ommwriter
You’ve got to admire anyone who sets out to create a new text editor. It’s a hard sell, after all. There are plenty of perfectly good free options and little room for non-trivial innovation. Between Notepad and Word (or, in my case, TextEdit and Pages) all your needs are covered. Saying, “I’m developing a new text editor” is roughly equivalent to saying “I think I’ll start a land war in China” or “I think I’ll combat rising sea levels by peeing less.”
Enter Ommwriter, the new text editor, currently in beta, that wants to reconnect you to the Zen of your writing.
Ommwriter appears to be another one of those full-screen writing applications, like WriteRoom and Dark Room, that have gained so much attention (relatively, anyway) over the last couple of years. These programs are attractive because they promise to knock down all those pesky modern barriers to your creativity. Hide the tools, hide the distractions of other programs, let’s make it just you and your text, you and your words, man. Mark Pilgrim nailed the silly pretentiousness of these programs when he wrote, “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?”
So, again, enter Ommwriter, the full-screen text editor that wants to clear away the clutter and let you reconnect to the Zen of writing. Ommwriter features a full-screen interface that hides absolutely everything else. Move your mouse and a minimal menu appears, allowing you to adjust the size and location of the writing area, save your work, adjust the font (purely for display, as it seems Ommwriter is a plaintext editor), and change the background image and ambient sounds.
I’m writing this in Ommwriter. I must admit that it’s an interesting experience. My writing takes on a more graceful appearance here, floating like a thought amid a serene winter landscape (Ommwriter’s default background is a winter scene). The ambient sounds, two parts tea house to one part Brian Eno, are oddly calming. And yes, it’s a bit easier to focus without the temptation of my web browser hovering in the background. The overall effect is a change of perspective. I’m viewing my writing in what is quite literally a new way. Isn’t that what Zen is supposed to be about?
It’s different, but I can’t say that this is an inherently better experience than writing in WordPress. In fact, Ommwriter is probably impractical for most of the writing I do. If I’m writing for the web, I’ll have seven or so other tabs open. If I’m writing for work, forget it; I’ll need Pages, Preview, Matlab, and Photoshop at my disposal, at a minimum. Bold, italic, and hyperlink functions would increase Ommwriter’s usefulness by an order of magnitude, and I’d like to have more than three background images to choose from, but that kind of feature creep isn’t very Zen, no matter how small the addition.
I will say, however, that Ommwriter is probably the ideal interface for keeping a private journal. Rather than WriteRoom’s self-consciously retro look (glowing green text on a black background, by default?), Ommwriter feels breezy and open. Privacy without claustrophobia, and an interface without expectations.
Ommwriter won’t become my default text editor, and I don’t think it wants to be. It’s still in beta and has lots of potential. Elegantly executed and unassuming in function, with a few tweaks I think this would make a nice addition to anyone’s Applications folder.
This post made me think about my first forays into writing as a child. I didn’t have a computer until I was a senior in high school, you know, right around Y2k. As a young child I first learned how to type and write on an IBM electric typewriter, which was pretty atypical for our generation of computer users (or so I can tell from talking to friends and colleagues who are now in their late twenties). I would like to see a parody program that accurately recreates the infinitely frustrating experience of typewriting on a computer: carriage returns, jammed keys etc. What’s that? You made a typo? Well, hit backspace, switch that lever over three notches–now you’re on the whiteout ink band–and retype your mistake. It didn’t whiteout the whole letter? Well, keep hitting backspace and keep using the White ribbon until you’ve hammered a whole into the paper; then, move the lever back over to the black ribbon and relentlessly attempt to fill the void you’ve punched into the page with the correct spelling. Ultimately, you’re left with a nice, mangled reminder of your grammatical shortcomings.
Jokes aside, I do have respect for a time when accurate typing and precision were favored…. And all at 120wpm. Amazing.
I prefer Scrivener to WriteRoom; if you’re trying to keep track of multiple chapters, POVs, timelines, and research, you just can’t beat it. And it has the great full-screen feature, too.
Alas, it’s Mac-only, so we Mac-using writers get to glory in the moaning of the Windows users. Hey, we suffer without killer Windows apps. Now the Windows users get to see what it’s like when someone’s not building an awesome thing for *their* OS…
On the PC, I’ve become strongly addicted to Intype. It’s got most of the features of e (and by extension, TextMate) — but unlike e, it’s superbly responsive and hasn’t ever crashed despite being an alpha. It’s just a text editor, though, rather than a word processor.
Shira, what specific features attract you to Scrivener? I’ve had an idea for a web-based writing application for awhile, but it’s got a slightly different focus than “distraction-free” writing.