Day 30: DarkRoom Review(ish)

It shouldn’t surprise me how often writing tips, advice, and strategies drift to the top of the various aggregators’ lists. The whole world seems to be writing now. Last night I came across something that I’ve hoped for for some time. I am writing in it now.

Not that you could tell.

DarkRoom is a Windows homage to the Mac application WriteRoom. On a Mac it’s a throw back to the Apple][e on a Windows machine its a throwback to DOS or WordPerfect 5.1. A text editor that robs your screen of all the distractions, replacing it with green text on black background. A CRT.

I’ve been able to replicate this look in Windows and Office for some time. You have to spend a while tweaking the environmental settings of the OS and then throw Office into fullscreen mode. I have settings for classic green and neo-classic amber. Trouble is that the plugin menu for Adobe PDF puts a kink in the screen and Office forces you to have a “Fullscreen” toggle menu. You can hide it in the bottom corner, but the magic is tainted still.

With DarkRoom you may set the background opacity down from 100%. Your text appears to be floating mid-air over all the other windows on your screen. I have it set to 75% now. It feels like a jet fighter HUD. That’s teh shit. I wonder what it looks like set to 0%.

Not so good.

First, it doesn’t go to straight 0%–something more like 10% is the nadir. Second, the text looks like it drops off opacity along with the background. Instead of appearing like my text is just weirdly overwriting the spreadsheet I have open in the window below, it looks like somethings broken on my screen.

Let’s see if I can hook you up with a screenshot…