was working in DisplayWrite or somesuch, it takes about 15 seconds to go full screen, green on black, etc.)
posted by Dr. Boom at 9:43 AM on January 12, 2007

"The best writing is rewriting." - E.B. White

True enough. But it seems to me that overwriting too quickly can be just as bad (I'm talking like 20 drafts in the same day here). It can over cook into a mushy porridge. Writing needs a chance to ferment a bit, before you know if it has a decent shelf life. Word processors, as some have mentioned, condition one to go back and make changes on the fly when what's really important is to plow ahead guns blazing on nailing down that idea and keeping the prose pulsing.
Ed: ...the National Book Award winning writer [] switched entirely to speech recognition for his writing output

I've wanted to do this for a while. Nothing is going to catch the natural feel of dialogue like that right? But it seems like the technology is dodgy and the best in the field Dragon ain't so hot and comes with a $100 price tag, which I'm loathe to pay. Does anyone have experience with it.
posted by Skygazer at 9:50 AM on January 12, 2007

Scrivener, which can be downloaded from this thread, is my application of choice for creative writing, and it comes with a full screen mode that I quite like. Like Ulysses and Copywrite, it offers a lot of tools for keeping track of all the various things that go into a book, without getting in your face about methods, character sheets, and so on. Quite flexible. I use it for technical writing as well as creative.

My favourite feature is its built-in MultiMarkdown support. With a little Perl and a little XSLT, you can export nearly anything.

Currently still in beta, but it is a pretty final beta that, in my experience with it, is far more stable and feature complete that most version 2 sharewares.
posted by AmberV at 9:55 AM on January 12, 2007

Huh. I'll have to try out some new text-editors. I've just been using word, but without any serious problems. I don't find anything on the computer as distracting as my cat. In terms of writing/editing I just type out my thoughts, print them and then edit from the printed sheet to the word processor. While I found this highly effective, I did catch some guff from a former manager who insisted his was a 'paperless office.'
posted by elwoodwiles at 9:59 AM on January 12, 2007

My wife used Dragon to transcribe the many hours of recorded audio that informed her doctoral thesis. In her experience it was a great tool once calibrated to her voice. (she'd listen to an interview with headphones on, and repeat it back to the mic aloud). So there's a limitation; it wasn't able to transcribe playback of multiple voices directly. That said, the scheme that she arrived at saved her a lot of time in the end. She didn't use it to write her thesis, for what that's worth. It was a more useful tool for getting known text down, rather than new composition. Probably worth noting that this was in 2001. I'd be surprised if the software hasn't improved since then.
posted by Dr. Boom at 10:00 AM on January 12, 2007

And sometimes I think I'm one of the last people in the world who actually appreciate the aesthetic value of using a good typewriter. Using a good typewriter is like using a good pen.

I still have four of them! Three in usable condition and an Olympia SM-9 in nearly flawless condition. I go back and forth between that one and the Olivetti Lettera 35l. Both are beautiful, the culmination in decades of refinement and engineering.
posted by AmberV at 10:01 AM on January 12, 2007 [1 favorite]

@Skygazer: But it seems like the technology is dodgy and the best in the field Dragon ain't so hot and comes with a $100 price tag, which I'm loathe to pay. Does anyone have experience with it.

I had to use Dragon for about a year due to a really nasty bout of RSI. I would not say that it's easier to use than typing, unless you have some temporary or chronic disability that prevents typing. But other people have had very different experiences.

The two things I found with it is that it understands entire sentences much better than it understands individual words. So I had to learn to look at something other than the screen or dictate from notes. In terms of workflow it's much better to dictate dirty and ugly copy with lots of mistakes and correct later. Also, I found it sensitive to voice stress so if you get angry/irritated at its error rate, the error rate increases.

@leapfrog: The two things that switched me over to emacs from vim were SLIME and auctex. But I must admit that I can't stand excessive key-chording so I tend to do everything from the pull-down menu or by function name. (M-x ispell-buffer for example).
posted by KirkJobSluder at 10:21 AM on January 12, 2007

leapfrog, I've spoken on the vi/emacs debate before here on MeFi. I still stand by that post.

Of course, nowadays I find myself using jed, but I do use it with emacs emulation so I'm not a complete traitor to my team.
posted by quin at 10:27 AM on January 12, 2007

I like pens.
posted by briank at 10:30 AM on January 12, 2007

Mellel, which I think is the best word processor since WordPerfect Mac 3.5 offers full screen writing that works very well. I write pretty much everything in Mellel or Textmate. TextMate + MegaZoomer gives you a full screen interface. MegaZoomer is a SIMBL plugin that makes any Cocoa application go fullscreen with a keystroke. It's brilliant and I use it all the time.

