Soothing

Being an Old Fart, I remember the days when hitting the "on" button on a desktop computer led to it very slowly growling and grinding into life, with the result of the looooong booting-up being just a blank screen displaying nothing more than:

C:/

No, I have no idea, either. If you were lucky, you might have a black screen with the text displayed in some version of Courier, normally a sickly lime-green colour.

In the intervening years software has grown like Topsy, much of it spurred by the widespread adoption of the Graphical User Interface and WYSIWYG techniques. The resulting bloatware too often serves to slow everything down, distracting you from writing rather than aiding it.

So imagine my surprise and delight to discover a whole class of programmes like JDarkRoom, word processor packages that take a resolutely minimalist approach.


With JDarkRoom, what you get is an enormous black screen; all the widgets and toolbars hidden leaving just you and the screen. When you start to type it's back to that Courier font, albeit now in a rather seductive green.

And it's so peaceful.

You can concentrate on writing, on letting words form on the "page" rather than worrying about formatting or indenting or any of the other numerous tricks that now take up half our mind, distracting us from the real business of producing the words at hand.

The down side? Well, so far I have been utterly unable to make many of the commands work -- in fact, it's been a struggle to find a complete list of commands (I still haven't). I know Ctrl-S means save. And I know Esc means quit. But I can't cut and paste, and nor can I even open a new document -- everything has to be over-written on the one document I did succeed in opening (and which automatically reopens whenever I turn on the program. Which I guess is handy if you're writing a novel).

I have certainly never been able to find this screen, the Holy Grail of JDarkRoom's controls (and pressing F6 on my MacBook, which is supposed to give this screen, simply turns on Number Lock):


When I want to format my text, I open the file as a Word document (it's all saved in rtf) and then go about my business.

This separation of the two processes is, for me, helpful. I just wish I could have a teeny bit more control over JDarkRoom. But even without it, I am in love with it.

Sometimes the simplest things are the best.