#WRITEROOM WINDOWS FULL#
#WRITEROOM WINDOWS FREE#

#WRITEROOM WINDOWS FULL#

The latest versions of Microsoft Word, for instance, offer a view called Focus View that opens your writing palette full screen and hides all menus and scroll bars. Happily, your current word processor may already have a screening mode that will hide the menus and icons of other programs so that what you see resembles a blank sheet in a typewriter. The most obvious way to avoid distraction is to screen it out, like a blackout curtain in Oslo used to screen out the midnight sun at midsummer. What we need is help in blocking out distractions.

Most of us find our computing devices distracting. The next thing you know, your writing session is over and your time has been frittered away by addictive, fun, but nonproductive pursuits. Or an alert informs you that there’s a fresh New York Times crossword puzzle waiting in your crossword app. You only just begin writing and achieve a little momentum when your mind decides to take a quick email break, or see what’s new on Facebook, or dash off a tweet. Let’s face it: desktop, laptop, and tablet computers can be distracting. Thoreau, Walden iA Writer’s focus mode on iPad. The WriteRoom wiki lists a few other apps in this category, and I'm pretty sure WriteRoom 1.0 is still available as a freeware app if you don't want or need the frills.Distraction-Free Editors by Gene Wilburn TOOL REVIEW || updated If you're in the market, I'd suggest giving both apps a try, as they both have their own feel and features.

#WRITEROOM WINDOWS FREE#

MyTexts is available as a free trial, and can be purchased for 12 Euro (about $17US), making it slightly cheaper than WriteRoom ( also downloadable as a free trial). Like WriteRoom, myTexts is a Cocoa application and its editing area is fully-compatible with System Services, the OS X spell-checker and third party applications such as SpellCatcher X. There aren't a lot more features, but everything is keyboard-navigable and quite well-polished, especially for such a young application. The sidebar automatically hides and can be triggered with a mouse-over, or you can disable the mouse trigger and call it only with a keyboard shortcut. Notes for the current document can also be popped up in a floating, always-on-top window which you can quickly paste to from other applications and which dims when not active. There's a sidebar containing your document list, as well as notes and tags for the current document. Tags assigned in the app are written to exported documents as OpenMeta tags, making Spotlight searching more efficient, if you're a 'tag' kind of user.įonts and colors are customizable, although you only get two choices (shades of grey) for the background. Documents can be exported in a variety of formats, ranging from plain text files (.txt) to Word documents (.doc). Your entire document library can be searched, including the title, full text, document notes and user-assigned tags. myTexts adds some great touches to the idea.įirst, myTexts uses a database to store your documents, with auto-save and auto-backup. The most popular of the comparable applications would be WriteRoom, which is in active development and, I believe, the original app in this category. This genre of apps basically time-warps you back to the days of full-screen, menu-free, plain text word processing. It's another 'distraction-free writing' app with some nice touches and a reasonable price tag.

MyTexts, a new app from MOApp, caught my attention recently.

Writeroom windows