Ia Writer 3 0 – Distraction Free Digital Writing Tool
But how do you eliminate distractions when you’re writing on a computer, a device which is itself a distraction? A distraction free writing tool might help. These full screen text editors do their best to remove everything that is not important to the task of writing. In this post, I’ll have a look at five of them in an attempt to find the right one for me. Let’s see what Left, Ghostwriter, iA Writer, Writemonkey 3, and Calmly Writer have to offer. https://servetorrent.mystrikingly.com/blog/really-good-free-video-editing-software.
- Ia Writer 3 0 – Distraction Free Digital Writing Tool Download
- Ia Writer 3 0 – Distraction Free Digital Writing Tool Free
Left
“iA Writer creates a clean, simple and distraction-free writing environment for when you really need to focus.”. The New York Times # The Original Introduced in 2010, iA Writer is the common benchmark for Markdown writing apps. # The Simple No custom file format or database: Edit your plain text files in any app you like. Writemonkey 3 is a “zenware” writing application with an extremely stripped down user interface, leaving you alone with your thoughts and your words. It is light, fast and free. With an array of innovative tools under the hood and full Markdown support, it helps you write better.
Left is distraction-free plaintext editor designed to quickly navigate between segments of an essay, or multiple documents. It features auto-complete, Markdown support, synonyms suggestions, writing statistics, markup-based navigation and a speed-reader.
The application was initially created to help Rekka with the writing of the upcoming novel Wiktopher, and later made available as a free and open source software.
Left isn’t truly full-screen. In Windows, I can still see the menu bar, which annoys me like crazy. The auto-complete and synonymous features are very nice, but they have an unfortunate side effect. As you write, information flashes along on the bottom of the screen, where both the auto-complete and synonym suggests appear. This is a distraction in itself, which is unfortunate for a text editor that aims to eliminate them. Also, there is no way to control the width of the text in full-screen mode. This means that on a wide-screen monitor, you have to move your eyes a lot from side to side as you write.
Ghostwriter
Ghostwriter is a distraction-free Markdown editor for Windows and Linux. It comes with full screen mode, document and session statistics, Markdown support, and a very clean interface. A built in theme editor gives you full control of the look and feel of the editor, and the live HTML preview makes it easy to get a sense of what your content will look like on the web.
Ghostwriter utilizes head-up displays to provide information and special actions. The Outline HUD facilitates navigating large documents. Simply click on a heading in the HUD to go to a different section of your document, including within the live preview.
To stand out from the crowd, Ghostwriter comes with something called “Hemingway mode”. Clicking on the “Hemingway” button in the lower right corner of the editor will disable your backspace and delete keys, creating a typewriter experience. This feature is especially useful if you want to avoid editing and force yourself to write.
iA Writer
iA Writer is a writing app designed with one goal in mind: Making you enjoy the process of writing. It gets everything out of the way so you can focus on getting your words on the screen.
The app comes with a wide range of features, like focus mode, reading time, Markdown support, syntax highlighting, typewriter scrolling, night mode, content blocks, hashtags, Word export, and much more. There is one important thing to know, however. iA Writer for different operating systems comes with different features. The Windows version, for instance, doesn’t come with syntax highlighting. But it has chapter folding, which the macOS version doesn’t have.
iA Writer is a paid application, but you can download a fully functional trial version to test it before you purchase.
Writemonkey 3
Writemonkey 3 is a “zenware” writing application with an extremely stripped down user interface, leaving you alone with your thoughts and your words. It is light, fast and free. With an array of innovative tools under the hood and full Markdown support, it helps you write better. Writemonkey 3 is available for Windows, macOS and Linux.
This is a mature application that comes with a wide range of options that enable you to tailor it to your needs. Webmonkey 3 is very keyboard friendly, which I love. All the application’s features can be accessed without touching the mouse. If you can’t remember a particular keyboard shortcut, you can use the command palette, which you might know from Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code.
Another lovely touch is the built-in white noise generator. With sounds ranging from an airport to a river, you’re sure to find something to keep your mind from getting distracted.
Writemonkey 3 is free to download and use on as many machines as needed. There are, though, some goodies, namely plugins, that are only available to donors.
