One of my favorite applications for writing is WriteRoom. It’s a “full-screen, distraction-free writing environment”. It’s good for people like me who are easily distracted or compulsive multi-taskers. Unfortunately it’s only for OSX (Dark Room is the Windows equivalent). Since I won’t run Windows on my Thinkpad and Apple has blacklisted OSX against running on non-Apple hardware, I needed to find a Linux equivalent.
With the full screen plugin for gedit, you can make it look and feel almost like WriteRoom.
- Download the full screen plugin
- Extract it to ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins
- Turn on the plugin in gedit preferences
- Adjust the font and color to suit your needs
Hit F11 and gedit will switch to full screen mode. It’s not quite as specialized as WriteRoom but it gives you the same distraction-free environment to write.
thought i’d mention that there is jDarkroom which is a java darkroom implementation.
if you havent tried it, its not too bad.
I think I came across that while looking for a replacement, but I just don’t like running java applications.
Both Beryl and Sawfish allow you to set up keyboard shortcuts that will put any window into full screen mode. You can easily configure GVim to hide the menus, toolbars, and scrollbars, and then you can use your window manager to make it full screen.
You can always CTRL+ALT+F1 and use nano or other console editor =)