![[calligraphy]](http://wearehugh.com/public/2007/01/calligraphy.jpg)
I’ve been peripherally following the latest fad of full-screen “writing-focused” text editors. Here’s what I’ve learned so far: in the beginning, there was WriteRoom (Mac OS X, $24.95). WriteRoom is “just about you and your text.” WriteRoom begat DarkRoom (Windows + .NET, $0), which is also “just about you and your text” but requires a 22 MB runtime environment. DarkRoom begat JDarkRoom (Java, $0), which is just about you, your text, and somebody else’s multi-megabyte runtime environment. (Depending on your platform, it may be as small as 13 MB, which is what the kids these days would call “an improvement.”)
No doubt JDarkRoom will beget something even sillier, like PalmDarkRoom (”just you and your graffiti”), or iPodRoom (”just you, your text, and your scroll wheel”), or WiiDarkRoom (”just you, your text, and the incessant flicking of your wrist”). It’s like a Biblical lineage of silliness.
Here’s the basic problem: you’re writing a text editor. Stop doing that. It’s 2007. Saying to yourself “I’m gonna build my own text editor” is as silly as saying “I’m gonna build my own build system” or “I’m gonna build my own amusement park.” Blackjack and hookers and all that. Writing a great text editor is insanely difficult. There is a certain class of software that sounds easy but is actually insanely difficult. I call it “garden path software.” If I ever start a software company, I’ll name it “Garden Path Software,” but until then, just stop.
Reading the change logs of these programs is like traveling back in time. Way back. Latest changes in JDarkRoom 8: Undo / Redo. Seriously. Version 8, and they now support undo. No offense, but what the fuck?
I guess the part I don’t understand is the target audience. Who is so serious about writing that they need a full-screen editor, but so unserious that they don’t have a favorite editor already? I’ve published two full-length books and posted a hell of a lot more than that, and you can pry my text editor from my cold dead hands. I’m not even going to mention which one it is; it doesn’t matter. Switching to a new one would be a frustrating and painful experience that would get in the way of my writing for weeks, maybe months.
All right, I think I’ve got it. (Write|J?Dark)Room is the SUV of editors. Remember when SUVs were new, and they were actually advertised as off-road vehicles? At some point the auto makers realized that no one was taking them off-road, and they switched to playing up their safety instead (which turned out to be just as much a fantasy as the off-road thing, but hey, it’s advertising). I think that’s what’s going on here. These programs aren’t for serious writers at all. They’re for the writer’s equivalent of script kiddies — people who want to go to Starbucks and pick up chicks with their MacBooks and their iPods and their glowing full-screen text editors.
No doubt they will be wildly successful. Meanwhile, if you need me, I’ll be in the corner writing my next book with a real text editor. I think it even has a full-screen mode.
§
We all know you use emacs Mark (not that there’s anything wrong with that). :)
— David Lindquist 
Although TextMate did not start development in 2007, if the developers of TextMate said to themselves that building a new text editor is silly, I know more than a few folks who will dearly miss having it around (myself included).
WriteRoom and friends may have been a flawed concept for you, but perhaps there’s still room out there for more text editors, other than emacs and vim (or whatever it is that you’re using).
— Joe Goh
Abiword has a full screen mode. ;-)
— michele
“Meanwhile, if you need me, I’ll be in the corner writing my next book with a real text editor.”
Me wants “Dive Into Python (2.5)”.
— michele
“They’re for the writer’s equivalent of script kiddies — people who want to go to Starbucks and pick up chicks with their MacBooks and their iPods and their glowing full-screen text editors.”
I think I saw this guy, he had a pompadour and drove a Vespa :)
— Mikeal
Mark:
What heuristic would you use for saying whether or not it makes sense to build a new XYZ?
We certainly had a lot of (shitty) web frameworks out there before Rails and Django, and I don’t think those projects were a waste of time.
I wonder if any of the TextMate or WriteRoom users are people who bothered to learn emacs or vi; I sense the bulk of them are BBEdit or TextEdit converts.
You know what you should do? Fork WhiteRoom, make it paint the full screen black. Nothing more. The full screen, pitch black. Advertise it as the first full screen editor with writer’s block implemented in software level.
“Just about you and your text - or the lack thereof” could be the slogan.
I think it has potential to be the hit Garden Path Software needs to secure some fat venture capital. MacBook-powered Starbucks writers will love it.
For some programmers, creating a text editor is a write of passage.
GD&R.
— darkon
I think the main premise behind the zeitgeist around Writeroom and its ilk are that people are so cracked out on Continuous Partial Attention that they don’t realize they can just QUIT their IM/Skype/IRC/Email/Web/Usenet/Feed clients and go back to what our forebearers only knew: offline mode. Hell, they could even turn off their phone! This tool is a way of admitting that to themselves, even unconsiously, without taking any real responsibility for the symptoms.
As far as text editors go, I think TextMate has shown that there is room for innovation in the field. Emacs and vim are not the end-all, be-all of the field, even though the religion of GNU says there shall be no editor other than emacs.
— matt
Hi Mark,
JDarkRoom was just a fun piece of software written as more of an exercise than anything else. Turns out it’s popular, somehow. The lack of features is the whole point. If you want a more complex editor, that market is definitely already catered for - and if this approach didn’t work for people, they wouldn’t be using it.
Regards,
Duncan.
— Duncan
I am an intermediate emacs user and an experienced developer.
I also tend to sometimes write almost-incomprehensible nonsense and/or political essays, which many people tend to like and many more tend to throw away in disgust.
