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Simon Willison’s Weblog

WriteRoom

I had a look at WriteRoom a few months ago and wasn’t impressed, but Leonard just convinced me to give it another look and I’m completely sold. It’s a free text editor for OS X with two killer features:

  1. A full screen mode (toggle with ESC) that hides the rest of your screen, letting you type in glorious green-on-black courier with absolutely no distractions.

  2. Autosave. You never have to save a document, even when you quit WriteRoom. It maintains a list of your WriteRooms in the file menu, keying each on the first few words. If you want to move text to an actual file you need to either export it or use copy and paste.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve lost some notes to a crash having scrawled them in TextMate or SubEthaEdit without saving to a file. Auto-save / auto-recovery should be built in to every application.

Posted 15th November 2006 at 7:52 am

This is WriteRoom by Simon Willison, posted on 15th November 2006.

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21 comments

  1. Funnily enough, the whole autosave/don't think about where to save the file is one of the reasons I wrote Akra's Diary (http://www.akrabat.com/akras-diary)

    Regards,

    Rob...

    Rob... - 15th November 2006 08:19 - #

  2. Probably you already know but TextMate has the option to save files when focus is lost. Which isn't as good as auto-save but comes a long way.

    Thomas Maas - 15th November 2006 08:49 - #

  3. I use Emacs (editor) and Ion3 (window manager) to do all of my coding.

    Hitting ALT-RET will drop any application into full-screen mode, which looks especially nice if your using an xterm. I have always thought full-screen terminal sessions looked, well, um neat. You can run Ion3 for OS X using X11.

    Also, about the auto-save, that sounds cool... although, I must say, I reflexively save my work after almost every word anyway. The key-stroke is so built in that even when I am using other applications, as soon as I start typing I find my self hitting CTRL-X-S almost as if it was a nervous twitch.

    Noah Slater - 15th November 2006 09:28 - #

  4. But what's wrong with logging in as >console and running vi? :-)

    Dominic Mitchell - 15th November 2006 10:20 - #

  5. ln -sf /usr/bin/emacs21 /usr/bin/vi

    Nothing! ;)

    Noah Slater - 15th November 2006 12:30 - #

  6. Thanks for the hint, sir!

    Tommi - 15th November 2006 13:06 - #

  7. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaa

    aaaaaaaaa - 15th November 2006 13:16 - #

  8. Noah,

    You do realize emacs has auto-save don't you? It is enabled by default.

    M-x apropos RET auto-save RET

    David Lindquist - 15th November 2006 14:22 - #

  9. Oh, and no vi flames please. I get plenty of that at work. ;-)

    David Lindquist - 15th November 2006 14:39 - #

  10. Halfnote is neat-o, too: https://aaronboodman.com/halfnote/

    Jeremy Dunck - 15th November 2006 14:45 - #

  11. FWIW, MacJournal does that too, both the full screen mode and the auto-save.

    Adrian Bengtson - 15th November 2006 16:24 - #

  12. Will the editor wars ever end?

    Douglas Clifton - 15th November 2006 22:20 - #

  13. Douglas:

    Will the editor wars ever end?

    Nazi!

    Jeremy Dunck - 15th November 2006 22:34 - #

  14. Definitely a cool app. Maybe someday it'll be cool to have it on a Windows machine. :)

    Nicholas C. Zakas - 16th November 2006 05:08 - #

  15. There is something for Windows users - see - http://lifehacker.com/software/top/download-of-the -day--darkroom-185042.php

    Steve Ballmer - 16th November 2006 21:08 - #

  16. The Mac is a typewriter!

    Neil Kandalgaonkar - 16th November 2006 23:47 - #

  17. David, wow - I did not know that!

    Jeremy... Godwin, therefore Emacs wins. QED. Heh.

    Noah Slater - 17th November 2006 03:02 - #

  18. You might also like to take a look at Ulysses It's a grower.

    simonb - 17th November 2006 12:25 - #

  19. For full screen mode in any cocoa application, megazoomer: http://ianhenderson.org/megazoomer.html

    chas - 19th November 2006 00:18 - #

  20. I used to love WriteRoom. Today it flaked out on me, losing an hour's worth of writing. I poked around Application Support/WriteRoom and discovered the autosaved text file isn't in plain text -- and didn't have my words in it. Now it won't even create a new document.

    Goodbye, WriteRoom. I'll miss you.

    Jace - 22nd November 2006 10:03 - #

  21. "I poked around Application Support WriteRoom and discovered the autosaved text file isn't in plain text" WriteRoom 2.0 (beta is now availible on website) stores documents and standard txt and rtf document formats. It also uses standard appkit support for autosaving in separate backup files.

    Jesse Grosjean - 7th December 2006 04:02 - #

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