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.”

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