Lawrence Boatwright Photography

There aren’t many editing environments where there really aren’t any distractions. While I’m editing a document I play a continuous game of checking the spelling, checking grammar, fiddling with heading styles. The list goes on and on. I don’t know how many times I’ve ended up in Microsoft’s utterly useless online ‘help’ searching for something I don’t really need right now. Or ever probably.

Well, now there’s this fantastic little editor. I can’t remember what it’s called and I can’t find out without exiting and checking its name because it doesn’t even run in a window. It creates a full black screen with green writing. Very retro. Very uncluttered and very focussed. Right now I don’t even know if there are spelling mistakes in here and I quite honestly don’t care. I am able to focus on getting ideas written done. Period.

It’s rather strange how it’s taken so long to get back to the days of simple text editors. I remember WordStar being something like this, only I could add little mark-ups to indicate italic or bold or whatever. Here I can’t even do that. Fantastic!

Oh, now I remember. It’s called ‘Dark Room’. It’s free and you can download it from somewhere. Now go and do it yourself because I’m busy typing. The original was for Apple of course and it’s called ‘Write Room’. Not much sense in that: ‘Dark Room’, ‘Write Room’. Oh well.

Managing to put together any kind of sense in a blog entry without fiddling and phaffing about is an ongoing struggle for me. I think it must be some form of ADD or something. This blank, black screen is spooky but it works. I also cannot help wondering when all the little green characters will start moving about and I’ll have to return to the matrix.