For posterity:
For nearly 20 years I’ve used WriteRoom, a bare-bones Mac word-processing program, for everything I write. It’s my refuge, this featureless black screen with green type, like a command line of an old computer, like I’m in the movie “WarGames.” In WriteRoom, it’s just me and the flashing green block of cursor, me and my thoughts made visible on the blank screen. No menus or rulers, no friendly offers of A.I. assistance or options for collaborative editing. There is nothing so satisfying as snapping the program into full-screen mode, obscuring the hectic mess of open tabs and icons and desktop wallpaper, shutting the door on anything that’s not the task at hand.
I first discovered WriteRoom in 2008, when Virginia Heffernan called it “the ultimate spartan writing utopia” in a Times article about alternatives to Microsoft Word.
If you’ve struggled to wrench yourself from all of your computer’s modern seductions, enter WriteRoom. It served as the no-frills laboratory for creating this week’s Good List, and all the ones before it.
I didn’t know about this, thanks for sharing 