Tufte apparently thinks that fullscreen is bad. I question his sanity as fullscreen + Quicksilver is the shit: I've never worked so well and so quickly. I can go hours without touching the mouse.

Along those same lines, and referring to Richard Powers. I think he's over-generalizing. He wrote, in Galatia 2.2, that he could barely type at 30-something.... I'm thinking that might be why he prefers using dictation software. I can type very fast, keeping my eyes on the screen and my feeling is that any writer that has been able to touch type for more than a couple of years is almost certainly going to be able to totally overcome any of the issues he brings up. I call it rationalization. I actually find it much easier to write poetry direct to screen: I fall into a trance almost and (with the aid of textmate) I have a bagillion macros and shortcuts that let me mark lines and words and track revisions without every moving my hands from the home row or interrupting my train of thought. I think that dictation would be the least desiarable route... not to mention that he talks about editing with the PEN?! Ugh.
posted by n9 at 10:34 AM on January 12, 2007

I prefer the same idea when writing anything longer than an email. It's really not hard to do in MS Word though.

Tool > Options > General > Blue Background

View > View Fullscreen

Hide the Taskbar, disconnect from the intarwebs = insta-zen
posted by Andrew Brinton at 10:39 AM on January 12, 2007 [1 favorite]

Thanks AmberV. Scrivener looks nice. It's setup just the way I like, except for the corkboard being restricted to a grid layout. For some reason Full Screen isn't working on the beta I've got. Does it look as ugly as they show for Scrivener Gold (scroll to bottom)?

Right now, I just use TextWrangler (all plain text) and do all my organizing in the file system. Scrivener looks like it will help a lot.
posted by effwerd at 11:04 AM on January 12, 2007

I still have four of them! Three in usable condition and an Olympia SM-9 in nearly flawless condition.

I keep, in my office at a software company, a nearly-mint Hermes 3000 typewriter. It's fascinating to see the reactions of visitors. Those younger than myself regard it as they would a stock ticker in a bell jar; "huh. That's neat." Those older than myself fly into retellings of favorite typewriters or monumentally difficult writings undertaken with a similar machine and a bottle of wite-out or better yet, a circular eraser with a brush.
posted by Pliskie at 11:32 AM on January 12, 2007

Want an easier way to be 'distraction free' without getting another text editor?

Close your other applications.
posted by triolus at 11:40 AM on January 12, 2007

This is pretty tangential, as it's not a pared down text editor. But it's free, and it's what I use for writing stories. For windows only, and free as in beer, yWriter

Downsides : no italics or bolds
Upsides : Focuses your novel writing. Really easy to move around scenes and chapters. Free.
posted by eurasian at 11:45 AM on January 12, 2007

Close your other applications.

Also: Unplug the internet.
posted by Artw at 12:00 PM on January 12, 2007

This is probably going to make me unpopular but i really, really like what Microsoft have done with Word 2007. All the crap is still there, but it's nicely kept out of the way.

What the fuck? The first thing I said to myself when I opened Word 2007 (and really, any of the 2007 apps), was "Jesus fucking christ, why the hell are the menu items taking up half of the goddamn screen?!"
posted by odinsdream at 12:38 PM on January 12, 2007

You must have a very small screen, the "ribbon" is about 120px high. I think all the toolbars and crap at the top of Word 2003 might have been taller than that, and you could never find anything in it anywya - at least the ribbon is nicely orgnaised and once you get used to it being there you don't have to think about it much.
posted by Artw at 12:50 PM on January 12, 2007 [1 favorite]

JDarkRoom. (donation-ware)
posted by brundlefly at 1:19 PM on January 12, 2007

Sheesh, I used to write shareware full-screen text editors back in the 80s. The hardest part was when you run out of memory and need to swap buffer space to disk.

My favorite was an editor that came with Microsoft C (1985?) called "medit" or simply "m" it really was amazing. In fact it should still work on machines today (standalone exe) but it's (copyright) so it sadly died when Microsoft C went to a GUI environment.
posted by stbalbach at 2:08 PM on January 12, 2007

If were talking code, rather than prose, I really miss Allaire Homesite. The advanced search & replace features in particular were amazing.

Of couses Allaire got merged into Macromedia and homesite sort-of-kind-of git merged into Dreamweaver, but it's really not the same.
posted by Artw at 3:18 PM on January 12, 2007

Aside from the allure of green on black... eh. SciTe is still my preferred text editor.

