Steven Poole — the author of amongst other things, Trigger Happy — has a great run down of the reasons he chose to switch from using Word for writing his books and articles. In the process, he swoons at great length over in particular WriteRoom and Scrivener, citing their simplicity, no-frills fullscreen modes and future-safe formats. All ‘minor’ details, that have also made me switch to using Scrivener for largely all my writing.
Lately I’ve been in need of something similar for Windows, strangely enough, to fill in some sparetime I have at work. But there somehow doesn’t seem to be quite the same market for ‘creative writing’ apps on Windows. I tried out Word 2007, and I must admit to finding it almost offensively obnoxious (whoever greenlit the background ‘reflection’, is hereby fired).
It makes me feel unappreciated to be honest.
But then, I’m also something of a formatting whore, and I honestly have problems starting up Word and just typing away; I can’t do it. The font is wrong, I’ve got to fix the line-height, would you look at those margins? Having finally come to terms with this illness of mine, I’ve faced the inevitable, and it is called Scrivener.
Now granted, for most of the fiction writing I’m fiddling with these days, any old text editor would probably do just fine. But since Scrivener has both a fantastic fullscreen mode (the only way to write!), and easy-to-use support for screenplay formatting, it’s pretty much a done deal for me.
Pages, in its current incarnation is a pretty damn good choice too. Start it up, collapse the toolbar, and it’s just a white page. Nice. And, it of course also comes with a screenplay template, because where the Word people think I need hundreds of ‘letter’ templates, what I really want is something to play with, I’ll figure the letter templates out myself, thank you very much
But, even with Scrivener, I do have a problem; moving between different computers and different OS’s is a damn hassle. All I really want, is a web-based Scrivener. I don’t think it would be a particularly hard application to create. At its most basic, Writer does the job, but I can’t defend having my work on someone else’s, potentially insecure server. Especially if I were to, at some point, write something work-related.
So, maybe worth spending some time on creating as an open source project?
Anyhoo, not that I’ve done much ‘serious’ writing as such, mostly just to satisfy my own curiosity. But I certainly understand what it feels like to discover the simplicity of something like WriteRoom. It’s like a revelation! How could I not have seen this before?! I start this thing, and then, I just write!
That’s the bottomline. Everything else is just in the way.
http://writer.bighugelabs.com/
http://writer.zoho.com/
http://docs.google.com/
Depending on your preferences, console applications can get the job done. Terminator (http://software.jessies.org/terminator/) plus Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/) with vim or emacs or nano or what have you, in full screen mode, can certainly fit the requirement of an application that takes up the whole screen and lets you just write. They’re intended for a somewhat different audience though, so YMMV. Personally, vim winds up just working really well for me, for some reason.
hcabbos, did you even read the entry? I linked to Writer :D — As for the other two, especially Google’s Docs, it’s simply too fugly and distracting for me to work with. The Fullscreen feature is the killer here…
David, true, and if I weren’t such a lazy bastard, I might even try them out :)
How is this layout not simple? I don’t get your grief over Word 2007 … compare your Writer link to the image shown, I know which one I’d choose any day.
In regards to your default margins and fonts, just change it and save it as a normal template. Or, alternatively, create your perfect writing environment and save it as a “Creative Writing” template.
If the print-preview look annoys, switch to “Draft” view and it looks more like Writer. Disable spell checking if you’re feeling like you just need some time on your own.
It seems to me like you’ve spent more time finding alternatives than customizing Word 2007 to your needs.
Dude, I’ve spent a long time switching doohickey’s off to trim it down, and I’m very interested in knowing how to turned off the [holdingbackvile.ogg] ‘glass background’.
This is what mine looks like:
Not bad, and it could certainly work. Only the background is like a thorn in my eye. Call me pedantic, but I hate it with all my heart.
This is how Pages looks when it’s no-frills:
I have trouble with both, because I am, as I said, a formatting whore. It’s like candy; if it’s there, I eat it.
Now WriteRoom looks like this, out of the box:
It has options for how big you want your ‘page’ to be, and a boatload of other things, most of which you’ll never need to touch.
It shuts out the world in a way neither Word, nor Pages can do, and it is a genuinely better ‘creative’ writing environment for it.
And finally Scrivener’s fullscreen mode:
I’ve got the toolbar showing, so you can see the options it includes, like changing the width of the ‘page’ (and old paradigm, for sure) and what not.