Calmly Writer
Calmly Writer sticks out from the rest of the crowd in that it’s not an application in the classical sens of the word. Instead, Calmly Writer is a pure web application. It’s also available as an app for Chrome OS if you dabble in stuff like that.
As the other applications, Calmly Writer comes with full-screen support and focus mode, and dark mode. It also makes sure that your work is safe by making continuous backups. It supports opening and saving local files, but it also supports Google Drive. This means that you can take all your files with you. Personally, I don’t recommend using Google Drive, but that’s another discussion.
That Calmly Writer is a web application means it can use the browsers internal spell checker. Some of the other applications also come with spell checkers, but they are often limited to a few languages. This is not an issue when the browser’s own spell checker is used.
The web application approach also means that Calmly Writer doesn’t care what operating system you are using. Windows, Linux, macOS, Android or iOS, the app will work on any of those operating systems.
Final thoughts
At first sight, Calmly Writer is very appealing. I love that you don’t have to install anything, and that the browsers own spell checker can be used. Unfortunately, Calmly Writer seems to be abandoned. The Chrome OS app hasn’t been updated since 2017, and the last update on the @CalmlyWriter Twitter account was in September, 2018. That the app has been abandoned by the developer might not be a problem, but I prefer to use software that’s alive.
With Calmly Writer out of the picture, it’s hard to choose between the four remaining apps. But I’m leaning towards Writemonkey 3. In general, all four of the apps have basically the same basic features. What makes me gravitate towards Writemonkey 3 is that makes it easier than the other three to navigate with the keyboard. I’m a great fan of using the keyboard as much as possible, and avoiding the mouse. Having to go from one input device - the keyboard - to another - the mouse - is just another distraction I’d love to be able to eliminate.
https://ameblo.jp/inamor-yuta/entry-12657093324.html. All these applications can help you achieve distraction free writing. But to get real distraction free writing, you have to disconnect your computer from the internet, and throw away your phone. Or perhaps good, old-fashioned pen and paper is the way to go.
by Gene Wilburn
TOOL REVIEW updated 5/3/2014
Simplify, simplify, simplify.
—H.D. Thoreau, Walden
Let’s face it: desktop, laptop, and tablet computers can be distracting. You only just begin writing and achieve a little momentum when your mind decides to take a quick email break, or see what’s new on Facebook, or dash off a tweet. Or an alert informs you that there’s a fresh New York Times crossword puzzle waiting in your crossword app. The next thing you know, your writing session is over and your time has been frittered away by addictive, fun, but nonproductive pursuits. Don’t feel alone. Most of us find our computing devices distracting. What we need is help in blocking out distractions.
The most obvious way to avoid distraction is to screen it out, like a blackout curtain in Oslo used to screen out the midnight sun at midsummer. Happily, your current word processor may already have a screening mode that will hide the menus and icons of other programs so that what you see resembles a blank sheet in a typewriter.
Free spins for existing players. The latest versions of Microsoft Word, for instance, offer a view called Focus View that opens your writing palette full screen and hides all menus and scroll bars. Similarly, the Swiss army knife of writing tools, Scrivener, has a view called Composition Mode that effectively screens out the complexity of the menus. In LibreOffice Writer this view is called, simply, Full Screen, and it’s also called Full Screen in Apple’s Pages word processor.
If this mode helps you and you’re happy with the result, then you’ve already found a solution. However, if you’re yearning for even more freedom from distraction, or are simply curious about what other writing tools offer, there are products that also screen you from the complexities of, say, Word or Scrivener by keeping things minimal. These apps don’t try to be full word processors or outliners. They simply let you write text, the way you would on a typewriter. With the addition of spellchecking, of course.
In general, minimalist editors share certain characteristics. They usually create plain text files that end in the file extension .txt. They sometimes offer rich text format (RTF) for preserving attributes such as italic, underscore, bold, and font choices. RTF files end in the extension .rtf and are easily imported into any major word processor.
Text Editors
The simplest editors of all are the text editors that come with your operating system. In Windows, this is Notepad or a third-party substitute. For Mac users this is TextEdit. For Linux users the editor would be Vim, Gedit, Emacs, or one of the many open-source variants.