For code manipulation, nothing could fit me better than emacs. It has all of the features I might need to be more productive handy at a chord’s reach.
But I did try WriteRoom (which is free, though you /can/ buy it for $24.99), just to see what it’s like.
I fired it and got an empty screen. I started writing. Within 20 minutes I was already sweeping the net for somewhere appropriate to publish what came out of it. I liked it that much.
Now, I wouldn’t dream of writing a book with WriteRoom. I’d write a book in LaTeX, not ASCII, so I’d need formatting and editing tools galore.
But WR is perfect for essays. It gives you exactly what you need.
WR is not about turning off your IM and net connection. It’s about turning off emacs’ bar and the OSX menubar.
It’s about turning off EVERYTHING.
And it works. For me. For essays.
SonOfLilit
— SonOfLilit
Ah, it’s because people want to write the text editor for MovieOS, of course.
(Incidentally, shouldn’t this textarea be after the website box in the tab order? Perhaps I’ve missed something.)
— sil
Mark: In my experience text editing and writing (unstructured thoughts and blurps which then got edited into something called text) are different tasks with different mental models and modes. For each mode I pick the tool in which I’m most comfortable at that point. There is no single living in WriteRoom 1.0 ($ 0), it is just one room in a larger house, other being TextMate, in earlier times also emacs and vi.
Matt: For me it is less about offline mode but more about the absence of visual noice. It’s like an empty sheet of paper on an empty desk in an empty room. You don’t want to live there all the time, but it’s nice to have. Mostly an asthetic preference, of course, but I’m also an uncluttered desk type.
— Tim
Hey I just had a cool idea for a new toy, it’s round and it rolls. If you have 4 of them and stick some poles between each pair and then directed some form of power to the round things you could move stuff really easy … oh wait, I think someone came up with something like this ages ago, I think they call it the wheel!
Oh I have an even better idea, I could create a program that lets me type things, edit what I type and has lots of other cool features to make my typing easier … oh wait, I think someone came up with something like this ages ago, I think they call it Vi!
— Katie
1. Fire up gnome-terminal.
2. Run the terminal version of either vim or emacs (to taste).
3. Press F11; you now have a powerful full-screen text editor.
4. Optional: Customise how vim or emacs places text on screen for that centred single column look.
— C R
I haven’t try DarkRoom (yet), but it is really a problem that it requires 22 MB runtime environment?
I still welcome new attempts at building text editor, maybe someone will come with some new cool concept. :)
hmmm ‘(Depending on your platform, it may be as small as 13 MB, which is what the kids these days would call “an improvement.”)’
reminds me of emacs … as time goes, there exists more resources hungry editors *cough* like eclipse *cough* … and emacs looks like an improvement … over time
— yahoo
I used a couple of IDE’s (Netbeans, Eclipse, VS) until I found SciTE, which was faster, cross platform and very customisable. Eventually I ran out of hot-keys for my custom commands, and now I’m a Vim convert (modal editing and chained text commands just blows everthing else away). My quest for a better editor took me steadily back in time and away from ‘fuller featuered’ IDE’s. The current trend seems to be to help out idiots, but isn’t much good if you aren’t an idiot.
— david
LaTex
\close
— Petas
A balance between the innovative and the classical; has our medium matured to the state where emacs or vi can truly be considered classical?
I, like many here, make my living in ASCII. I have used several editors (emacs, vi, Visual Studio, BBEdit to name a few) and I can see huge room for improvement in each
(speed, ease of use, feature set). I applaud those who take on the monumental task of improving the design of my tool-set and I am critical at this attitude which would stifle innovation.
— James
This blog entry shows an incredibly pompous attitude. You are losing me as a reader. If the genre doesn’t work for you, fine, so be it. It obviously works for some, and it’s never good form to call them fools or imply they lack self-discipline. Hey, if a developer asks you for your advice on whether they should do a project, by all means give them an honest opinion. But if a developer has undertaken a task and there is some subset of the 6 billion people on the planet that think its pretty cool, it’s generally good form to bite your tongue and not call them chumps no matter what you might think. Attacking the size of the framework required by a project is old school. Cocoa comes as part of the OS but the .net framework does now as well…. It should always be a consideration of the developer but it’s one of many. If you would prefer we can focus on the inappropriate things you have done in the past just to drop in a negative vibe, but then again, it would be bad form. Maybe it’s time for you to watch Bambi once again, and take the advice therein to heart..
— anon
Is only Mark allowed say “You must be new here,” or can anyone do it?
— Vitorio
“Switching to a new one would be a frustrating and painful experience that would get in the way of my writing for weeks, maybe months.”
Emacs or Vi(m), then. I like my text editors to share as much interface as possible with my web browser, my cd-burning tool, my pdf/ps-viewers, my media players, my spreadsheets, my word-processors, my configuration utilities… I see that vi and emacs enthusiasts share this wish occasionally, and solve it by either making a vi mode or cramming some new application into emacs (does it have a CD player yet?).
I solve it by using editors based on the Xerox PARC-derived user interfaces of my desktop. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a single non-graphical text-editor that follows the basic interface guidelines — those found in everything from Eclipse to Kopete. Not one. And I’ve been searching a long time. When I really have no access to an X-server, I’m forced to use mcedit, the best I could find interface-wise.
I could learn vi (or emacs) but that would be a frustrating, painful experience which would get in the way of my productivity for weeks or even months. There would have to be a truly enormous efficiency gain to win back the time investement, and I don’t believe it. (Xerox PARC didn’t either — they did big comparison studies on various forms of text-editing.)
