Sounds Good In Theory
Mark Pilgrim gives his take on the recent full screen text editing fad:
I guess the part I don’t understand is the target audience. Who is so serious about writing that they need a full-screen editor, but so unserious that they don’t have a favorite editor already?
Even avoiding the obvious answer that almost every welder, pianist, doctor, or writer is open for a better tool, it was amusing to see a parade of writers respond with ‘me! me!’.
I fired it and got an empty screen. I started writing. Within 20 minutes I was already sweeping the net for somewhere appropriate to publish what came out of it. I liked it that much.
I found writeroom an excellent tool for writing my dissertation.
I write extensively as a part of my job; and I write for fun – I love WriteRoom. It’s a great application – and it suits my way of working. It’s clearly not right for you; but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong for everyone.
In defense of WriteRoom: I showed it to a journalist friend of mine, and he loved it.
The answer is very obviously ‘Lots of people.’ Groups that fit the bill: young writers without technical facility who don’t want to bother with emacs or (gah) vi; those with problems focusing attention on blocks of text in the presence of visual cruft they’ll never need; those unable to control their tendency to procrastinate but able at least to acknowledge it; those who never use GUI elements in their text-editing and respond well to the spartan simplicity of old-style WordPerfect environments, so they want to smooth out the peripheral areas of their text editing environment; etc.; etc.; et endlessly cetera.
I recently wrote a new draft of a screenplay with WriteRoom, and I have to say that I appreciated the experience without desktop and menubars etc. It was only the words on the screen. It’s a psychological thing, but stripping the computer back to what is essentially a typewriter worked really well for me…. Actually using WriteRoom made it possible for me to use my computer as a creative writing space, something I haven’t been able to do for a while. No I don’t ride a vespa, nor do I try to impress girls at starbucks, but amazingly enough, I did like writing with this tool, and I won’t apologize for that.
John Gruber, a fan of Mark Pilgrim, writes:
This is an insightful observation, but no one else had the guts to say it (yours truly included). Back when I started Daring Fireball in 2002, there were two weblogs that served as significant inspirations. One was Dive Into Mark, and this is a perfect example why.
No one had the guts to say it because it’s hogwash. Additionally, it’s more condescending trolling by Mark Pilgrim.
These programs aren’t for serious writers at all. They’re for the writer’s equivalent of script kiddies — people who want to go to Starbucks and pick up chicks with their MacBooks and their iPods and their glowing full-screen texteditors.
Like John Gruber, I’ve read Dive Into Mark for a long time and enjoyed his writing. Sometimes I can’t believe it’s the same writer behind those words.
Another commenter asked:
Who stole Mark and replaced him with John C. Dvorak?
Which would be funny, if it wasn’t so sad.
