After reading mentions of Dark Room and its Mac predecessor, WriteRoom, for a while, I finally gave it a shot and am pretty impressed overall (with Dark Room, at least).
Update: Distraction-free text editing has a new contender. Check out my review of WriteMonkey.
Dark Room is written and supported by Jeffrey Fuller. In his words:
Dark Room is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, Dark Room is just about you and your text. Basically, Dark Room is a clone of the original WriteRoom that is an OS X (tiger) exclusive application. It is a child of necessity, as there were no viable alternatives in Windows to produce the same behavior.
Text On Your Screen
This is no WYSIWYG editor. It’s text on your screen. Period. It’s green text on your screen. Green Courier New 12pt text on your screen.
The idea is that there are no distractions, and it works pretty well. You can hit F11 to toggle into and out of fullscreen mode and the clipboard works as you’d expect, so while it looks like a VT220 terminal, you get the benefits of modern life (wow, is that as far as we’ve come in over three decades?).
A basic statistics function (Control-/) is included as well. It displays a count of words, lines, and characters (both including spaces and without spaces). That’s nice. It’d be nice if it included more statistics, such as average word length, reading level, etc. Also, it would be nice if it worked on a selected area of text.
Customize Dark Room
Dark Room may favor Courier New as the default font, but you can, of course, customize the font choice. This is especially handy if you feel the need to dail the way-back machine a little further back and use Comic Sans.
Also, you can change the font and background colors, the opacity of the window, the cursor blink rate, and even enable multiple monitor support. Dark Room supports auto indent, tab-to-space conversion, page settings, autosave, and file context menu integration.
Suggestions
Dark Room does what it is built to do; it gives you a functional text editor with no clutter. However, adding some additional features might be nice.
- Though Find is supported, Replace is probably the most obvious missing feature.
- Regular expression support in Find (and Replace) would be great.
- A hotkey to preview in a web browser of choice might be nice. Not necessary, but HTML tags are a common part of modern writing and toggling between a rendered view and the default text editor would be handy.
- Likewise, some basic HTML tagging support. For example, highlighting a phrase then pressing Control-B would bold the text (by wrapping with <b> or <strong> tags).
- The Statistics function is pretty basic and works on the entire document. It would be nice if it included more statistics like reading level, average word length, etc. and if also worked on selected text.
Overall
Dark Room is a great editor that I’m already using regularly, which, given its missing features, is a testament to the need it meets and Fuller’s implementation.