As it is, it’s only the occasional config file I have to edit with no access to a standard-compliant editor. But that actually shows that there IS room for another text editor. Perhaps I’ll write it one day.
It would probably take more time than learning vi! But I’d do something useful for the world, instead of joining a group determined to keep text editing in the seventies.
Any sufficiently complicated text editor contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of (vim|emacs).
TextMate is a piece of crap.
— vimacs
I found writeroom an excellent tool for writing my dissertation. I used it before this fancy new pay to play version came out, so I think I’ll find a way to recreate in for free, but I’ve gotta say it was useful.
— Dan
Ok. I guess i just don’t get it personally. I’ve never had a need to use anything more unnecessarily complicated then wordpad on windows. Ok, to be honest i switched it with metapad for windows. But still.
— Kayin
“Who is so serious about writing that they need a full-screen editor, but so unserious that they don’t have a favorite editor already?”
I would rephrase this as, “Who is it who is serious about writing but who does not need to consult notes, web-based information sources, plot and character outlines and timelines, whatever, while writing? What kind of serious writing can you do on a blank screen? Sonnets?”
— Mark
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware, or at least repurpose something else. With that in mind I sometimes type things into an old Newton keyboard that isn’t attached to anything.
— Adolph Trudeau
What is worse: software creators who think stupid ideas such as this are innovative, bloggers who feel the need to comment on them, cloners who feel the need to copy the useless features, bigots who need to make condescending remarks about the size of runtime environments, or people who feel qualified to comment on how others should spend their software development resources? Is this what it means to be a “creative type”?
— Anon
Mark,
This seems to be a problem of OSS development in general. Everyone likes to work on what’s cool or interesting ( don’t blame anyone for that ). As a result, you find that certain uh, over-plowed fields are yet again being plowed.
If anyone could ever get all the minds of an OSS project pulling in one direction (i.e. Ubuntu) they could deliver amazing things quickly. I like to say, when talking about “enterprise” OSS:
“If you put 7 of the most talented OSS developers in a room for a week and asked them to fix a bug in a spreadsheet program, in 1 week you’d have 2 new mail readers, and a text-based web browser.”
That said, I think that TextMate has been an excellent addition to the Mac user toolbox.
So why aren’t there any easily-integratable editor back-ends? Emacs wants to be your OS — it’s hard to have it sitting quietly and anonymously inside another product.
Yeah, it’s frustrating that people are re-inventing the wheel, but as someone who’s had ideas for new GUIs that involve text-editing, it’s also frustrating that I can’t just send programmatic commands to an editor component.
Well designed C++ libraries are extremely rare, so let’s say I’d settle for a portable C implementation that I can wrap from a bunch of languages.
Is anything like that out there?
— HiggsBoson
Before I started using textmate, I had used various vi clones (last few years vim, of course) for atleast 10 years. I still use vim on non mac platforms, and like it very much; but yes, I think textmate is a much better editor. I’ve never used writeroom, bbedit, or textedit (I have, however, used textwrangler, but didn’t think much of it).
“I wonder if any of the TextMate or WriteRoom users are people who bothered to learn emacs or vi; I sense the bulk of them are BBEdit or TextEdit converts.”
— Brian
I’m not a coder. TextMate lets me do coder-level text manipulation stuff that was always too hard in vim, too obscure in emacs or too ugly in BBEdit. Snippets with entry points and the like. So I’ve found it to be useful.
There’s a place for bringing advanced text editing features to people who either don’t or can’t learn something like vim. Although I agree that 90% of new text editors have no reason for being.
Even worse are the various “note taking” applications that are just crappy text editors with some spackling.
— jhn
Congrats! You are now my new favorite blog!
I thought Paul Ford did a nice job of describing WriteRoom’s appeal (where AlphaSmart Neo = WriteRoom).
— Brett
Om I the only one who caught the futurama reference?
— Maurice
So in the 90s you’d be railing against the creation of Python because, hey, Perl was already here and it’s 1990 and creating a new programming language is as silly as saying “I’m gonna build my own build system” or “I’m gonna build my own amusement park.” Blackjack and hookers and all that.
— Bob Jones
Is this what it means to be a “creative type”?
Yes. Have you ever heard of Steve Jobs?
Meanwhile, you need to relax. This is an editor flame, part of a long and glorious tradition of hyperbole. Discussion of text editors is the pro-football-fandom of the programming universe: if you aren’t willing to paint the emacs source code on your naked chest, you are not a true fan!
Incidentally, vi sucks! :)
…bigots who need to make condescending remarks about the size of runtime environments…
See, you aren’t getting the joke. Long-time emacs users have endured years and years of complaints about the size of the emacs runtime environment (”EMACS: Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping”). This argument has now fossilized, and it will never die. The .NET runtime is 22 MB, they say that Vista requires half a gigabyte just to boot, and people are still flaming emacs for having too many features.
So the fact that these new editors require two or three times more memory than old-school emacs to provide a fraction of the functionality is deliciously ironic. Revenge is sweet!
— MikeB
You just asked the question that everyone in the room has been thinking but didn’t want to look clueless. I don’t get it, either.
— Beerzie
WriteRoom would be pretty silly for writing a book… but for writing blog posts, etc.. it can just be kinda fun. Black background, neon green text… bring on teh sexy 1996!
I love it.
— Joshua
I don’t want to tell anyone what kind of tools to use; but I would challenge your assertion that WriteRoom (et al) are not serious tools. I write extensively as a part of my job; and I write for fun – I love WriteRoom. It’s a great application - and it suits my way of working. It’s clearly not right for you; but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong for everyone.