Now this is just looking at the question of what I think is the best sit-down-and-write-stupid, environment, and Scrivener wins for me. I simply write better and more easily when I’m in Scrivener. Chalk it up to whatever you want, but them’s the facts.
There’s a lot of other things in Scrivener that makes it a better ‘brainstorming/creative writing’ environment, but that’s another matter.
Now, Draft view in Word is simply too white. And it’s left-aligned… Left-alignment is just no good, not in Word, not in web-design. And it still has markers for ‘pages’, quite unnecessarily. And then there’s the footer and menu bars; what do I need them for when I’m writing?
I shall await your rebuttal :)
The other cool thing about Scrivener’s full screen is that you keep a lot of the functionality that you’d normally lose using WriteRoom. But, when all is said and done I just can’t pay $35 for Scrivener when there’s a nice little app like Bean out there. Sure it doesn’t have all the gee-whiz features, but it’s got enough to suit my needs.
BTW Bjørn, let me ask you a critical question: Why are you such a vehement defender of Word? It seems like it would make sense that for different kinds of writing tasks, different kinds of programs might be better suited. And let’s face it, Word tries to hit high and low, far and wide, which usually isn’t the best way to hit the bullseye.
I’m not a vehement defender of Word; I certainly wouldn’t use Word to edit text files, so I definitely agree that other text apps can have their place.
It just seemed to me that you were knocking Word for the wrong reasons, i.e. it being in your face, wrong typeface, page margins etc. when most of those things you can adjust to suit your fancy. If you want a black background, no interface writing application, then by all means use whatever takes your fancy. I personally miss the full screen edit functionality that they’ve taken out in an effort to simplify the app, so I’m with you there.
The background would annoy me too. In my MS-internal install for Office 2007, the background is a smooth gradient, so it must be something that’s different between the MS-internal and Retail builds of Office.
“But, when all is said and done I just can’t pay $35 for Scrivener when there’s a nice little app like Bean out there. “
You can get most of the features of Scrivener in Scrivener Gold, a stable beta that is free. Not as refined, not as pretty, but very functional. (It is a beta, so its not perfect, but it’s pretty damn solid.)
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/freestuff/ScrivScreens.html
[quote comment=“154819”]It just seemed to me that you were knocking Word for the wrong reasons, i.e. it being in your face, wrong typeface, page margins etc. when most of those things you can adjust to suit your fancy.[/quote]
True, but then I’m forced to hate applications on a more fundamental level than what it can or cannot be made to do for me. I hate it for what it would potentially do to my mom, if she were to use it. And Word, would probably get her strung out on some death-defying Comic Sans addiction.
I was impressed by what you mention Scrivner can do. Shame I can’t get it for my Dell.
I’ve also fallen in love with Scrivener. I still wish I wrote more, but when I do hunker down it’s so nice to work with.
I recently showed it off to a friend of mine and she’s very impressed and taking a look at it. But I ran into the same problem as you Michael when she asked if I could find something for her mom on Windows. There’s just nothing out there like Scrivener. All that’s listed on Scrivener’s links page (http://www.literatureandlatte.com/links.html) have some but not all of the features.
Luckily it sounds like we might be getting a Mac for her mom alleviating that individual issue. But I’d love to see something created that was similar to Scrivener for Windows. :)
I stumbled across Scrivener a few months back not long after I came back to Mac and I love it! In fact, it’s probably the only app keeping me on Mac, otherwise I’d just run back to XP (seriously, OS X is not all it’s cracked up to be, looks great but shocking usability).
An alternative for windows might be JDarkRoom, a PC version of WriteRoom.
Now, if I can just figure a way to run XP and coherence OS X…
I’m sorry; I could’ve sworn you just implied that XP had better usability than OS X…
I guess it depends on what you mean by usability, but yes, I do find XP much easier to use than OS X.
Maybe that’s because I have been a long time windows user an am new to OS X, but simple things like poor mouse responsiveness (I’ve tried third-party apps to help this) and simple things like focus follow (amongst many other gripes) mean I don’t like being in OS X as much as I do XP.
YMMV.
Have you seen Buzzword yet? It’s a very powerful web-based word processor with a very minimal interface. I think it might be close to what you’re looking for. Buzzword is currently in private beta, but I think that you have enough of a compelling reason to request an invitation.