WriteRoom

WriteRoom has been getting a fair amount of attention recently, and, after using it for a fortnight, I’d say it deserves it.

WriteRoom’s key feature is that it doesn’t really have any features¹, it just turns your computer into a screen for writing on, with no distractions². You don’t have to think about anything but writing. Not even saving: WriteRoom automatically saves your work whenever you stop typing for five seconds, and when you open the applications all your ‘rooms’ appear just as they were when you last quit. (That’s not to say that all your data is trapped inside the application: you can export to plain text files when a piece of writing is finished.)

Managing multiple ‘rooms’ is simple too, with each open document assigned a command key—Command+1, Command+2, and so on depending on the order the documents were opened—which means you can quickly switch between notes and a draft. You can also, of course, cycle between documents with the standard Command+`.

In it’s raw state, WriteRoom is great for getting down ideas quickly, or using in place of cramped text fields on the web, but with the help of a few of Services and utilities, I’m so taken with this full-screen, distraction-free writing environment that I’ve been using it for everything—reviews and features, longer emails, weblog entries and comments, the lot.

If you want to do the same, the following will come in handy:

• WordServices will give you a word count, among other things.
• Following this tip switches the spellling checker to English (as opposed to American English).
• HumaneText converts text written with the Markdown syntax to XHTML.
• ServiceScrubber lets you assign command key combinations to the above Services, as well as WriteRoom’s inbuilt ‘Send Selected Text To WriteRoom’ Service.
• Jumpcut gives you control over the Clipboard.

With all that in place, for my needs at least, WriteRoom is the perfect application for writing.

Update: Here’s a good piece on WriteRoom and stripped-down user interfaces

1. The preferences let you set font size and colour, background colour, and specify page width, height and margins. That’s it. ↩

2. Here’s a screengrab of this post being written in WriteRoom. (Please excuse the unholy admixture of XHTML and Markdown.)↩

Posted at 12pm on 13/07/06 by Jack Mottram to the mac category.
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Tags: applications, mac, minimalism, writing