Focus Writer

Monday, 11 July, 2011

Good writers suffer from the art of procrastination and take it to new levels…. what can you do NOT to do any writing today?? There’s email, IM, Twitter, Skype, Facebook. And that’s before you get on to any of the work related distractions ;) And when you do actually fire up Word or Writer there are a plethora of menus and styles and the such-like to distract you.

What to do??? Well one possible route (besides NOT checking email until after lunch) is to use a word processor that avoids all the bells and whistles to help you focus on just the writing. Focus Writer is one (open source) example of a new breed of “simple” word processors. It eschews the bloatware charge led by Microsoft for a very simple single column pane. It can run by default maximised (so you can’t see anything else) and no tool bars are visible. Move your mouse over the topedge and a single line menu appears; over the bottom edge and a status bar appears. Functions? Its got a spell checker, find and replace and supports TXT or RTF. The latter is handy because you can do basic formatting (super/subscripts, indents, bold/italic, justification. And themes. And that’s it. There is (of course) a portable version as well.