WriteMonkey is the new king of full-screen distraction free text editing.
For simple, distraction-free text editing, I had at first settled on Darkroom for Windows. It was pretty good but seemed somewhat unfinished. Then I found Q10 and decided it was the way to go.
Then a reader, Arch1k, suggested that WriteMonkey was the best editor in this genre. I’d never heard of it, but after finally downloading and trying it, it’s clear that my prior choices were inferior; WriteMonkey is much better. By a long shot.
WriteMonkey has some unique features.
Besides well-executed text editing, WriteMonkey includes features that set it apart from others such as Q10 and Darkroom.
Progress Bar – a thin line on the screen edge grows downwards as you type, indicating how far along you are towards a document length goal. The default is 3000 characters but can be set to any number of characters (with or without spaces included) or words. In the image above you can see the progress bar—it’s the thin line in the upper left. Click to view the larger image.
Jumps – pressing alt-J will bring up a list of locations within the document to which you can quickly jump. The list includes bookmarks, headlines, and paragraphs.
Repository – pressing alt-R will toggle between the edit display and a text repository, where you can keep snippits of text, URLs, etc. Essentially a scrap of electronic paper.
WriteMonkey executes typical features well.
Well-executed from front to back, WriteMonkey has yet to get in my way or make me grumble about some bothersome aspect.
It supports most of the normal things you would expect from a full-screen text editor: customizable fonts and colors, typing sounds, text statistics, spell checking, find and replace, and so on.
Notably, find and replace supports wildcards and regular expressions. Also, it seems to handle multi-monitor setups well.
Another nice feature is its support for zooming; control-scrollwheel zooms the text size and editing width, shift-scrollwheel zooms the text size, and alt-scrollwheel zooms the editing width.
WriteMonkey is the best full-screen text editor. So far.
So, for now, WriteMonkey is the best option I have found for distraction-free, full-screen text editing. It has more features than either Q10 or Darkroom (or others for that matter) and gets the job done better than either.
Check it out.
