September 6th, 2006
Dark Room for Windows and WriteRoom for Mac: Old Fashioned Word Processing is Back
By Alice Hill
RealTechNews
While the word processing world is battling it out over templates and clip art, commerical versus open source, a little known dark horse word processor called Dark Room is bringing back the simplicty of the early word processing workhorses in all their green text-on-black screen glory.
“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. Basically, Dark Room is a clone of the original WriteRoom that is an OS X (tiger) exclusive application. It is a child of necessity, as there were no viable alternatives in Windows to produce the same behavior.” Source: they.misled.us
“For Mac users who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world. WriteRoom is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, WriteRoom is just about you and your text. Requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later.” Source: Hogbay Software
We Say: At first I thought this was more of a programming exercise than a viable product, but then after playing around with the simple ASCII look and lack of button rows and collapsible drop down menus, Dark Room is like a breath of fresh air. Like playing Super Mario Brothers or Duck Hunt. Sometimes old school is more fun.
–Download Dark Room Here
Note: the download is often down
–Download WriteRoom for OSX (tiger) Here
Ed Porter says:
Every newbie programmer in America has written a similar application using a richtextbox and Visual Basic. Why are you so excited about this?
Thanks,
Ed Porter
September 6th, 2006 at 7:28 am
BigManChili says:
Because we’re not all newbie programmers…..
September 6th, 2006 at 7:32 am
AP says:
PWN3D!!!111!1
September 6th, 2006 at 7:45 am
Alice Hill says:
I thought it was just a college project too and it probably is, but even though I was scarred by a program called Volkswriter aka Volkswagon, I never thought I would have anything nice to say. But sometimes it is fun to take a walk back in time.
September 6th, 2006 at 7:51 am
Dispatch says:
Yeah and you need Microsoft .NET to even run this. No thanks…
September 6th, 2006 at 8:04 am
Ian says:
How about Notepad, in Windows? If you’re distracted by that, you’d better go to the doctor and get checked for ADD.
September 6th, 2006 at 8:28 am
Ryan says:
You can run nano or vi on both of those platforms! Gentlemen, set your terminals to FULL SCREEN.
September 6th, 2006 at 8:28 am
MrLipid says:
As someone who writes every day in XyWrite, Dark Room is not quite the nostalgia rush for me as it is for those who have moved on. Still, great to see that some things old are new again.
September 6th, 2006 at 9:15 am
Bill M says:
Your ADD comment is quite accurate. I am going to download this and install it specifically for my son with ADD, so he can work in a less cluttered environment and actually finish an assignment instead of playing with font effects. Even Notepad has too many options, and it still shows the desktop activity.
September 6th, 2006 at 9:41 am
RIc M says:
Isn’t this Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS all over again? That probably wasn’t the first “clean screen” wordprocessor but certainly was the most popular.
September 6th, 2006 at 10:09 am
harsh says:
I agree with ryan if you want just text editing with a pure focus on text go for vi or emacs, in a pinch you could always nano or pico, but they’re free and tested by time
September 6th, 2006 at 10:13 am
Beejan says:
It keeps crashing before it even really loads up. It says that I need to reinstall my .NET framework (I run Windows XP).
September 6th, 2006 at 10:34 am
gcc says:
Uh- I echo #7, you want the oh-god-my-eyes-they-burn fun of dealing with old school text editors? Well, get Vi, maybe you’ll actually be able to get some work done that way.
And BTW, Emacs is another option. Not sure if it works under windows, but I believe it does on OSX, and I’ll be damned if you can find me a more powerful old-style text editor than that.
September 6th, 2006 at 10:51 am
James Ryan says:
vi and latex, because everything else is crap.
September 6th, 2006 at 11:27 am
Dex Terminal says:
I like to write all my term papers with this in between sessions of playing Pong.
September 6th, 2006 at 11:30 am
Jason says:
What possible reason did they have for using .NET to write a little program like this? I’ll just stick with my old MS-DOS version, it probably works better anyway.
September 6th, 2006 at 11:34 am
Jesse Grosjean says:
Is it possible to set text margins in Vi, Emacs… etc when in full screen mode? Text that wraps across the entire screen is pretty hard to read, and my impression is that’s what you’ll get when you use Emacs in full screen mode. Anyway as the developer I’ll certainly agree that standard unix text editors are much more powerful tools, but for the simple task of blocking out distractions so that you can bang out a few pages of text I think WriteRoom/Darkroom can work better.
September 6th, 2006 at 11:43 am
Liz says:
When I want just plain text-writing, I use Notepad (or TextEdit on the Mac.) Why download some other client when your computer comes with a perfectly good simple client? Cute, but useless-looking bit of software.
September 6th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
Rich says:
Hmm. I wonder if I still have my old Chi-writer disks and if they still function.
September 6th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
Lewie says:
I remember writing my own word processor for the Timex/Sinclair 2068. What fun! I could insert, delete and cut and paste, but that was about it. Of course, by the time I got it done, Timex/Sinclair went belly up and I moved up to an IBM XP and Volkswriter. Geez, computers used to be a lot of fun.
September 7th, 2006 at 5:09 am
Jim says:
This is stupid. There are tons of plain text editors that don’t require .NET. Like notepad, wordpad, textpad. Simply, who cares, why did you bother to post this. Is HogBay paying you or something?
September 7th, 2006 at 9:01 am
Jesse Grosjean says:
Jim, this is Hog Bay. First no, of course I am not paying anyone for this review. Second Hog Bay Software makes WriteRoom, it’s for OS X only. Someone else makes DarkRoom that uses .NET, but it’s not Hog Bay Software.
And no I don’t think this app is stupid. It’s actually surprisingly useful for many people. It took a week to write, month to polish, and with no advertising after 3 months it has about 3x the user base of other applications that I’ve worked on continuously for years. So it may not be for you, but for many people it really does help.
September 7th, 2006 at 12:40 pm
Jeff says:
Jim, I’m the one that wrote Dark Room, and I always get a kick out of when people pointless slam my work.
I’m surprised by how many people have been put off by the .NET requirement. I don’t have a Windows machine in my house that doesn’t have .NET for some other program. I suppose I just figured that it was just about standard these days. In a way it is kind of funny, because I picked .NET because it is not only incredibly fast to develop in, but I actually thought I would be saving people space, since I was figuring .NET was already on everyones machine.
September 11th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
vanlandw says:
I’m shocked to see windows XP installations minus .net. Many worthwhile freeware projects require it and it’s simple to download from windows update. From what I can gather this project started out of DEMAND for a windows alternative to WriteRoom. The description of the application should be enough to know if installing is worth your time. I agree with everything Jesse said. So much negativity towards a project I’m sure has taken hours of time and offered as a free download. The internet as a whole needs to pick it up.
brb
September 13th, 2006 at 10:33 pm
ironico says:
Hi all,
I create an other version of this software, with Database support.
Is freeware and it’s a windows application (not .net)
You can download here :
http://www.gennarovarriale.it/2007/02/13/black-room-09-windows-application
February 13th, 2007 at 11:24 pm
Brain Trepaning says:
I like a black screen and a flashing green cursor. I write at night and all other writing programs have a white background that lights up my room. I was ecstatic when I found this little app. Thanks for making it. http://www.trepaning.com
June 14th, 2007 at 9:30 am
Doug says:
I have serious attention span problems and this little app is great when I just need to focus on the writing, just the writing and nothing but the writing. Thanks for making it! My eyes and my employers thank you.
Yes, vi, emacs do the same things, but I downloaded this and had it running in less than a minute on a winblows box… try that with emacs!! blah
June 12th, 2008 at 6:55 am