Dark Room Text Editor: If All You Want to Do is Write
Big thanks to Michael Werner and Dosh Dosh for helping bring this nifty writer’s tool to my attention. I’ve been looking for something like this for my PC for the longest time!
What I wanted was a word or text processor for my PC that behaved and looked much like the MS-DOS word processors many of us grew up with did — black screen, green (or amber) text, monospaced screen font, and probably best of all, minimal distractions (no color, windows, icons, blinkies and other attention-seekers), leaving us with just our words and writing.
Through the years I made do with one solution after another, but with Dark Room, I think my search is finally over!
Check out the screen shot (click on the thumbnail to magnify) — that’s exactly what I’m looking at right now. Well, I’m on a high-res monitor, so there are large black areas on the left and right that I cropped out (all that black helps with the focus on writing thing, though). As you can see, there’s precious little to distract you from your words!
You can run it in a window on your desktop if you prefer (kind of defeats the purpose, but to each his own), and there are enough “Preferences” options to somewhat tailor the program to suit you. You can change the background and text colors, for example, and the font (the first thing I fiddled with since taking that screen shot; I’m not a big fan of the default Courier for on-screen viewing), and a number of other basic settings I’ll leave for you to discover.
Funny thing is I’m old enough to remember when this kind of app used to be the epitome of high tech; now it falls under the category of no frills.
A few things to note:
• Like the app, installation is also no frills. After downloading the compressed ZIP file, extract its contents into a directory on your hard drive. Clicking on the application icon launches the program. So you don’t have to keep navigating to the folder when you want to run the program, create a shortcut on your desktop, like so:
- While in Explorer, viewing the contents of the directory where you’ve placed the Dark Room files, right-click on the Dark Room application icon.
- Context menu appears. I’m using Vista, but the menu choices should be similar if you’re using older versions of Windows. Click on Add to Quick Launch (to add the Dark Room icon to the Quick Launch section of your task bar), and/or Send To > Desktop (create shortcut) to put an icon on your desktop.
That’s it. Now you’ve got an easy way to run Dark Room whenever you need it.
• When you first run it, Dark Room launches into full screen mode, which completely takes over your whole screen. And like old MS-DOS programs, there’s precious little in the way of interface: no menus, options, choices… don’t freak! Just press <ESC> and it’ll become a regular window with menus and all (<F11> returns it to full screen).
Go through the menus and options while in window mode to familiarize yourself with the program’s features (don’t worry; the feature-set is a very balanced “enough but not too much to be confusing”).
Even when in full screen mode, it behaves pretty much the way other Windows text processors do, so really, I don’t think you’ll have much difficulty figuring this app out and getting productive.
Highly recommended!
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