For me it’s a welcome to return to the simplicity and elegance of WordPerfect. Don’t get me wrong, when I’m page-setting, of course I want WYSIWYG, and everything that Word (or Pages) brings to the party; but when I concentrating on the words – not their presentation: I don’t need any of those distractions.
Remember, some SUV’s really do get their tyres muddy.
— AJ
Applause. Cheers!
— Claes Magnusson
I’m convinced! Choice *is* a bad thing. Thanks, Mark.
— Bjorn Nitmo
Well, I use a pen and a notebook, so I’m far more hardcore than anybody else here by far.
P.S. Tabindex seems to be a bit messed up here.
“Who is so serious about writing that they need a full-screen editor, but so unserious that they don’t have a favorite editor already?”
Actually, most “serious” writers have a favourite word-processor.
this ‘post’ proves that you’re just as big a pratt as Gruber!!
sheesh
:o_
— Emma
I actually tried writing in ‘CopyWrite’, just to see if there was any advantage to writing in a ‘writers’ application rather than BBEdit, and I’ll admit, being able to lounge back, keyboard in my lap and just type with the font set big enough not to cause eyestrain from that distance was kind of nice. Of course I do that in BBEdit anyways, so it was nothing new. Do I find having an interface distracting while I write? Truly, having a life, a phone and kids are distracting - at least the interface is quiet. The icing on the cake was trying to save a couple of documents and switch back and forth between them, which required an interface that they obviously hadn’t thought out very well, and I tolerated that just long enough to copy and paste what I was working on back into BBEdit. Sorry guys - I’ve got too much work to get done to suffer through someone else trying to decide what I need and don’t need to see.
Maybe strangely, I use a Text Editor while I’m writing and editing (it keeps me from wasting time formatting), and then I’m either publishing to the web, or running through Word if I need to format for print.
Bare Bones Software - continues to never suck. Word… well… I’ll leave that one alone.
Wow, thanks for turning me on to writeroom.
love the simplicity
— lacus
Let me get this straight– a /Python/ developer is complaining about people who have to download runtimes in order to run applications?
Wow.
— Mark
I don’t see what the problem is. I, for one, had never considered a full-screen product until I heard about WriteRoom. I admit that some days I’m not mature enough, apparantly, to write without being distracted by the siren song of the “internet” or IM or Twitter or whatever. I don’t use WriteRoom all the time, and I can see why many people have no need for it, but I think it’s a good product.
— PZ
The funny thing is that I actually find that having my text editor as a 640×480 window (my resolution is at 1024×768) is ideal for me. I don’t like having it fill up the entire screen.
In defense of WriteRoom: I showed it to a journalist friend of mine, and he loved it. A moderately savvy Mac user, he’s complained for years about Word and the other word processing options. A text editor in the classic sense like Emacs or vim is beyond his patience to take up. WriteRoom suits his needs nicely, so I take from that that at least some part of the audience for this software are journalists.
Personally, it’s vim (well, gvim actually for code) and WriteRoom for creative writing.
Someone commented:
“I would rephrase this as, “Who is it who is serious about writing but who does not need to consult notes, web-based information sources, plot and character outlines and timelines, whatever, while writing? What kind of serious writing can you do on a blank screen? Sonnets?””
What kind of serious writing? Well, short stories for me. I don’t have reams of notes, plots or character outlines because they tend to make my stories feel very ‘written’.
Maybe he could add “short stories” to the list of ‘non serious’ writing?
— Jim
I don’t really get it - are you saying that people shouldn’t develop text editors because it’s hard? Or are you saying that people shouldn’t develop text editors because there are already a bunch that are currently used? Or is it because this current batch that you mention aren’t the greatest pieces of software and you are extrapolating that because of that, therefore no new software in the space could be good?
If you honestly believe that any of those three arguments are reasons not to develop a particular piece of software, that would be very sad. And if you don’t please elaborate for the dense (me) as to the real reason people should not be developing text editors, because those are the only three reasons I could pull from your post.
— nybble
Given the usual tone around here I’m not surprised by this post, but it’s still missing the point in an irritating fashion.
The dull condescension up above can be rephrased into a reasonable question like so:
Who wants a full-screen editor, but doesn’t have a favorite editor already?
The answer is very obviously ‘Lots of people.’ Groups that fit the bill: young writers without technical facility who don’t want to bother with emacs or (gah) vi; those with problems focusing attention on blocks of text in the presence of visual cruft they’ll never need; those unable to control their tendency to procrastinate but able at least to acknowledge it; those who never use GUI elements in their text-editing (e.g. Quicksilver/Textmate types) and respond well to the spartan simplicity of old-style WordPerfect environments, so they want to smooth out the peripheral areas of their text editing environment; etc.; etc.; et endlessly cetera.
Your post is sharp and hilarious when it comes to the development attitudes on display among text-editor developers, but you are letting a boring chauvinism about computer tools get in the way of fair-minded social observation. But you’re presumably an emacs/vi user - and those aren’t tools for writing prose, period, unless you’re so comfortable with them (by virtue of programming use) that you can retrofit your writing habits to a shocking degree. (Textmate’s irritating character-by-character undo function is an example of the myopia that afflicts longtime programmer-editor users, but I’m willing to live with it.) If you don’t understand how average computer users deal with their software, that’s OK. But leave those assessments to people who get it, man.
