Dark Room

Dark Room

The freeware Windows app Dark Room, based off the Mac software WriteRoom, looks a heck of a lot like the classic text-adventure game Zork. It’s a black background with a CRT-style green foreground color for your text that aims to offer a distraction-free application for writing. There are few bells and no whistles: this lightweight text editor is without buttons, menus, or anything else that might disturb your concentration. You can either accept the default preferences and start typing into a new document, or hit Ctrl , to open up the Preferences.

Because Dark Room starts in full-screen mode by default, you won’t be able to see the menus at the top of the application. To access the Preferences from the “View” menu, exit full-screen mode by hitting the F11 button, then select “View.” From the Preferences dialog, you can change the color and size of your font, the color and size of the Dark Room “page” (the writable area of the screen), and the color and opacity of the background (behind the page), as well as a variety of advanced settings, such as the ability to open documents in Dark Room from the Windows context menu, multiple monitor support, neutral highlighting, and autosaving.

Basic text-editing features like “Copy,” “Paste,” and “Find,” help you do slightly more advanced tasks, but that’s about it. Users can’t make global replacements, for example. Dark Room’s shortcomings, though, only serve to enhance the sense of focus it can bring to your writing.

Dark Room is a full-screen, distraction-free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, Dark Room is just about you and your text. Dark Room is a clone of the Mac OS X application WriteRoom. The goal of the project is to capture the essence of WriteRoom, while keeping it simple and free.

Version 0.8b adds neutral highlighting and cursor blink-rate control.