Georges Simenon, the creator of Inspector Maigret, used to shut himself away with a good stock of sharpened pencils and paper so that he didn't even run the risk of interrupting the flow of his writing to sharpen a pencil. PyRoom (http://bit.ly/jv74EQ) can be your digital equivalent of Simenon's technique. Because it's a fullscreen editor without buttons, widgets, formatting options, menus and with only the minimum in terms of dialog windows, you can shut yourself off from your operating system's rich graphical environment and focus on writing and writing only. The screenshot below shows you just what I mean.
I've been using it myself for a year or so whenever I have any writing task that's not obviously straight-forward. This can be in any field - technical, financial, creative - and can involve as little as one or two paragraphs. Every time, PyRoom allows me to collect my thoughts and get them down on paper (so to speak), no matter which language I'm writing in.
Saving your text and leaving PyRoom require standard keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+s and Alt + F4 respectively. When you're draft is underway, you can continue in PyRoom or switch to another application to format it.
Developed by Florian Heinle, PyRoom is only available for Linux at the moment, although a Windows version is planned. For the impatient, WriteRoom on the Mac, and DarkRoom for Windows are similar environments that are already available. Or install PyRoom on a linux virtual machine running on your host.
Give it a go: there's nothing like a blank black screen for focusing the mind.
My age-old quest would be just like this but loading on startup, so my PC would function as a typewriter. A good compromise would be installing an extremly light and quick Linux version (I have Windows XP on small netbook) just for that one use and find a way for this program to start when I boot into Linux on a dual boot basis. Any idea if that's doable?
RépondreSupprimerIf I understand correctly what you want to do, I'd say that you can almost do it, but not quite so simply.
RépondreSupprimerIn you Linux installation, you need to have an editor like vi, vim, emacs, jed or zile. After booting up, you enter the command to start the editor (usually the application name). Then you can enter and edit text, save it and return to the command-line prompt.
So, there's one more step that what you envisaged.