I like wordpress as a blogging platform, but I do not care for the online post editor. In fact, I have yet to use an online editor that I have been thrilled about so I use off line, desktop editors.
When I am in the middle of some code, and I want to blurt something out, I often use Textmate‘s blogging bundle, or if I am in Eclipse I use my blogging plugin. However, for most of the general posts (like this one) I’ve been using ecto.
All of those applications though are less than optimal for longer, deep-thought text (not that I have any posts like that, but I am trying to work towards those). What would work the best, for me, would be a full screen distraction free editor like Scrivener. However, while Scrivener is great for writing books and papers, it’s a bit overkill for writing a simple blog post.
The application that seems to have everything I am after appears to be one called Writeroom. It looks perfect, but in my opinion $24.95 is kind of ridiculous for something so basic. It’s basically textedit with full screen abilities.
Being the cheap skate I am, I decided to look for a better deal.
I started looking for open source projects first and found one called pyroom, which is a free, open source python + GTK version of writeroom. Unfortunately, the site seems to be sketchy today. After a bit of digging I finally got the source, but I couldn’t get it to run correctly on my Mac. You might have better luck on Windows, or Linux (or if you are a bit more determined on Mac).
Speaking of Windows, if you use it you can use DarkRoom which is the same program on windows.
Next up I tried to find a way to get Textmate to behave like writeroom. There is some talk of a plugin thing you can download that lets you tweak any OS X application, and can get Textmate to “kind of” work like writeroom, but the whole thing seemed hackish and I didn’t want to mess that much with it.
Finally, I found this sweet program called JDarkRoom – which is a port of DarkRoom which is a port of WriteRoom. JDarkRoom is just like writeroom, but written in Java and free (not open source though).
And by jove, it actually works! Well, aside from one small thing that is. The illusive emacs key bindings. They do work in the editor, but the program uses some of the bindings for other things. For example, ctrl+n in JDarkRoom means “make a new document” which collides with the proper “go to next line” all the other OS X apps support. There are a few others like that too, but if you are not a emacs key nerd, then the application works perfectly.
Since it’s java too it should work on all systems as well.
I can’t use it until they get the bindings sorted because I am just too used to using the emacs keys to move around in text (I put in a bug and hopefully it’ll get sorted soon), but it’s a great find for those who like the idea of WriteRoom, but just can’t see coughing up $25 for the program.
(Another way to get WriteRoom is to grab the new macheist bundle – which is $50, but comes with several programs.)