Writer: A Distraction-Free Word Processor

So I was talking to Mike at work and he mentioned a site he uses for writing called DarkCopy. DarkCopy is one of those distraction-free word processing applications that you can only describe as ‘minimal’. DarkCopy does nothing except display the letters you’re typing on a black background. There’s no font faces, no tables, no bullet lists, no ClipArt, nothing. It’s just words on a page.

As is so often the case with these things when I went searching for the site myself I’d forgotten the name. I knew of WriteRoom (an OS X application that popularised the distraction-free concept and on which DarkCopy is based) so I went looking for web-based alternatives to it.

While I didn’t type the right things into Google to get DarkCopy to come up I did discover another alternative in my search, Writer. Writer styles itself as the ‘internet typewriter’ and does pretty much the same thing DarkCopy does while adding a teeny weeny bit more functionality. It’s still mostly text on a black background but in addition there’s a word count, the ability to print, email, convert to PDF and, for me the most important difference, save your work. Writer autosaves your work to its servers so you don’t need to worry about accidentally closing the window or having to leave your work half-written (it uses cookies to remember you so it’s not even necessary to create an account, it starts saving stuff right away).

This extra functionality sits relatively unobtrusively at the bottom of the page. True aficionados will point out this still provides a distraction but as someone that rarely finishes a piece of writing in one sitting it’s crucial for me to be easily able to save and recover documents I’ve written previously.

The only thing I dislike about Writer is it doesn’t appear possible to resize the input window. If you have a large viewing window this isn’t too much of a problem but as someone who uses it on my wife’s 12″ iBook it’s a little frustrating to be able to only see two paragraphs of text. Particularly when the layout leaves a good deal of space empty at the very bottom of the page. I tried a few Firefox extensions that claim to resize text input fields but they didn’t help either. I’ve sent off an email to the site’s creator, John Watson, suggesting it as a feature he might like to implement but considering how many people there are using the site on their wife’s 12″ iBook (a rough estimate puts it at one) I don’t really expect anything to materialise any time soon.

So, in conclusion, Writer comes recommended as an excellent (and did I mention free?) alternative to Word, Notepad, Windows Live Writer or whatever it is you’re currently typing your stuff into.