Allow for me to share with you a quirky and fun piece of software called WriteMonkey.
What is WriteMonkey?
WriteMonkey is for those of us who are notorious multi-taskers in the world of tabbed browsing, grouped taskbar buttons, and instant messaging. It’s for those of us who can get easily distracted with all a computer can give to us, all the amusing things the internet holds, and all the anecdotes our friends want to relay to us from across the country. For those of us who consider ourselves writers of any sort, WriteMonkey will help you focus on the task at hand without interruptions, so long as you are willing to let WriteMonkey do so. In their words:
Zenware for full screen distraction free creative writing. No whistles and bells, just empty screen, you and your words. WriteMonkey is light, fast, and perfectly handy for those who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter but live in modern times.
Fire up this freeware and you’ll see a small and simple splash page with “monkey says:” above a random quote. When it’s gone, you are faced with nothing but a full screen of forest green and an innocent blinking line awaiting your command. The words will appear as a brighter green, but if this colour scheme is not your type, you can simply right-click to bring up a menu, and go down to the Preferences to change it to any colour combination you desire. I chose light red text on darker red ‘paper’, with a point 12 Georgia font. If you don’t like the fullscreen option, you can take it down to standard mode complete with a menu bar, but it doesn’t look as pretty.
Hang out in the Preferences box and you will find that not only can you change fonts and colours, but you can change the width of the page you want to type on and how long the lines go. You can choose how you want it to count your progress, and if you like a little novelty with your writing, you can even toggle the typewriter sounds for that old school feel.
The Replacements tab will show you the shortcuts (“triggers”) you can type for it to auto-insert certain things, for instance typing /sig will automatically fill in your name, as long as you remember to tell it your name in the preferences first. And simply typing /now will insert the date and time, in any format you like. There are all sorts of replacement tags for you to type that will make your writing that much more easier, plus you can create your own if you find there is a symbol or phrase you use often enough that you want to give it a special trigger.
WriteMonkey is proving to be a fun little program to play with and have fun with. Sure, any other word processor program could probably do the same thing, but would it be as entertaining? If you want to try something a little different than Notepad or Word or OpenOffice, or even Google Documents, I think you should try WriteMonkey as an alternate text editor.
