The writeroom full#
The writeroom software#
The writeroom code#

But full screen has been refined by Nisus Writer, which Michael Chabon used to write “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” as well as the seminal program CopyWrite. What emerges instead is one pristine and welcoming scroll: Your clean and focused mind.įull screen is not a Scrivener invention Scrivener credits Ulysses, another excellent Word alternative for Mac.

Life’s daily cares slip into the shadows. When you’re working on a Scrivener opus, you’re not surrounded by teetering stacks of Firefox windows showing old Google searches or Citibank reports of suspicious activity. Not only does Scrivener save like a maniac so you needn’t bother, you also get to drop the curtain on life’s prosaic demands with a feature that makes its users swoon: full screen.

The writeroom software#

Instead, it shines and stands upright like a domino, which makes you think of a brisk “click” instead of a software “blurp.” It’s also black and white, like words on a page. Neither is it slightly rounded like some squishy teething toy. Unlike so many twerpy little applications, the Scrivener icon eschews that ubiquitous Curaçao blue. It greets you without Word’s back-slanted, subliterate “W” - speeding nervously to the finish line - but with an open-minded yin-yang adorned with quotation marks. Scrivener, then, is one of us, at home in the writer’s jumpy emotional and procedural universe. That “whilst”! It alone makes me feel like writing. Scrivener is “aimed at writers of all kinds - novelists, journalists, academics, screenwriters, playwrights - who need to refer to various research documents and have access to different organizational tools whilst aiming to create a finished piece of text.” Scriveners, unlike Word-slaves, have florid psychologies, esoteric requirements and arcane desires. But read on - and download the free trial - and being a Scrivener-empowered scrivener comes to seem like life’s greatest role. Ring, scrap and cork sound like fun, a Montessori playroom. The happy, broad-minded, process-friendly Scrivener software encourages note-taking and outlining and restructuring and promises all the exhilaration of a productive desk: “a ring-binder, a scrapbook, a corkboard, an outliner and text editor all rolled into one.” As its name makes plain, Scrivener takes our side it roots for the writer and not for the final product - the stubborn Word.

The writeroom code#

Our redeemer is Scrivener, the independently produced word-processing program of the aspiring novelist Keith Blount, a Londoner who taught himself code and graphic design and marketing, just to create a software that jibes with the way writers think. He has purged his life of Word entirely, and he says he feels great. So I have come to admire Steven Poole, author of books on video games and language, who trumpets a new radicalism on.