I just got around to checking in with the WriteMonkey site (http://writemonkey.com/ to see if the minimalistic word processor had been updated and found that, indeed, it has.

Some of what's in the newest version (As of Dec. 1st) is under the hood, ensuring compatibility with Windows 8. The main interface has also been updated to look more like a piece of paper taking up the full screen which looks rather pleasant.

For any Windows users who have ever been jealous of the availability of minimal text editors on the Mac like iA Writer or Byword, well, this is it for Windows. And it's free. (Though, I think I'm at the point where I should probably be making a donation to the creator.)

That said, I do wish the creator would implement a standard installer and update system. Having to manually unpack the archive file and create a program directory is, though small, still pretty inconvenient.

It would also be nice to have some kind of preview system since you're writing with markup rather than WYSIWYG, though I'm always reluctant to ramble on about "missing" features when it comes to applications whose purpose is to be minimal.

Thanks for the heads up. Interestingly, WriteMonkey is a .NET application (now using version 4.0) which seems rather strange for a non-graphical tool.

It is part of my standard plain text toolbox in Windows, but I'm also using TextRoom http://textroom.sourceforge.net/ which is cross-platform.

Writespace (a Word add-in that turns Word into distraction-free writer), FocusWriter, Zen Writer and Q10 are other choice and are just a few of the (seemingly) countless number of Windows alternatives in this category.

Listerene wrote:

Writespace (a Word add-in that turns Word into distraction-free writer)

Thanks for this. Has anyone tried Writespace with Word 2010 on Win7, 64-bit? My main concern would be stability, i.e. I wouldn't like to lose any content whatsoever. But otherwise I wished to have something like this for Word for years...

http://writespace.codeplex.com/

@ Dr Andus

Regarding stability this quote from the site may be of importance: "Always, always, always keep a copy of your orginal document or text before you try out or use Writespace so you can revert if things go bad. Writespace is work in progress and has not yet been tested enough to be called "stable"."

My question is why you would use Writespace instead of some other software (Writemonkey e.g.) and finally copy and paste text into Word. The only advantage of Writespace I can see is spell checking.

When I read about "Word Integration" and "Text Formatting" I understand that I lose everything what Word has to offer (e.g. paragraph and character styles, tables ...). So, why I should write in Word?

Do I miss something? Thanks!

@Bernhard

Thanks. I guess they don't have a Word 2010 installer anyway, so it might not even be a possibility.

My question is why you would use Writespace instead of some other software (Writemonkey e.g.) and finally copy and paste text into Word.

Because I've tried them all and I've been having problems with them on my Win7, 64-bit machine. Things wouldn't run properly, would produce error messages etc. - enough to put me off.

Plus it would be just a question of convenience to have something similar to Scrivener's one-click distraction-free full-screen view in Word. Quick switching back and forth. Also, it would be nice to still be able to use Word add-ons during distraction-free writing, such as Dragon dictation or EndNote citations.

@Dr Andus

Thank you very much for the clarification! Indee, I didn't consider the add-ins.

Dr Andus wrote:

Because I've tried them all and I've been having problems with them on
my Win7, 64-bit machine. Things wouldn't run properly, would produce
error messages etc. - enough to put me off.

WriteMonkey should have no such problem, even on Windows 8, as it uses the latest version of the .NET framework. I've used it in my Win7 64bit laptop with no problem.

Plus it would be just a question of convenience to have something
similar to Scrivener's one-click distraction-free full-screen view in
Word. Quick switching back and forth. Also, it would be nice to still be
able to use Word add-ons during distraction-free writing, such as Dragon
dictation or EndNote citations.

I don't know if you'd be able to use the add-ons in the Writespace environment. Unfortunately I also have Word 2010 so cannot test it anymore.

Dragon dictation might work in WriteMonkey and such. For Endnote, I had the impression that there is a special URL for each reference, which one can integrate in plain text files and have them be updated by the relevant info through the Word Endnote add-on, but I may be confused with another bibliographic tool (I seem to have done this mistake before actually).

There is always the possibility of selecting a text and using Text Editor Anywhere to zap you to your favourite plain text environment and back again, but you'd be losing any existing formatting along the way.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

WriteMonkey should have no such problem, even on Windows 8, as it uses
the latest version of the .NET framework. I've used it in my Win7 64bit
laptop with no problem.

Thanks. Maybe it's something with my system then. But I had an error message (something or other missing or not running) right at the start, so I didn't continue with it.

For Endnote, I had
the impression that there is a special URL for each reference, which one
can integrate in plain text files and have them be updated by the
relevant info through the Word Endnote add-on, but I may be confused
with another bibliographic tool (I seem to have done this mistake before
actually).

Yeah, we discussed that before - I don't think that's possible in EndNote.

