I thought this was already in beta, because I have a writeroom 4 beta on my Mac. The icon is black and green.
It’s true I started that version of WriteRoom 4 a number of years ago, but have since abandoned that approach. The next WriteRoom 4 will be a new start.
The three things I would want to se are:
- Export to rtf, doc, pdf, HTML, and epub
- Publishing to various web services
- Tools to effectively manage large documents, either through the library view you’re already working on or an ability to quickly navigate to a particular header.
I would also suggest not getting too carried away with features, that’s what FoldingText is for. WriteRoom should stay simple.
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Just really really wish you’d go back to something like 2.5. It gave me a lovely, simple, page-like interface that I have not been able to duplicate with 3.0, which I find cumbersome and unpleasant to use.
Hey Jesse,
i personally don´t need another “minimal writing” environment (there are tons of apps that do that, and some very good).
FoldingText is fanstasic as a scriptable/minimal editor, i would hope you focus on it and Taskpaper.
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I’ve just posted a follow up that answers some of the “Why” questions:
What would be interesting for me :
- left panel with working folder for project (one project many files of many types .png, .pdf)
- second left panel with current doc header outlining
- githhub multimarkdown support if not already
- math blocks support
- figure support
- easy table creation (with rules attribute modification)
- easy legend creation (figure, table) and intext citation (cf. fig. 1)
- easy bibliographic data citation (ex. papers)
I love LaTex, and markdown is great but too simple for scientific purpose. I would love to use this kind of soft like a LabNoteBook
I ve started tu use folding text this way (and scheduler was great for experience planification) but lack of citation, table, figure was critical
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There are so many minimal editors, and most seem to embrace markdown. I personally liked the approach that Ulysses 2 (now called Ulysses Legacy, I think) had before the company switched it to a markdown-centric program. Users could define their own markup and customize export options. With updates to OS X, now MacOS, that program became pretty unstable, and I think there’s a gap for a text editor that does what the old Ulysses used to do. I would like WriteRoom 4–or some other product–to resurrect and include the features that made the old Ulysses great. (Update – found that there was a compatibility update for Ulysses Legacy & Sierra, but I still like the idea of this feature in future versions of WriteRoom…)
Hey, Jesse –
Steve here; fellow Cocoa developer from North America – happy to find this news just now. I was on board with your pining for WriteRoom’s minimal customizable text editor back in the day. I bought a couple of versions, and from what I can tell, you helped set what is now a trend of similar apps. Congratulations if so. ^ _ ^
My main use case for WriteRoom (many times a day) has been a quick alternative to TextEdit for typing random stuff in window that I’ve previously tweaked to perfection, rather than a brash white one. I use it less lately because performance seems to falter under load, and I was about to finally say goodbye before learning you had set out to resurrect it. I also played with the theme-making a lot, but found the image rendering behaviour hard to predict when resizing; so I decided to settle for solid colours and have been content ever since.
Speaking for myself, if WriteRoom had overcome those little things, then my conception of it would have been “a better TextEdit,” and I’d probably keep using it for years. It wouldn’t have to do much for me to continue loving it in the aforementioned way, but it would have to be as quick and reliable as TextEdit is.
On the contrary “what would you not like to see” – I see people asking for Markdown, cloud sync, et cetera… which reminds me of other apps including the near-essential Ulysses, championing a lot of that stuff. Speaking again for myself: if WriteRoom tried to be Ulysses and fell short, then I’d just continue using Ulysses – the only reason I can think to aim for that would be to actually exceed it (a real challenge) or to be a lower-cost competitor.
My general complaint about the current trend of minimal editors is that they’re good, but… sort of quirky – it’s reminded me that I’ll take meticulous polish over bells and whistles when I’m really picking software companions. (It’s certainly inspired my own devopment philosophy too.)
Anyway. Best wishes with the project. ^ _ ^
Want:
- A theme which allows more text to fit on my large, 4K screen when I want to review long documents
- Don’t crash (WriteRoom crashes on startup about 50% of the time for me)
Nice to have:
- I often write blog posts on WriteRoom (as plain text), and I have to manually add links after pasting into WordPress/Blogger. Would like an easier way to add links within WriteRoom.
- Faster/better handling of very large files
- Any kind of Evernote integration
TP3-style text filtering by tag and search - everything else is secondary.
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Be great to have a publish to micro.blog setting in WR 4.
Great! I keep on coming back to Writeroom even though it hasn’t been updated for quite a while. My number one suggestion -and a big reason why I keep on coming back to it- is to be able to start typing right away, i.e. open with a new document like it does now. Every other app opens with a finder window prompting you to open a document or create a new one. I mostly use Writeroom to jot down a quick note and want to get down to it immediately.
Yes, I agree. Everything else WriteRoom did for me is now covered by Byword and Ulysses.
As others, noted the transition from Wr2 to Wr3 was a rough one and the point at which I started looking for alternatives.
Tag filtering would be especially useful in conjunction with a library, if you could view search results across files.
Like I suggested here: LibraryView (testing, ideas, and feedback needed) - #54 by derickfay
My workflow is WriteRoom + Git, and I’d like a couple of things related to that.
- When a file that’s open in WriteRoom gets changed by another program (e.g pulling changes from a remote git repo) I wish WriteRoom would notice this and offer to reload, or just reload without asking. My current workaround is to close and reopen the file.
- I don’t know whether this is related to Git, but WriteRoom often asks me “Do you want to save the changes made to the document …” when I close a document but really haven’t changed anything since last hitting Cmd+S and committing the file. It even happens when I haven’t changed anything at all since opening the document. I’ve learned from experience that the correct answer is “Save”, after which Git correctly shows I have no uncommitted changes. “Revert Changes” often backs out changes that have already been saved and committed. I find this very counterintuitive.
- Unrelated to Git, but I often have several documents open in full screen windows side by side. After rebooting, WriteRoom reopens them all (usually) but doesn’t arrange them in the same order, which is annoying because the order is important to me. Particularly, I keep the document I’m actually writing on the left, so it’s next to the desktop that has the Git client, then the documents I’m referring to in decreasing order of usefulness.
Waiting for preview version of WriteRoom 4. My current wishlists:
- Export files to other major formats like RTF, DOC, EPUB, etc.
- Publishing to various Web services.
- Localization. Would be great if I can translate my whole document to a different language inside the app.
- One great feature ( i don’t know) which will make WriteRoom 4 again great. That one great feature should not be available in any other writing Mac app. just like WriteRoom discovered and made the tagline “Distraction free writing” famous in it’s early days for Mac users.
Just two requests : do not abandon it and revive the IOS version.
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Writemator app is based on the old WriteRoom app for iOS. Updated for iOS 11 with all bug fixes and some some new features. Check it out if you are missing WriteRoom for iOS: WriteRoom for iOS lives on as Writemator
One thing I really want is a way to set a preference to default new documents to RTF. I use WriteRoom for essays and articles and often need italics and nested lists, and it’s a little thing, but it would be a nice streamlining feature for me.
And I’ll give my +1 to these things listed by others before:
- Typewriter scrolling
- Cloud sync
- Evernote integration
- Document navigation
- Export control in multiple formats (esp lame but necessary doc/docx)
- Time logging, either native or w/integration with another app
- Framework for citations
- Better handling of large files
That said, there’s much to be said for keeping it as simple/lightweight as possible. I’m still having major lag/incomplete document display issues with longer documents and it’s driving me nuts.
A way to email all the documents, I love Writeroom, but since my iPad is dying I feel the need to ask this: is there any way we can email the documents from the app to an email directly?
If not, PLEASE ADD IT.
Thanks!