Mostly Harmless

I’m trying out WriteRoom, right now. It’s a no-frills text editor for Mac OS X. The primary feature is that you can run the editing window in full screen and hide everything else, e.g. the Desktop, menu bar, Dock, clock, WiFi meter, CPU meter, network meter, memory meter, battery status, script menu, other applications and browser windows, etc.

In other words: it’s a blank screen with a blinking cursor.

It has spell checking (as you type), a few basic editing commands and no font formatting other than typeface, color, and size. You can also pick the page and background colors and that’s about it.

Even the scroll bar fades out when the mouse isn’t over it.

Nothing but text: Pre-GUI caveman style.

You can still edit with the mouse, however. Cut & paste. Search and replace. With a text-only screen all the usual distractions are out of sight but still there if you need them, a mere application switch away. Since I can’t see those other windows they’re not using any of my brain power, it’s very tranquil.
A bonus on the blogging front is that I don’t have to use that tiny little edit window that Movable Type gives me. I’ll just paste this text when I’m done. (I could probably upload my post from here with a plug-in or something, but cut & paste is fine…)

[Speaking of cutting and pasting, PopCopy is the multi-clipboard manager that works exactly like a clipboard manager should. It stays out of the way until needed and then it's easy to cycle through items to see what's going to be pasted.]

WriteRoom supports multiple documents which can be independently zoomed to full screen. Right now I’ve got four full-screen “rooms” open that I can cycle through with a simple keystroke (command-`) — I can think of them merely as blobs of information, not as files in a directory on a hard drive that need to be keep track of. Just open a window and start typing.

A side effect of full-screen mode is that when I’ve switched to another application I can get back by clicking just about anywhere (since it obscures the Desktop). Effectively the background becomes a handy text editor for taking notes; this is great because 95% of the time when I suddenly have to write down something during a phone call or voicemail I will reach for my keyboard instead of a pen. If I leave a “notes room” open I’ll have something even more convenient than my typical method of typing into a random terminal window.