I would be interested in something like Writespace but otherwise I'm reasonably happy with the Fences quick-hide feature (I set my desktop to a uniform grey).

BTW, these days I use StoryView as my main writing tool (which is also grey), as it allows for almost real-time reverse outlining. (I'm using Outline 4D for viewing 3 tiled docs in my second monitor, which is why I'm not using that instead of StoryView).

Dr Andus wrote:

BTW, these days I use StoryView as my main writing tool (which is also
grey), as it allows for almost real-time reverse outlining. (I'm using
Outline 4D for viewing 3 tiled docs in my second monitor, which is why
I'm not using that instead of StoryView).

Are you referring to StoryView (which is the previous name of Outline 4D) or to StoryTurbo which is a completely different program?

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Are you referring to StoryView (which is the previous name of Outline
4D) or to StoryTurbo which is a completely different program?

Yes, I'm talking about StoryView. O4D can't have two instances running, hence I need to use StoryView.

Here is a screenshot of StoryView, once Fences hides my desktop icons (a simple double-click anywhere on the desktop). It's not totally distraction-free, but these are distractions (StoryView functions, launch bar to other apps) that are useful to me. (Paragraph formatting is done by StoryView automatically based on my preferences, so formatting does not distract me from writing - but this forum does :)

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/428516/screenshot_2013-01-08_16-53-31.png

Dr Andus wrote:

Yes, I'm talking about StoryView. O4D can't have two instances running,
hence I need to use StoryView.

Ah yes, I seem to recall you having mentioned this before. I understand that an additional license is not needed for this.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

I understand
that an additional license is not needed for this.

I'm not sure what Write Bros' official policy is on that. From a practical perspective you do need two different serial numbers (O4D on top of that has more digits) and they need to be activated online. But there is no harm in asking for an SV license, once one has splashed out on an O4D license...

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Dr Andus wrote:
>Because I've tried them all and I've been having problems with them on
>my Win7, 64-bit machine. Things wouldn't run properly, would produce
>error messages etc. - enough to put me off.

OK, I'm not sure what the source of my problems was in the past. I did update my .Net framework recently though, so maybe that did the trick. In any case, WriteMonkey (v. 2.5.0.9) now works perfectly on my system and I'm just lovin' it.

Dragon dictation might work in WriteMonkey and such.

And it does work with Dragon!! Can't believe it... Besides the Markdown support, that is another major advantage over FocusWriter (which I still love, just a bit less :)

I'm confused. What is "distracting" in Word, WordPad, etc.? Personally, I like to be able to BOLD, Italic, etc. I even used Word's capabilities to change the toolbars, for example creating a "hanging indent" capability. Maybe my brain just works differently.

Cassius wrote:

I'm confused. What is "distracting" in Word, WordPad, etc.?
Personally, I like to be able to BOLD, Italic, etc. I even used Word's
capabilities to change the toolbars, for example creating a "hanging
indent" capability. Maybe my brain just works differently.

It is very likely that people differ in terms of their capacity to concentrate and their propensity to be distracted (like light sleepers vs. deep sleepers).

But also, you are describing a word processing task, not a creative writing task. There is a big difference between e.g. typing up the minutes of some meeting and formatting them, and sustained creative writing all day long, every single day, all year long.

Concentration becomes a very precious resource and anything that produces distraction (such as the "toolness" of the writing tool) undermines your productivity. In fact most formatting decisions and actions disrupt the focus on writing, which is why Markdown is great, as you don't need to interrupt your typing to reach for the mouse when you need to make something bold or italics or turn into a block quote.

Dr Andus wrote:

Cassius wrote:
I'm confused. What is "distracting" in Word, WordPad, etc.?
>Personally, I like to be able to BOLD, Italic, etc.
Dr Andus wrote:
But also, you are describing a word processing task, not a creative
writing task.

Incidentally, I don't even think MS Word is that great at formatting. I've just spent two very frustrating weeks editing a 10k-word article in Word, where Word constantly reversed my decisions about the formatting of headings and block quotes, such as renumbering headings when I didn't tell it to do so or seemingly randomly inserting or eliminating spaces from between the section number and the start of the heading, or just undoing my block quote indentation, when I updated the styles.

I got so frustrated that now I'm contemplating learning LaTex for writing, formatting and typesetting my documents (I have no need for maths formulas), to get complete control over the look. It would be great if this could be done in Markdown, but MD seems to be more oriented toward web output then typeset documents.

Here is an interesting article in this regard entitled "Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient" and with headings such as "The evils of WYSIWYG:"

"1. The author is distracted from the proper business of composing text, in favor of making typographical choices in relation to which she may have no expertise ("fiddling with fonts and margins" when she should be concentrating on content).

