Up until now I’ve mostly written all of my posts and pages in a program called MarkdownPad. Even though I really like it I sometimes feel that it’s a bit too… clunky, for lack of a better word. It’s great for doing shorter writings and editing files, but I haven’t really been comfortable using it as a long form writing environment. As I do with a lot of stuff I once again sat down in front of my screen to find something new and preferably awesome that I could use.

FocusWriter

FocusWriter is a cross platform, distraction-free text editor (or writing environment, as the developer himself calls it). It’s a pretty neat looking app with an minimalistic interface but it also has suprisingly many features. It supports both rich text and plain text formatting, but sadly there’s no real Markdown support, meaning that it doesn’t have any syntax support. You can still write it in the editor of course though and it can actually both open and save documents with a Markdown file extension, which is good. What I mostly like about is that it has a clean interface and that it hides all the menus by default.

One thing I really hate about distraction-free/full screen editors is that I often feel too trapped when I use them. I mean, they’re probably a life saver for many people but it’’s not my cup of tea. If I’m stuck I want to be able to take a quick break and then jump right back in when I get the urge to write some more. Fortunately, FocusWriter gives me the ability to do so. You can also make your own themes where you can change the colors, the typeface and the margins for the writing area which also comes in handy.

So far I’ve only been using it for about two or three days, but I have a feeling that it’ll stick around for a much longer period.

A side note

To my suprise I first found an app for Ubuntu (who would’ve thought?) called UberWriter. It looks exactly like iA Writer (apart from some minor color details), which means that it’s incredibly gorgeous. You should try it out if you get the chance.