You can emulate green on black and even the save on close behavior by setting properties in SciTEGlobal.properties. And for the techies, you can set aside special formatting based on file extension.
posted by linux at 3:33 PM on January 12, 2007

open word processor, go to 'view', press 'full screen'

problem solved
posted by 0bvious at 4:54 PM on January 12, 2007

Ctrl-Alt-F1
vim
posted by flabdablet at 6:13 PM on January 12, 2007

If were talking code, rather than prose, I really miss Allaire Homesite.

I still use it daily. I've tried switching to other, newer applications, but nothing really meets the unique mix of simplicity and power that Homesite has. That or I'm just way too used to it.

When I'm on a shell though, it's VIM all the way. Emacs is whack.
posted by o0o0o at 10:09 PM on January 12, 2007

My name is 235w103, and I have a problem.
I've tried to start this college semester by taking all of my notes on my laptop. But...I'm easily distracted. As soon as some...some PEER of mine starts blathering on about what THEY think, I tune out, start checking email, Metafilter, playing solitare... I know I need to pay attention and take better notes, but it's so HARD.
Thanks so much for this post. As an experiment, I used WriteRoom for all of my notes today, and actually managed not to be distracted. Thanks, empath and WriteRoom- for helping me help MYSELF.
posted by 235w103 at 10:29 PM on January 12, 2007

Pretty cool, but I already skinned OOo to look about the same. Gives me a retro feeling I like. Black screen. Green text. Terminal font. Kind of fun.
posted by rougy at 10:56 PM on January 12, 2007

o0o0o : When I'm on a shell though, it's VIM all the way. Emacs is whack.

[argument with my better half]

Her: VI is better.
Me: Why?
Her: Because it starts in a non-editable mode. I can't accidentally modify the document that I'm looking at.
Me: Is that a common problem? Because I just use 'less' when I want a read-only mode. And if I do find myself in emacs/ jed I can always just ctrl-x ctrl-c to not make any changes. Are you that afraid that you might slip and hit a key that you are too incompetent to correct?
Her: Yeah, well sleep on the sofa tonight, fucker.

And thus, I win and I lose.

[A made up exchange. We don't argue about emacs and vi anymore. We save our passion for cats vs. dogs. And Birds. And rabbits. And rats, chameleons, geckos, and the big fucking tortoise that will outlive us both. Ours is an interesting house.]
posted by quin at 11:38 PM on January 12, 2007

Darkroom: Now I can make my own live action Strong Bad e-mails! Yes!
posted by Cyclopsis Raptor at 12:07 AM on January 13, 2007

I use VI (vim, really) because as a programmer I find myself in those weird situations where I have to search for huge phrases and replace them with other huge phrases, sometimes with conditionals on both ends. VI offers me ways to do that which are really, really similar to all the programming languages I work in. That's all there is to it.

I have written fiction and poetry in vim and wished there were easier ways to deal with formatting. But frankly, all the easier ways have pretty much sucked as far as I can tell.

(I do like UltraEdit a lot, but I can't afford the Apple hardware tax)
posted by lumpenprole at 12:53 AM on January 13, 2007

Your favorite text editor sucks.

I've been using PSPad text editor for all my programming stuff. I dig it so much that when I went all linux, I just set it up and ran it under Wine. Which is does, no problem. (Well... some problems, but yeah... you know. It's way better than gedit.)

Anyway, PSPad is not spectacular, but it's got a lotta really nice features for javascript/html/php/perl-type projects, as long as you prefer the more stripped down text editor approach to that of a fullblown IDE, like eclipse. It's kinda boring, but I really like multi file search 'n' replace, code highlighting, indentation, little tools to find rgb colors and ascii equivalents, that kinda thing. The little things that help get work done.
posted by ph00dz at 12:07 PM on January 13, 2007

I started off with WriteRoom but ended up switching to Scrivener. The full-screen mode works a lot better. My favorite feature is the nifty slide-up/auto-hide panel that gives you control over font-size, page width, and transparency, along with writing stats. The version to try is the latest beta linked off the forums.
posted by fubar at 2:31 PM on January 13, 2007

Thanks for this post, empath. And all contributors, really, for the comparisons.

Never thought I'd be coming back to this post after perusing it briefly, till I realized I what a cool thing a black background with green type would 'feel' like in a darkened room. Yummy. Perfect.

I hate you because now I'll have to upgrade to OS 8.4 after all. Dang./
posted by alicesshoe at 4:48 PM on January 14, 2007

oops, did I write 8.4¿ Shocking.

heh, I meant 10.4. of course.
posted by alicesshoe at 4:49 PM on January 14, 2007