I have a few story ideas pounding around in my head. I am working very hard not to take any of them very seriously. But I am starting to jot down words for them.
Most of the inspiration for starting to write fiction again was reading a review about a text editor called JDarkRoom.
What Is JDarkRoom
JDarkRoom is a full screen text editor that locks you out of all of your other programs. It has no menus, no spell check, no…well pretty much anything. I take it back. If you hit Ctrl+L it will show you a word count which is pretty fancy.
By default it sets the background black with green text which happens to be a favorite of mine but I might have to change it to a blue background with white sometime to relive my favorite word processor (the name of which escapes me) from back when I was in college.
It lets you save pretty much plain text files. Kind of like notepad.
JDarkRoom Is Great For Rough Drafts
Since you do not spend time dorking around with formatting or with spelling or grammar, JDarkRoom really encourages you to pound out words which is just amazing for rough drafts. The other night in bed, I was typing and barely paying attention. I hit the Ctrl+L before saving and realized I had around 750 words of outline material. Pretty neat.
JDarkRoom is a Great Change of Pace
We are all so used to all of the features in Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org and all the others that sometimes we spend so much time noticing the little squigglies under the mistyped words that we really shouldn’t be paying attention to until the second draft. Working with something so stripped down and new (to me at least) is a great way to change my expectations for a text editor which means I spend more time just typing.
All Good Writing Needs Java
I need coffee to function in the morning, but I’m talking about the Java programming language. JDarkRoom runs on Java. That would normally be enough to cause me to ignore it, but I recently bought an Asus EeePC which is running Linux. Since Java runs just as well on Linux as Windows (or Mac), there is a version of JDarkRoom for each platform. Since the files are just plain text files it is very easy to install JDarkRoom on each computer I touch and save all of the files on my USB Pen Drive or email the file back and forth to myself. Unlike most Java programs, this one loads fast and operates even faster.
If you are looking for something that feels more like an old school typewriter and encourages you to just get some words on paper, you might want to take a look at JDarkRoom.
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