WriteRoom and its clones are not trying to compete with emacs, vi, or TextMate. Editing is not even their primary task, which is why they are unashamed to leave the Undo feature out of the first N versions.
WriteRoom is, first and foremost, an educational toy. It’s an exercise and a demonstration. Instead of haranguing your co-worker about how his IM client is killing his productivity and should be turned off, you can give him WriteRoom and let him see for himself. If, even after spending months reading 43 Folders, you can’t convince yourself to quit checking your email every five minutes, you can try WriteRoom. Experience the feeling.
Once you train yourself to be aware of distractions and deal with them, you may not need WriteRoom anymore. Or you may just put emacs into WriteRoom mode, which is easy to do. But would it have occurred to you to do so, if WriteRoom’s clever marketing hadn’t convinced you that it might be a good idea?
— MikeB
Editors that need 15MB+ of libraries just to edit plain text make me cry.
— Shii
I agree, sometimes I just like to bitch to hear myself bitch too. Even better, if I attract passers by.
God help us simpletons who managed to install enormous runtimes using our even more enormous broadband connections and our ridiculously enormous hard drives. God help us overcome our inclination to use different tools for subtly different tasks. May He save us because we don’t work exactly like your rotting, pompous ass.
— Anti
I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around how wrong-headed this is. This is 2007, right?
Look, existing editors either:
-Don’t have the feature
-Don’t expose it well enough for WriteRoom fans
-Have too many other features
or all of the above. And if you think creating software is just about having features, the more the better, and associated complexity be damned, you’re clearly not a Mac user. Oh wait, you’re not.
— Lukas
Except, “all of the above” is actually not possible here. Wrong-headedness abounds!
— Lukas
It’s also batshit crazy to write a C compiler from scratch just because you don’t like the licenses of the currently available ones. I don’t hear anyone complaining about GCC…
And the part about the 15MB runtimes is just plain silly. You are right, it’s 2007, which also means that we live in the Land of 500 Gig Hard Drives And Humongous Magic Mystery RAM. Back in my days, we had to program our way through 6 foot snowdrifts! On Sunday! Before breakfast! And we liked it!
I’ve read the article. Mark is right. Those who disagree are wrong. And whiny babies to boot. Plain and simple.
Really, people. It’s not a personal attack. Though I guess if you can’t exercise enough impulse control to avoid posting a whiny comment on an inconsequential blog post about an inconsequential piece of software (which apparently I can’t, but then, I’m not having trouble focusing on my writing either), maybe you really do need a writing application that appears to lock you out of every function that makes using a computerized text editor useful. Don’t want distractions? Close your browser, moron. How hard it is?
And that’s why they call it a rant.
-systemsboy
I recently wrote a new draft of a screenplay with WriteRoom (without strict formatting of course), and I have to say that I appreciated the experience without desktop and menubars etc. It was only the words on the screen. It’s a psychological thing, but stripping the computer back to what is essentially a typewriter worked really well for me. I don’t see WriteRoom as a new text editor as much as an answer to what I think is a common problem for writers using computers: too many distractions. And while working offline is certainly an option, that still doesn’t get rid of the multifaceted user interface looking back at you that promises photo and video editing, music libraries, etc. Actually using WriteRoom made it possible for me to use my computer as a creative writing space, something I haven’t been able to do for a while (legal pads have been my refuge).
No I don’t ride a vespa, nor do I try to impress girls at starbucks, but amazingly enough, I did like writing with this tool, and I won’t apologize for that.
Mark, I’d like to hear your comments on Scrivener, which I’ve been hearing about on 43Folders and in other places in the last few weeks. That’s a text editor that you might rightly criticize, since it’s really trying to be a full-time replacement for whatever you’re currently using to write your next book. WriteRoom isn’t. If Scrivener is successful, it will be because it does new things, and gives you more options. It’s the opposite of WriteRoom.
I code in TextMate, write in Pages, and play around in WriteRoom. Sometimes I like to write on paper, too, and sometimes on the typewriter. Changing things up is part of the fun. That’s why I like WriteRoom. It’s a weird environment that I can use to break out of my normal routine when I get stuck in a rut. It’s not going to change the world, or do the work for me, or replace any of my text editors, but it’s a fun iteration that takes me back to the Apple //C.
“I thought Paul Ford did a nice job of describing WriteRoom’s appeal (where AlphaSmart Neo = WriteRoom).”
My Alphasmart ‘boots’ in one second, lasts 300+ hours on a couple of batteries, and, when I put it in a large polythene bag it is rainproof. I can take it to places I would not take a shiny designer laptop. Different animal.
WriteRoom is basically just TextEdit (yes it can do rtf for example) with a really nice full-screen mode feature. Why use full-screen? It’s like hitting the zoom button in any number of applications. While zoomed out, sure you can see your work, but it’s easier and more visually focused to zoom in. When you want to zoom in on just text, you use WriteRoom. If you need other information in the meantime, then you simply zoom back out. And so forth.
WriteRoom isn’t about reinventing the wheel. If you want a programmer’s tool, use BBEdit, or whatever. But if you want TextEdit plus full-screen, try WriteRoom. Also keep in mind that with WriteRoom, full-screen functionality is effectively added to any compatible app via a very handy plug-in.
Finally, the fact that there’s a full-screen fad on right now is an indication that zooming in on just text is a feature that other developers have either forgotten or failed to contemplate.
All you need is Graffitti (google it, I’m lazy), which will turn pretty much any window (iApps excluded) full-screen — no title bar, no dock, nothing.
