![]() You can just pump words onto paper, with no overhead for styling them and no worrying about Word auto-correcting your ordered list into something you don't want. The beauty of both of these applications is the intense focus on a single objective: writing. Writeroom is for Mac OSX, but there is a freeware Windows equivalent that is called Darkroom. What sort of tools give you limited functionality but advantages derived from specificity? Since writing is such a large part of our professional development, I've picked a handful of writing tools that everyone should take a look at, and that improve on Word in significant ways.įirst up is my very favorite writing application, Writeroom. With generality comes mediocrity in function, and with specialization comes excellence (this comes from a person who studied Philosophy and Library Science specifically because he didn't want to specialize, for whatever that is worth). Word is not good at anything specifically because it is an acceptable solution for a variety of functions. Can you think of a way to do it better, or do it differently that makes more sense for your workflow? What if you could swap out just that one activity for a piece that makes it better? Is Word the best at performing a specific function? Pick any single writing assignment or a single piece of functionality from Word. But as we know from reality television, popular does not always equal good. Word is easily the most popular word processing program in the US. In fact, let's just take a single piece of the suite: Microsoft Word. In libraries, that could be the ILS, but what I'm going to talk about today is something that almost everyone is familiar with: the Microsoft Office suite. ![]() ![]() The another thing Emacs done better is the line wrap icon in the fringe.I'd like to talk about a style of software that everyone in libraries is definitely familiar with-the massive interconnected hunk of software that does everything. The even better thing in Emacs is that the distraction free mode is local to current buffer, you may not want this mode in other types of buffer, for example the Clojure REPL or shell buffer, Sublime has no such feature, distraction free mode is global to the editor, no matter you are editing an article or editing java source code file. Here is how the distraction free mode looks like in Emacs:Īs you can see the status bar is gone, the minibufer is still there, but it mix into the background, almost unnoticeable, but you can still execute command by execute M-x. Execute M-x list-packages and locate writeroom-mode:Įxecute M-x writeroom-mode to go into distraction free environment. I found the writeroom-mode can do the exact same thing like Sublime. Actually I almost in full screen in Emacs, so there are already no much distractions out there, the thing I really want is centered text area and fixed with, so my eyes can focus right in the middle, the default left align makes me a little uncomfortable, it also gives me a feeling of reading a book or how it looks like when it displayed on Web page, the margin is important for comfortable reading. I also use a lot Emacs, it will be good if Emacs also support this. I first know the so called distraction free mode is when I'm using Sublime Text, Press Shift + F11, and you go into Full screen mode, and the text is centered, each line contains 80 characters, I found this is very helpful when I focus on writing, for example when writing a blog post.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |