One Big Library.

Over on the 'log, Graham asked:

"scrivener looks wicked-cool, but writeroom looks like fullscreen Emacs without all the text-editing goodness. Any chance you'll blog on why you like it?"

I do much or all of my "serious" (aka "paid") professional prose writing in Scrivener. It lets me collocate my writings, offers a great writing mode, and generally stays out of my way and Just Works. Still, I've spent many a lengthy night starting at the BLANK SCREEN OF DEATH any writer's faced when they're just struggling to begin that journey of fifteen-to-twenty-two-hundred words with that first word put down. When I'm on one of my OSX machines, Scrivener's full-screen mode clears away distractions and makes it easier to get off the schneid. Before I found Scrivener, WriteRoom did this for me, and version one was free-as-in-beer, I think... I never paid for it, in any case (though I gladly paid for a license for Scrivener).

Sometimes (like, say, for example, from 8:30-5pm on days between Monday and Friday, just to pick a few :), though, I'm stuck on a windows machine with no Scrivener access. Fortunately, there's Dark Room, which is basically WriteRoom for windows, but even better, because it's (IIRC) GPL'd.

So, to answer your question, it's saved my tuchus on numerous occasions, and it led me to other apps with similar features which continue to save my tuchus, so I gladly recommend 'em all.

I'm struggling to meet a writing deadline (how does anybody do this every month for years? Yes, I'm asking you, Roy...) and just found a big helping hand: WriteRoom. It does just what it says it does, expertly well.

As somebody who basically learned to compose prose during my K-12 years while seated at an Apple ][+, a full screen with only a black background and green text is surprisingly supportive of just getting stuff done.

(And there's even a clone for windows called Dark Room.)

Now to get back to that piece...