The reason some writers write with a text editor—Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon), for instance, uses Emacs, a Unix/Linux editor—is that text editors are fast, lightweight, and nimble, as well as being free of any formatting distractions. They also perform well on older computers. You don’t need the latest in hardware to run these peppy little programs—you just start typing and go. The following distraction-free editors, however, offer additional support for writing not generally found in text editors.
WriteRoom (http://www.hogbaysoftware.com) may be the quintessential minimalist editor aimed at writers. Available for Mac and iOS, it costs $9.99 and $4.99 at the respective app stores.
Ia Writer 3 0 – Distraction Free Digital Writing Tool Download
WriteRoom offers two modes: a text window similar to Windows Notepad or Mac TextEdit, and a full-screen mode that blocks out all distractions from the system. One interesting option it offers is “typewriter scrolling” that, similar to a typewriter, keeps the current line in the center of the screen so you don’t have to type looking at the bottom of the page. WriteRoom has customizable sounds, including typewriter clicks for those who miss the typewriter experience. You can set the color palette of your choice, such as black background with soothing amber or green letters, like an early PC monitor. WriteRoom offers spellchecking as you type and it tracks word count. It can also convert between plain text and rich text formats. This time-proven product is a solid choice for Mac and iOS users.
Q10 (http://www.baara.com/q10/) is a free Windows minimalist editor similar to WriteRoom but with a few extras. It offers a spellchecker, timer (for timed writing sessions) and statistics that include word count, character count, and page count.
Ia Writer 3 0 – Distraction Free Digital Writing Tool Free
It has a useful “notes” feature: any paragraph starting with “.” is considered a note. You can get a list of all the notes in your manuscript and jump immediately to any of them. You can also set goals: a target count of words, paragraphs, or pages, and view a percentage stat of how close you are to meeting your target. This is particularly useful for writers adhering to a strict daily word count.
Like WriteRoom, Q10’s color schemes are customizable. Unlike WriteRoom, Q10 produces plain text only, with no option for rich text. This editor is an excellent choice for Windows users.
FocusWriter (www.gottcode.org/focuswriter) is a free editor that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers. Similar to WriteRoom and Q10, FocusWriter combines some of the elements of both. Like Q10, it offers daily goals, timers, and alarms, and like WriteRoom it can produce both plain text and rich text files. It also provides support for basic OpenOffice/LibreOffice .odt files.
Its appearance is especially customizable, not only in terms of colors, but also in terms of background themes for those who prefer a bit of pizzazz, even in a minimalist editor. It includes a spellchecker and an optional scene list sidebar. FocusWriter can put you into a focused text mode in which the current sentence you’re writing stays in full view while surrounding sentences are dimmed. This can be useful for keeping your mind on composing rather than editing.
Running on multiple computer platforms, FocusWriter is an especially good choice for writers who use more than one operating system.
iA Writer (http://www.iawriter.com) is available for Mac ($4.99 [price currently reduced 50% until next update]) and iOS ($4.99) at the respective app stores. It presents a white background with black letters, like a sheet of paper in a typewriter; a full screen mode that blocks out distractions; and a focus mode that focuses on the current sentence, in the manner of FocusWriter. Unlike the rest of the minimalist writing tools, it doesn’t offer the writer a choice of screen fonts. Instead it supplies a single, attractive fixed font, akin to a typewriter font.
iA Writer can export to both .rtf and .html. What makes this little editor hot is its secret weapon: it employs standard Markdown symbols to add attributes such as bold, italic, lists, or block quotes. For instance, in Markdown language you can italicize iA Writer by typing *iA Writer*, surrounding it with asterisks. If the concept of plain-text formatting piques your interest, you can find out more about Markdown syntax at daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/basics on the website maintained by John Gruber, creator of Markdown. (For more information on Markdown, see “What is Markdown?“) Even without using Markdown, iA Writer is a pleasant writing tool that can sync files between a Mac and an iPad, via iCloud or Dropbox, for those who switch back and forth between computer and tablet.
These distraction-free editors are great for any writer who needs help concentrating on the work at hand, especially while composing. Once you’ve had a taste of distraction-free writing, it’s jarring to go back to a writing mode that displays menus and icons. As Thoreau implies in Walden, simplicity can be deeply profound. Productive, too. ■
Gene Wilburn is a writer/photographer residing in Port Credit, Ontario, Canada. Gene serves as an advisor and nonfiction editor for Small Print Magazine.