I’d have to point out (to commenters, not the author) that “flaming” WriteRoom is not the same as flaming text editors. I think people are focusing on the “hello, it’s 2007!” throwaway line and losing track of the main point of puzzlement, which is (in my own phrasing): was anyone actually asking for this?
The Mac world in particular seems to be crowded with “writers’ text editors” like WR, Ulysses, and countless others, most of which seem to have two things in common: one, a philosophy of stripping out everything possible (many of them started out with no ability to format text at all, and had the chutzpah to advertise that as an intentional feature) and two, a noticeable lack of professional authors endorsing them. Might I humbly suggest that this is because, by and large, professional authors have not been going off to writing conferences and complaining to one another, “If only somebody would make a word processor that just did less!”
In practice, formatting just isn’t the distraction these guys seem to assume it is. Anybody serious about manuscript formatting spent the half-hour necessary to learn to make simple templates, and for the last ten years they’ve just selected one and started typing away. Whenever you find an author rhapsodizing about a word processor it’s generally about features that make editing easier. I’ve heard of more non-technical and fiction authors starting to use text editors expressly to get “power editing” tools–although they usually have to import documents back into a word processor for formatting. (Lest anyone pipe up with suggestions about LaTeX, sorry, but for non-technical manuscripts that’s really more trouble than it’s worth.)
I don’t think writing a new text editor is entirely a lost cause in 2007, but you’d have to be bringing something really new to the table. TextMate succeeds because a sufficient number of Mac users want power approaching something like Emacs without having to, well, deal with Emacs. (I’m a TextMate user, and I’ve used Emacs for years.) WriteRoom may succeed because a sufficient number of people get turned on by its Zen approach, sure; I’ve played with it and I appreciate it on some level–but when I really ask myself, “What about this text editor justifies buying it when I already own TextMate,” I don’t have a real good answer. The same would likely be true for anyone else already using another editor.
— Watts
That would be MegaZoom (or MegaZoomer), not Graffitti. Sorry.
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html
This is probably the best writer’s tool out there. Ulysses is pretty darn great as well. http://www.blue-tec.com/
— Anonymous
comparing eclipse with a text editor is bullshit at its best
— ludwig
“Well, I use a pen and a notebook, so I’m far more hardcore than anybody else here by far.”
I got you beat. I don’t write down anything; I keep it all in my head. :)
BTW, I haven’t found a text editor yet that didn’t suck lagoon water. However, like many people, I reach a certain comfort level with one or two simply because they’re the only ones around. I learned vi (not vim, straight vi) because it was the only editor on the Unix server I administered. On Windows machines, I use Crimson Editor mainly because it’s in the standard packages of approved software for my company, but more often that not I’ll find myself using Notepad. At home, I’ll use either vi or Notepad. It’s like shoes; they’re always ones out there that are newer and better, but you still have those old, worn out ones because they’re just comfortable.
— Buck
I think “formatting” is a red herring here. Your typical word-processor is over kill for what a writer needs. There are a ton of great text editors but they aren’t the right tool for the job either.
As a writer, you need a tool that allows you to focus on what you’re writing. Writer’s tools such as Ulysses and Scrivener bring organizational tools that allow you to tame the chaos of a writing project.
— Anonymous
Mac users, and I include myself in this, aren’t interested in features, necessarily. It isn’t that writers sit around wondering why nobody is making word processors with fewer features; it’s that Mac users are used to getting and interested in making less-feature-rich products that create a better overall user environment.
See also: iPod, iPhone.
— Emily
I don’t think the Textmate, VoodooPad, *or* WriteRoom are going to get off of your lawn anytime soon, Mark.
Khoi Vinh first caught my attention with the idea he had for a pretty brutal writing app, subsequently answered more or less by WriteRoom:
http://www.subtraction.com/archives/2006/0509_blockwriter.php
I must say I’m on the critic’s side of the argument here in that I can’t agree with the vi/emacs/real writers know text like programmers know code idea. The interest in WriteRoom and its peers suggests the mainstream apps are waiting for a competitor.
MP3 players before the iPod come to mind at all?
Sure, word processing / text editing is more of a mature field so it’s actually closer to the cell phone handset analogy for the iPhone. Now if only Apple would spot this and make Pages one nifty piece of software with clearly defined modes and an insanely sneaky preference pane so as many of us can get whatever we want from it.
Throw Pages into Leopard and really use Core Animation to bring about an iPhone style revolution over the entire OS … now there’s a thought. But I veer crazily off topic.
WriteRoom is as people have been saying a great little double click route to a writing mode and an entirely subjective frame of mind (naturally) which can really get the work done at times, or is at least a great freeware option to offer to those who are only half way to solving their attention problem. There’s lots of users like that!
This is all about philosophy when it comes down to it. Hence the live action firefight in this thread.
— John Muir
Both emacs and vi are too complicated and esoteric. This is why I use more modern/user-friendly editors like gedit or nano.
— J. W. Dobson
The iPod comparison seems to capture a fundamental (but very common) misunderstanding about the Apple zeitgeist. Yes, designers often talk about “less is more” these days and you hear a lot of talk about the iPod being successful because of what it left out, but when you think about it, that’s not quite the case. If you took a crappy Creative MP3 player that had, oh, voice recording, an FM tuner and internal speakers and you stripped those features out, you wouldn’t have an iPod, you’d have a crappy MP3 player. People don’t buy iPods because they have a checklist of features that absolutely can’t be included. It’s not what Apple doesn’t do that’s the key, it’s that Apple does a lot without getting in your way.
