The zen and art of editing text
I’m writing this post using my new word processor, WriteRoom. There are very few applications that are both cleverly simple and life altering, but WriteRoom has the potential to change how you write by bringing a slice of quiet productivity to your desktop.
When you first launch the application, it fades the screen to an empty, blank page, leaving only a small green cursor on a vast black canvas. That’s it. And while it seems like a simple concept, like an homage to editing text in a terminal, it’s a refreshing and thoughtful design. It’s not the first word processor to do full screen editing, but it is the first to do it with style. It removes distraction, purposefully, leaving only what’s needed to write and think clearly.
The interface itself is a mash of a typewriter, a terminal editor, and a quiet place to work. It keeps the text centered on the screen like a typewriter, so that you’re always looking straight ahead. It’s frugally featured, but does provide staples like smart quotes, hyphenation, spell checking–and most importantly text navigation and selection in the vein of Textmate’s (which I find more productive than, say, Word’s).
WriteRoom can be scripted too, using standard OS X scripting. Documents are either plain or rich text, and are stored in obvious formats in obvious places. It plays nicely with application switching and navigating between Spaces, which makes it easy to get back to the real world when needed. It auto-saves obsessively, and has a simple revert feature that reminds me of an old version of WordPerfect. The editor can even replace the edit control in Safari and other applications.
And while I can’t wait to write a few scripts for WriteRoom, to combine it with Git, reStructuredText, and WordPress, I’m more exited to shut out the world and just write. Even simple things like weblog posts and design need to come from that quiet, thoughtful place, something that is increasingly difficult to find in editors today.