2. The typesetting algorithm employed by WYSIWYG word processor sacrifices quality to the speed required for the setting and resetting of the user's input in real time. The final product is greatly inferior to that of a real typesetting program.

3. The user of a word processor is under a strong temptation to lose sight of the logical structure of the text and to conflate this with superficial typographical elements."

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

Dr Andus wrote:

Concentration becomes a very precious resource and anything that
produces distraction (such as the "toolness" of the writing tool)
undermines your productivity. In fact most formatting decisions and
actions disrupt the focus on writing, which is why Markdown is great, as
you don't need to interrupt your typing to reach for the mouse when you
need to make something bold or italics or turn into a block quote.

This is the argument for Markdown that I don't really get. When I'm in "creative" mode, I'm not even thinking about what needs to be bold or italic. It's only afterward, after I've edited the piece and gotten it to the point where I'm satisfied, that I go in and add italics or bold. To me it is just as distracting to the creative flow to add Markdown while I'm writing than it is to use a word processor's tools for formatting. And it may be more so even, as I find __characters__ like that more distracting, plus I have to mentally work to see __double-underscores__ as indicating italics. Granted it is helpful to see ordered and bulleted lists, and block quotes for what they are as I'm editing.

Most people who are creating documents for others to read, don't have access to typography programs beyond their word processors. That Word makes it difficult and/or frustrating (which I wholly agree it does), shouldn't be the argument for or against Markdown, it's really just an argument for avoiding Word whenever you can.

I'm not arguing against Markdown. For me -- and I fully acknowledge most of this is personal preference -- the advantage of Markdown is that it is a way to add formatting to plain text, and writing in plain text, the creative part, to me is more productive. Of course, that is related to the formatting. In plain text, you don't have to be seduced into adding the formatting as you compose your work, but -- coming full circle -- if I'm trying to add Markdown formatting as I go, that is just as distracting to me. So I have been doing more of my personal writing in Ulysses III on my MacBook. When I'm at the office on my Windows PC, I often write in Notetab. At work, I CAN export (usually copy and paste) my writing into a desktop publishing program for formatting and layout.

Anyway, great discussion!

Steve Z.

In fact most formatting decisions and
actions disrupt the focus on writing, which is why Markdown is great, as
you don't need to interrupt your typing to reach for the mouse when you
need to make something bold or italics or turn into a block quote.

You do not need to interrupt your typing to make sth. bold or italics or underline words or apply heading templates: Word, LibreOffice et.al. have keyboard shortcuts for that.

Franz

At my age, or maybe it's my laptop's age, my biggest problem is hitting the correct keys on the keyboard.

Other than relatively short messages, I haven't written fiction or "prose" since college. All of my extensive writing has been technical...the creativity came in developing statistical and mathematical methodology to analyze/evaluate safety data to assess how effective safety programs or innovations were or to predict the likely outcomes of same.

I still use Word 2000, or for simple things WordPad. Yes, sometimes Word would aggravate me, but not too often. My BIGGEST problem came when I discovered that the email system we were using at the FAA would actually CHANGE a Word document that I had emailed to someone. I would get a call from a recipient asking why I wrote something in a particular way. I replied that I had not. I finally started sending all of my Word documents on CDs rather than via email. (In DOD/Win 2000 days I used GrandView for almost all of my writing.)

By the way, the best English thesaurus is "The Synonym Finder." It's old and not available electronically, but is still the best. (I've repeatedly nagged the publisher to put it in electronic form, to no avail.) I once said to an editor, "Let me tell you what is the best thesaurus."

She replied, "It's there on the shelf."

I looked, and said, "You're right!"

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

This is the argument for Markdown that I don't really get. When I'm in
"creative" mode, I'm not even thinking about what needs to be bold or
italic.

Well, I meant the term "creative" in the broadest possible sense, to include any kind of writing (fiction, scientific etc.) where you really need to concentrate and come up with new and good stuff.

In the academic writing that I do, emphasis is indicated by italics, to be used very sparingly, but sometimes you do need it. Also, it always must be preserved when it's within a quote. Block quotes also need to be recorded, and headings need to be indicated. Markdown makes that very easy, and it does it relatively unobtrusively. I don't find that my text is littered with Markdown code.

Franz Grieser wrote:

You do not need to interrupt your typing to make sth. bold or italics or
underline words or apply heading templates: Word, LibreOffice et.al.
have keyboard shortcuts for that.

Sure, but here we're talking about distraction-free writing environments, and even though Word etc. do have those shortcuts, for some reason they still don't care to provide a full-screen distraction-free mode a la WriteMonkey etc.

Cassius wrote:

My BIGGEST problem came
when I discovered that the email system we were using at the FAA would
actually CHANGE a Word document that I had emailed to someone.

