A while back I was discussing FOSS alternatives for cutting out distractions, and one of the pieces of software that I couldn’t find a decent alternative for was Writeroom which is commercial software for the Mac.
Now Bruno Bord (who’s basically French) has come to the rescue with the PyRoom project. I may have to get involved.
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gnome-terminal –hide-menubar -x vim with fullscreen profile anyone?
manny: PyRoom is not good enough for you: fine. Don’t use it, I won’t be sad. But please don’t suggest geeky tools for non-geeks. Please try to think about them first.
Don’t you really think that anyone able to use vim would use PyRoom (or even Writeroom at the first place)?
I got a better one: Ctrl-alt-f1 – login – vim.
Don’t you think that Joe User will never use vim? or emacs? or even Gnome terminal ? And don’t even think about the tty interface.
Who wants Totem? Just give them mplayer, and they’ll have to learn the key bindings…
What’s a GUI anyway, huh?
Who cares? And let’s get rid of screens, too. Pointless. A braille terminal is enough for everyone.
When will geeks understand that their tools are _not_ for ordinary users? I enjoy using vim myself, but I wouldn’t advise anyone to open a console and run [your favorite editor] to edit text.
end of rant.
aaaah…
manny: want a beer?
Dave, thanks for the heads up on this app. Installed from brz and runs great. If you’re thinking of contributing, here are a couple of ideas/requests.
1. Toggle word count.
2. Amber/brown theme
3. Toggle spell check (I’m really bad)
4. Autosave which would make it more save for the non geek (target audience).
5. Print draft.
I’ll be happy to be a tester. Hi Bruno.
Did you know that there is an online version of Writeroom. Have a play here:
http://writer.bighugelabs.com/
Okay. I’m a non-geek and would like to try this! Can you step me through installing it? I installed bazaar through Adept. But now I’m lost! Running Kubuntu 7.10 64 bit.
Thanks!!!
Elswood: if you have bazaar installed then you can checkout the code with the following command:
$ bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~brunobord/pyroom/trunk
a folder named "trunk" will be created, in there you will find the one and only python script called pyroom.py, start with:
$ python pyroom.py
I found the bazaar command at:
http://news.launchpad.net/general/pyroom-a-writeroom-clone-in-python
The launchpad home page for PyRoom has not instructions on how to checkout the code
PyRoom is now in the Ubuntu repos for Jaunty/9.04!! I am actually pretty impressed based on initial thoughts.
I found WriteRoom earlier today, and bummed that it wasn’t for Windows. Then I found links on its website to alternatives. Q10 for Windows seems great and better than the other Windows versions, though it is closed source and has not been updated in a while (none the less, a great app!).
I installed PyRoom on my Jaunty alpha install from the repos, and also downloaded the .deb for TextRoom and installed. TextRoom has a ways to go, but PyRoom seems to do the trick. I was worried about it being a Pearl app, but not an issue I think. Not sure how resource heavy or unheavy it is, but it is nice.
“gnome-terminal –hide-menubar -x vim with fullscreen profile anyone?”
This would work great if you don’t mind having to turn your head to read a sentence. Vim is unable to have margins on both the left and the right, this doesn’t matter when writing code, but is quite frustrating when writing lengthy paragraphs. This is why I use PyRoom for general writing instead of Vi; although I use Vi for all other editing.