Recently, it seems that I’ve been bitten by the writing bug once more – not that you’d know from the dearth of posts or the cliched metaphor in this very sentence.  Be that as it may, I find myself writing once more, and often prefer a computer to pen and paper as I am given to editing in place.   It’s just my way.

I’ve been looking at editors geared to little distraction for a while and considered the obvious – the obvious to me – such as lyx and vim but neither seemed to turn my Ubuntu running EeePC 701 into the full screen editor / typewriter emulator I was looking for.  I remembered a recent Slashdot thread – recent being almost a year ago(!) – inspired by a New York Times article discussing this very problem.  Amongst the recommendations was a program called Writeroom, a stripped down full screen editor presented in green on black glory. Writeroom, however, is an OS/X program, which meant I was still without a solution.

Apparently, in the time between that story and my latest bout of scrivenery inclinations, an enterprising and kind soul released an open source Python based clone: PyRoom.  Even better, he maintains Fedora and Ubuntu repositories, sparing me from the annoying maintenance involved with tarballed binaries.  I’m just putting the program through its paces, but it looks to be precisely what I was looking for – a simple full screen keyboard oriented writing implement designed to minimize  distractions and maximize writing.

If you have been looking for a solution to the same problem, it is worth the few minutes it takes to add the repo and install.

This entry was posted on ‍‍כ״ט כסלו ה׳ תשס״ט - Friday, December 26th, 2008 at 00:29 and is filed under incidental, plagarism, software, tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.