Yes, this is the other big argument for staying within text editors and using some kind of a mark-up such as Markdown or LaTex, which is 100% portable across all platforms.

Dr Andus wrote:

Dr Andus wrote:
Cassius wrote:
>I'm confused. What is "distracting" in Word, WordPad, etc.?
>>Personally, I like to be able to BOLD, Italic, etc.
>Dr Andus wrote:
>But also, you are describing a word processing task, not a creative
>writing task.

Incidentally, I don't even think MS Word is that great at formatting.
I've just spent two very frustrating weeks editing a 10k-word article in
Word, where Word constantly reversed my decisions about the formatting
of headings and block quotes, such as renumbering headings when I didn't
tell it to do so or seemingly randomly inserting or eliminating spaces
from between the section number and the start of the heading, or just
undoing my block quote indentation, when I updated the styles.

I got so frustrated that now I'm contemplating learning LaTex for
writing, formatting and typesetting my documents (I have no need for
maths formulas), to get complete control over the look. It would be
great if this could be done in Markdown, but MD seems to be more
oriented toward web output then typeset documents.

Here is an interesting article in this regard entitled "Word Processors:
Stupid and Inefficient" and with headings such as "The evils of
WYSIWYG:"

"1. The author is distracted from the proper business of composing text,
in favor of making typographical choices in relation to which she may
have no expertise ("fiddling with fonts and margins" when she should be
concentrating on content).

2. The typesetting algorithm employed by WYSIWYG word processor
sacrifices quality to the speed required for the setting and resetting
of the user's input in real time. The final product is greatly inferior
to that of a real typesetting program.

3. The user of a word processor is under a strong temptation to lose
sight of the logical structure of the text and to conflate this with
superficial typographical elements."

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

You might want to try Lyx. It's a GUI front end for LaTeX. Lyx is free as in free beer and is available for Linux, Mac and Windows. Lyx (and LaTeX) are especially suited for academic writing.

johnmcde wrote:

You might want to try Lyx. It's a GUI front end for LaTeX. Lyx is free
as in free beer and is available for Linux, Mac and Windows. Lyx (and
LaTeX) are especially suited for academic writing.

Thanks for the suggestion. It does look like Lyx might hit the spot (or one of the spots).

In the previous posts I conflated two wishes. One wish was for distraction-free writing, the other wish was for gaining more control over document structure formatting and typesetting.

WriteMonkey is a bit of a half-way house, as it is great for distraction-free writing, and it even offers reasonably good control over structure and formatting via Markdown (mark-ups for headings, emphasis and block quotes is all I need).

However, to turn it into a complete product (an academic paper for a journal), I need to export the text into Word, so that I can insert my citations from EndNote, create the bibliography, format the paper, so that it can be shared with others and sent to publishers.

That's where things go pear-shaped, as Word produces all kinds of formatting and typesetting glitches, and EndNote is also awkward, when it comes to tinkering with its styles to meet different journals' special requirements.

I started to look into LaTex, and it's clear that it's far superior over Word in its output and would give me huge control over formatting and typesetting. But there does seem to be a steep learning curve, and some of the LaTex editors I saw for Windows (such as LaTex Editor: http://www.latexeditor.org/screenshots.html can't exactly be called distraction-free environments.

Lyx, being WYSIWYM, might be a less daunting way to get into LaTex... I see that people started toying with the idea of converting Markdown into LaTex (which would be the ideal solution: WriteMonkey + Lyx), but the solutions I've seen are way over my head and my computing skills...

Problem: I want to be able to display a line of text (my research question) at the top of my screen permanently, without any borders or buttons and with the same font and background colour as my WriteMonkey, so that it blends into my distraction-free writing environment.

Solution (so far): using DesktopCoral to display the text as an image made from a WM screenshot, reserving it from other maximised windows. Here is a description with a screenshot:

http://drandus.wordpress.com/2013/11/08/my-minimalist-writing-environment/

Wish: Unfortunately DesktopCoral doesn't let me write into its bar directly, so to modify the text I need to take a new screenshot in WriteMonkey every time, save it, add it to DC, adjust it etc. A bit of a hassle.

Is there any alternative way of displaying text exactly like this where one could just write directly into the reserved area?

I am sure that there are utilities enabling you to display "ghost text" which is not influenced by anything else, even full screen views. However, what you want seems to me so brilliantly simple and useful, that I would suggest you make a proposal to WriteMonkey's developer for a relevant plugin.

A dissertation is not the only application where a title or question, permanently displayed, can help one focus their writing. I'm sure many WriteMonkey users will use it.

You can say that other donating users are interested (I am, and I count as two: I've also made a donation on behalf of my wife :-)