I’d argue that this is also what TextMate and BBEdit have done that made them popular compared to other editors. People who hate Emacs and Vi hate them because their interfaces are arcane, not because they “do too much” (as easy as it is to mock Emacs on that point). Really, I think Mac users are interested in features — they’re interested in how those features are implemented. “What tools will make writing easier” is not the same question as “what tools are in standard word processors that I’m not using,” and stripping things out in response to the second doesn’t help you answer the first. Again, this appeared to have largely been Mark’s point.
I propose all full-screen “writing tools” be subject to the WordStar test: if they can’t at least meet what WordStar 4 could do twenty years ago, they’re not fully baked yet, no matter how well-crafted their “less is more” pitch may be.
— Watts
If someone was to write a TextMate clone for Windows, they’d be doing pretty well I reckon. Textmate sells. That said the majority of win users would just pirate it, such is their nature.
Scribes is a nice textmate alternative for Linux.
I really don’t understand the argument here. If someone where to tell me to use emacs, vi, pico, nano or any other cli tool to write a novel I’d think they were an idiot. Sure they’re great tools for manipulating text, but they’re the last tools I’d want to use to write any sort of multi-chapter, multi-draft document. Along the same vein, Microsoft Office and just about any other word processor are totally overkill for such an endeavor as well. I don’t want their clutter or over head. TextEdit and other simple notepad-esqu programs are too simple.
I want a tool that allows me to do several things.
1. Organize my thoughts.
2. Organize my chapters.
3. Organize my footnotes (if necessary)
& (most importantly)
4. Write.
It doesn’t need to do anything else.
I love TextWrangler for writing shell scripts/html. I wouldn’t use it to write a letter.
— Cam
If you are a Mac weenie try Tex Edit
http://www.tex-edit.com/
— Me
Man. This is just quibbling. What you write with is such an inconsequential factor with respect to whether or not the end result is good.
The tone of this post strays from constructive criticism, and is essentially picking on somebody else’s work just because you don’t agree with it. :-|
PS - As an interesting aside, Asimov used to have several typewriters set up in his NY apartment, each for a different book he was currently working on, so he could just move between them when so desired. He also liked writing in noisy, distracting environments.
— pleb
Nice troll, Mark. Very nice troll.
[For more substance: why do some people who write documents that aren't code make the switch from MS Word to, say, Emacs or vi? Why do others embrace the cool blue of WordPerfect for DOS? Why do some people use hand tools to build chairs instead of buying the latest router and table saw? Because they want the software out of their way. Now go and write some code in Word.]
— Nick S
The weenie-itis in here has truly reached staggering proportions when it appears that there are already 90 comments and not _one_ of them mentions the fact that (a) Lightroom doesn’t include source, (b) Darkroom doesn’t include source, and (c) Darkroom’s _clone_, JDarkroom, doesn’t include source.
Mac OS X includes pico. I have been unable to determine what the difference between pico and these editors is, aside from maturity (and availability of source). And it isn’t often that one compares pico (or its users) favourably to other editors (or their users) in terms of maturity.
- Chris
WriteRoom certainly isn’t the answer for everyone, but for those who have found it useful thanks for posting in this thread and giving the rant at the top of the page a bit of balance.
RE: comment 92. Chris not sure if you were joking, but anyway WriteRoom source code is made available to registered users upon request.
I am the only one using the text editor sam? I also like a plain screen of text without distracting amusements. And structural regular expressions, once understood, are so much more powerful than regexps, that you’ll never go back. Windows binaries can be found at ftp://netlib.bell-labs.com/netlib/research/sam.exe and the key paper describing its use can be found at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/sam/sam.pdf. The X version runs on Macs and can be found through fink.
— dennis
You know something? Arguing about text editors is an excellent way to avoid actually writing anything.
Some people like paper and fountain pens. Some people like minimalist text editors. Some people like full-featured word processors. But all successful writers have one characteristic in common: they write.
Who stole Mark and replaced him with John C. Dvorak?
— Rube
The best writer’s tool I’ve ever used is called Deadlines, written in an archaic, impossible-to-decompile language called GUILT that was first installed by my parents when I was very young.
I use a text editor when I want serious text editing. I use a word processor when I have large quantities of text that need to be formatted and/or include some basic layouts. I use a DTP package when I want text that’s really pretty. Each program handles text, but each one has a different purpose.
I’d argue that the WriteRoom-style editor shines for people who like to just plain write and handle their editing later. Getting rid of distractions (IM, menu bars, etc…) helps to focus you on the simple act of getting text out of your brain, thru your fingers, and onto the page.
A “cure” for writer’s block is to write without editing. Just get it all out of the head. I think the full screen editor facilitates exactly that approach. Write now, edit later.
And yes, when I edit, I’ll be in my favorite text editor, not WriteRoom. Do I look like a glutton for punishment?
— Nik
Lots of old men, moaning that this newfangled ‘Lager’ stuff will never catch on.
— Stephen
I dunno, there’s something to be said for “minimal”.
I’m an artist. Most of the time my process involves starting on paper, scanning to Photoshop, cleaning up the scan, bringing it into Illustrator, and pulling out paths with great precision. I like the results. And sometimes I’ll start something direct in Illustrator.
But sometimes I just like to start up Alias Sketchbook and fuck around. Sketchbook doesn’t have much in the way of features. Sketchbook takes over the screen. Sketchbook ignores the style guides. It doesn’t even give me fancy tools - just pencil, pen, markers, pseudo-watercolor, and airbrush. But it’s fun, it’s great for quick color comps and similar tasks. I know damn well I won’t do anything finished and “perfect” in it, and this frees me to play around.
