If you were a technology kind of guy, especially one that writes about technology for writers, you’d be looking for feature-rich programs that would help writers write. Programs that had twenty gizmos and thirty widgets and lots of drop down menus.
That would give you a lot of things to try out and then write about in a review.
But, there are a fair number of us who go the other route: simple, minimalist, and very little between what we’re thinking about and what we’re writing. Not tons of features. Not yet another whiz-bang tweak of an obscure command that might get used once every twenty books.
There are such programs out there.
Dark Room is one of them. From the web site:
Dark Room is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, Dark Room is just about you and your text.
Basically, Dark Room is a clone of the original WriteRoom that is an OS X (tiger) exclusive application. It is a child of necessity, as there were no viable alternatives in Windows to produce the same behavior. Sure, you can kind of emulate the behavior by jumping through a bunch of hoops in Word/Writer, but it isn’t the same. Also, you can do something similar in emacs, but who wants to learn a bunch of obscure keyboard shortcuts?
The goal of the project is to capture the essence of WriteRoom, while keeping it simple and just as free.
Instead of lots of menus and toolbars, Dark Room has a few keyboard shortcuts that do the work for you. For example, Control+Z equals undo.
The minimalist nature of the program is shown in the screenshot on this post.
If you’re looking for something simple to write your words with on a computer, Dark Room for Windows could be your program.
Scot
[tags]blogging, finding-your-voice, technology-for-writers, ten-keyboards, writing-tools, dark-room, word-processor[/tags]
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