Focus on Writing with FocusWriter
I just discovered FocusWriter, a free writer's word processor that runs on most any operating system. I'm going to give it a try because the glitzy window chrome that ornaments most word processing tools is too distracting. Here's a snapshot of my entire screen when it's running:
The perfect soothing backdrop for the Great Canadian Bile-Oozing German-Speaking Made-of-Expired-Chicken-Liver Robotic Alien Novel.
The backdrop is courtesy of National Geographic, which offers terrific wallpaper photographs for your desktop.
Archived Comments
does FocusWriter have outlining ? any graphics capability ? I couldn't tell from their website.
I don't think it has either. It really does seem to want to do without anything but the text. I leave it in plain text mode and don't even bother with italics or titles or any of that sort of thing. (I then run a home-made script to convert it to pretty and print-ready HTML or PDF.) The only extra feature it seems to have is a timer or word counter that will tell you if you've reached your daily goal or not. I find that a bit pointless and ignore it. There are lots of other word processors just for writers. I'm sure outlining is a feature of many of them, but I just use a separate document for that and do it manually (if I do it at all).
thanks for the info, and the useful link
yay. It's got a penguin...
Yes, absence of penguin is a show-stopper for me. One feature that caught me off guard was that it always writes out files in Unicode with a leading UTF-8 BOM, so don't use it to edit configuration files.