* Room editors - you, text and your ideas. Nothing extra



    Historically, it turns out that for many 70% of the work on a computer consists in writing various kinds of textual information. Whether it is the source code of the program, an article on habrahabr, an archival document, or regular friendly correspondence.

    And for each type of work with text there is a tool. For documents - a complex word processor, with a bunch of formatting tools and other not-always-needed nonsense, for sources - a program editor with auto-indentation, syntax highlighting and highlighting brackets, for correspondence - usually a trivial messenger window :)

    Strange as it may seem, there are special editors for writing various kinds of articles and literary texts, but few people know about their existence. Many use a word processor (MS Word, OO Writer) for these purposes, people have more practical use of various Notepads, and some (oh, horror) use the web interface of services where articles will be published.


    In my (and not only my) opinion, the use of these tools, although acceptable, but still inappropriate.

    When working on an article in a word processor, you often stop and start playing with fonts, highlights, italics, instead of working on meaning and text. Also, the word processor carries with it a bunch of unnecessary functionality, and an overloaded multi-button interface, which, instead of helping to work, is only distracting. Often annoying spell checking "on the fly" and all kinds of auto-replacements, because of which you constantly stop, go back to correct a typo or cancel an unsuccessful replacement.

    Notepads in this regard are not so bad, but still, sometimes they seriously lack appearance and font settings (like the standard Windows Notepad) or have to configure for a long time to get rid of programming twists, such as indents, line breaks and parentheses .

    The web interface is already a purely personal matter, but not always reliable, even the habr, due to a server error that jumped out of time, lost an infinite, possibly quite good article. Yes, and about the customizability of web interfaces, one does not always have to say.

    So, we discussed in which articles and literary texts should not be written. Now let's get to the bottom of a more useful question.

    It will be about * Rooms- minimalistic editors designed specifically for working with literary texts.

    The philosophy of such editors: In writing the text, the main thing is the author, and not the software. Room-editor will not help you write a brilliant short story, but will do everything possible so as not to interfere with this. In other words: nothing that can distract from the text, no windows, buttons, whistles and fakes. Only a black screen, text, you and your ideas.

    To bring a variety of screenshots, it makes no sense. As you can see from the picture at the top of the topic, the editor’s interface is pretty minimalistic, or more precisely, it’s completely absent. Most operations are performed using hotkeys, since text is manipulated using the keyboard. And it is much more convenient than reaching for the mouse once again.
    Usually, in settings, you are given the opportunity to sharpen the appearance for yourself: fonts, colors, background, indents from the edge of the screen. There is also auto-save, which will allow you not to lose your work even if your computer loses power or crashes.

    Now let's move on to specific software solutions.

    For MacOSX users, WriteRoom exists - the progenitor of this type of editor. Accordingly - the most advanced and perfect. But unfortunately not free ($ 25).

    DarkRoom is not a shy of this WriteRoom clone, created for Windows users. Free and has all the advantages of the original. Requires .NET Framework 2.0 for its work.

    PyRoom- Linuxoids are also not offended. The editor is young and written in python. The repositories of popular distributions are not yet available, but you can run it freely without even installing it on the system. KDE users need gtksourceview to be installed for it to work.

    JdarkRoom is a free solution written in Java, and accordingly cross-platform. Requires a JVM of at least 1.4.

    The online option is for those who do not want to depend on desktop software. Thanks for the micktu link .

    There are also solutions using the omnipotent editors vim and emacs. But this is for too advanced or fans of these products.

    Naturally, the Room editor is not a panacea, and it will not make a brilliant writer out of you. But focusing on writing the text will help.
    And of course, there is no friend for the taste and color, I think many here will say that they are more comfortable writing texts in Word and will be right, but personally for myself, I recently discovered this type of editors and am very happy .

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