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

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

And for each of the types of work with the text there is a tool. For documents - a complex word processor, with a bunch of formatting tools and other non-always-necessary nonsense, for source codes - a program editor with autoindent, syntax highlighting and highlighting of brackets, for correspondence - usually a banal messenger window :)
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Strangely enough, there are special editors for writing various kinds of articles and artistic texts, but very few people know about their existence. Many use a word processor (MS Word, OO Writer) for this purpose, people are more practical - a variety of Notepads, and some (oh, horror) - a web-based service interface where articles will be published.


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

While working on an article in a word processor, you often stop, you start playing with fonts, selections, Bolda-Italics, instead of working on meaning and text. Also, a word processor pulls with it a bunch of unnecessary functionality, and an overloaded multi-fine-button interface, which instead of helping in the work only distracts. Often annoying spell checking "on the fly" and all sorts of auto-replacements, because of which you constantly stop, go back to correct a typo or cancel an unsuccessful replacement.

Notebooks in this regard are not so bad, but still, sometimes they seriously lack the appearance and font settings (like the standard Windows Notepad) or have to be long configured to get rid of programmer's frills, such as indents, line breaks and highlighting brackets .

The web interface is already a purely personal, but not always reliable, even Habr, due to the untimely jumped out server error, it lost a non-one, perhaps quite good article. Yes, and about the customizability of web interfaces we have to speak not always.

So, we have discussed, in what articles and art texts should not be written. Now let's get down to finding out the opposite, more useful side of the issue.

It will be about * Rooms'ah - minimalist editors, designed specifically for working with artistic texts.

Philosophy of such editors: In writing the text, the main thing - the author, and not software. Room-editor does not help you write a brilliant novel, but will do everything possible to not prevent it. In other words: nothing that can distract from the text, no windows, buttons, whistles and fakes. Only black screen, text, you and your ideas.

Give 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 quite minimalistic, or more precisely, it is completely absent. Most of the operations are performed using hotkeys, since working with text is done using the keyboard. And it is much more convenient than once again to reach for the mouse.
Usually in the settings given the opportunity to sharpen the look: fonts, colors, background, indents from the edge of the screen. There is also autosave, which will allow you not to lose your work even if your computer loses power or fails.

We now turn to specific software solutions.

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

DarkRoom is not shy about 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 - linuksoid also not offended. The editor is young and written in python. In the repositories of popular distributions is not yet available, but it can be freely launched without even installing it in the system. KDE users, you need to install gtksourceview to work.

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

Online option - for those who do not want to depend on desktop software. Thanks for the micktu link

There are also solutions with the all-powerful editors vim and emacs. But this is for too advanced, or fans of these products.

Naturally, the Room Editor is not a panacea, and a brilliant writer will not make you any. But concentrating on writing text will help.
And of course, there is no companion’s taste and color, I think many here will say that it is more convenient for them to write texts in Word, and they will be right, but personally for myself, I discovered this type of editors not so long ago and I am very happy .