benjarvis.org

My Varied and Torrid Love Affairs with Text Editors.

I have always been a writer. I had my own alphabet when I was a toddler and I participated in the Young Authors book contests in elementary school. I wrote poetry in junior and senior high school. Later on I edited a zine and now I blog. Through all of this I have maintained a fascination with all the trappings of writing. I love stationary, pens, envelopes, notebooks and pads. It’s only natural that this fascination and obsession would carry over into one of my other obsessions: computers.

In the beginning (for me) there was WordPerfect. Not the bloated GUI, WYSIWYG program that you see these days. No, real WordPerfect. WordPerfect for DOS. What you got was what you needed: a blue screen and a blinking white cursor. That’s it. No icons or menus (they were hidden behind a hot key), just sheer unadulterated text. You could get some writing done. The old PCs didn’t multi-task. They didn’t play music. If you wanted it to type, that was all it was going to do. It was simple and clean.

As time went on GUIs replaced the blinking cursor and the work space tried hard to mimic actual paper and typesetting. The problem with this (though I didn’t know it at the time) is that choosing fonts and designing layout is not writing. It’s typesetting. Writers write. You write and you write and you write. When the writing is done, you edit. You edit and proofread and rewrite and edit some more. First, second, third, forth drafts; it goes on as long as it takes. When all this is done, if you need to print it to paper or a paper like distribution (like a PDF or website) then you worry about typesetting and justification. That’s when the bolding and italics matter. And the writer (in most professional settings) doesn’t even do it!

I thought that Word for Windows would make my writing better because of all of it’s bells and whistles. It had an assistant and a spell checker (okay, spell checkers are nice). You could see what your novel would look like while you were typing it! And you know what? It did nothing to make me a better writer.

Eventually I got tired of pirating Word and switched to OpenOffice because I knew that I didn’t need half the features of Word. I needed a word processor for resumes and what the hell, maybe I could get some writing done.

Many a resume got written, but not so much fiction. Then I started dabbling in Linux and I found myself using Nano, a command line text editor that did little more than open, save, search and replace. I found myself enjoying writing in such a simple environment. Under Windows I started writing in Notepad. Then EditPlus. Now a days I use gedit in Linux and notepad in Windows, but that may change.

Enter Dark Room. Dark Room is a Windows clone of an OS X program called WriteRoom. Basically the theme of these programs is a full screen text editor like my old lover WordPerfect for DOS. It replaces your desktop with a black screen and a green cursor (of course you can change the colors to whatever you want). Ctrl-S saves and Ctrl-Q quits. ESC will shrink it down to a window and you can use the mouse, but the hot keys are where it’s at.

Give it a shot, free yourself of buttons and icons.

EDIT: There’s also a similar app in Linux called PyRoom. I love it on Ubuntu!