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…
