If you’re one of those writing types, and you like full-screen editors for the aesthetically pleasing and distraction-free writing environment they offer, check out Q10.
It doesn’t happen very often that I look for a piece of software to do a job, and end up finding one that does exactly what I need it to do, one that matches my list of requirements so completely that it’s like I wrote it myself (if I had any programming skills.) It offers full-screen editing of text files, and you can customize every aspect of it: font, background color, font color, indents, margins, and so on. The default screen is amber text on a black background, but I changed it to maroon text on eggshell-colored background, and the result is a clean and eye-friendly screen with nothing but text, and a small information bar at the bottom with word and page counts, and a clock. You can even set a word count goal, and the status bar will display a progress percentage.
Oh, and it does typewriter sounds every time you press a key. Combine that with the minimalist and clean screen, and you’ll have the closest possible emulation of old-school typewriter writing, without the mess of Wite-Out. Best of all, it’s a free download, and it only weighs in at less than 1MB. I can’t remember when I last found a piece of software that offered this much utility per megabyte.
And it doesn’t even run on Macs. Apparently, the best text editors are available only on Windows. Strange.
Being obsessed with text editors, I’ll definitely give this one a try. I hope it doesn’t make me regret buying TextPad.
vi. About as functionally minimal as you can get.