FocusWriter is all writing, no distractions

"It's November, and all around the world aspiring novelists (including this reporter) have turned their attention to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). In the spirit of choosing the right tools for the job, I decided to look for an application more suited to fiction than my trusty Vim, and found FocusWriter. It's certainly not a replacement for Vim, but it's a suitable word processor for prose.

"FocusWriter is a "distraction free" word processor that's designed to help writers immerse themselves in their work. When run, it elbows aside everything else on the screen and demands the writer's full attention. Granted, one could achieve a similar effect by simply writing in a full-screen terminal or switching to the console and running Vim or Emacs — but many writers (Neal Stephenson excepted) are not well-versed in the classic text editors. Since I was trying to make a break from my normal mode of writing about technology in Vim using HTML, I wanted to see if a change of pace (or application) could boost creativity. Of the crop of distraction-free word processors (more on those below), FocusWriter looked the most promising.

"FocusWriter is written by Graeme Gott, who publishes it and several other applications under the Gott Code brand. FocusWriter is Qt-based, free software (GPLv3), and packages are available from Gott for almost all major Linux distributions. Debian is the notable exception, but source is available if the Ubuntu packages will not install on Debian. It's multi-platform as well, with releases available for Mac OS X, Windows, and even OS/2."

Complete Story

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