Sometimes I can do this mindset change while staying with the more featureful programs. Sometimes I can’t. Sometimes I can do it by going to paper and a pen. Or a crayon. Anything to fool myself into being creative instead of worrying about “perfection” too early on.
If full-screen text displays that emulate 8-bit word processors in simplicity do that for someone on a regular basis, they’d be an idiot not to use them.
I find it truly ironic that a _Python_ programmer would complain about people reinventing wheels. Isn’t that all that Python programmers do? Heck, they even had to reinvent lexically bound variables, something that every real programmer realized was bad sometime back in the ’50s.
— Andrew
Where all these apps go wrong is in their failure to deliver on their core purpose: Isolation from distraction. A simple press of the escape key and you’re back to answering emails, surfing porn, whatever. The app should make it damn near impossible to stop writing and use your computer for other stuff.
Please enlighten me, what was the point of your lengthy diatribe? Simply to trash what another treasures? To actually share your favorite text editor may have had some redeeming value here. I suppose it is nice to know there’s someone out there that has, and needs, but a single writing tool in their writer’s tool box, kudos to you on that.
I use various text editors, word processors, etc., depending on focus and what it is I need to accomplish at the time. I also occasionally partake of a Caramel Macchiato / Frappuccino at Starbucks, but no longer “pick up chicks,” do not own an SUV, and have yet to take my iBook into one, nice thought though, and they do offer Hotspot wireless broadband Internet service.
I’m sure your text editor works for you, but what were you using before you discovered what you use now? What made you switch from what you used before to what you use now?
I’d love to continue, but I doubt seriously my time here is well spent. I have, what appears to be, a less than stellar writing tool to turn my attention to. I would like to thank all of you for allowing me to express a few of my thoughts on this (Wrongroom) subject.
— MrSin
So what? I’m probably going to create a new webserver. Why? Because it’s a learning experience, or just because I want to. By your reckoning, we ought to skip watching the SuperBowl — I mean, we’ve seen a SuperBowl before, right? Oh, wait, this one is different…
— Scott
Your comments sound like someone who trying to convince himself of something. What do you really care? The people that have created these various products are experimenting with a new idea. It is how innovation in technology comes about to benefit humanity. But no one is asking you to adopt the applications into your life. As a matter of fact I don’t really care how you file your stories or write your books. It’s really non of my business. That is until you made a blanket insult about those of us who do like writing with an application offering a full screen mode.
I’m happy for you that you’ve written two books. I’ve written one and I get published monthly in print. After using BBEdit for writing for the last five years I was thrilled to find two tools which have helped me immensely. Both are well written and thought out products with a full screen feature that I find brilliant.
The ability to write comes from the individual. I could write a novella in this comments box if I had to, but I don’t have to. And the newer editors with a full screen mode have made writing a lot easier on my eyes. So please use what you want to write with, but don’t judge others for the tools they choose. You come off as pontificating and ignorant with little respect for your peers.
For those that are looking around at different products give MacJournal and Scrivener a try. Both are fantastic and very affordable.
— Lou
Where all these apps go wrong is in their failure to deliver on their core purpose: Isolation from distraction. A simple press of the escape key and you’re back to answering emails, surfing porn, whatever. The app should make it damn near impossible to stop writing and use your computer for other stuff.
Here’s a solution for that one:
http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.html
Put it on a thumb drive, and you’re all set.
— Ian Warford
Mark - You said “What kind of serious writing can you do on a blank screen? Sonnets?”. Ok, let’s just say yes to sonnets. That’s certainly a very well respected genre of writing. But I suspect more pieces of serious writing have been done and will be done on a blank screen.
Hemmingway wrote on a manual typewriter. I do most of my writing free-hand on white paper. I love WriteRoom precisely because it removes all other aspects of the computer from the picture. I have keys. The keys make marks on the page. I can really get deeper into what I am writing–whatever mad ramblings they turn out to be.
I suppose if I were intent on writing a how-to book on C# things may be different. But each kind of writing must surely require a slightly different tool. For certain kinds of writing which I do I use WriteRoom and would not trade that for another. I used to have other favorites, but when I found this one it fit comfortably into the pantheon of my computer usage. I won’t say that it doesn’t have its flaws, but I don’t think I own a single piece of software that doesn’t have areas in which I could imagine improvement.
One of the hardest things about editors like vi is the unusual host of commands. On nearly every other editor I can think of ctrl-s/cmd-s saves your document. To use vi you have to learn a host of peculiar commands:
http://cac.uvi.edu/miscfaq/vi-cheat.html
I don’t want to have to deal with that level of distraction. That has nothing to do with the story I am writing. It’s not likely to inspire me or help me to decide on how to resolve a plot point. Hell, WR keeps my files saved as I go anyway.
I did change the text color to a golden yellow for practical physiological reasons: yellow against black is the easiest color combination for the human eye to acquire. I do the same thing with my command/terminal windows.
You have a very pretty high-horse. But, then again, that’s the nice thing about blogs. You can rant and vent your spleen and no one has to really care. Or even listen.
James: just to clarify, I did not write the comment that you are replying to. My comments are marked in a different style (like this one).
— Mark
The first thing I do, when I start on a new machine, is get the latest Vim installer. And soon I fire up Gvim in full screen mode, with the title bar of course. But, I don’t think it is always a bad idea to write an editor from scratch. Or even software. What would be bad, sad and ugly, is using just a few editors, and missing out experimenting with ideas that other editors have or might have.
— Alok
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