WriteRoom’s great as a full screen editor, but it has a hidden beauty as a windowed text editor too.
Look at it - gorgeous simplicity, green-on-black loveliness, and a live word count in the window’s title bar. I shall say that bit again: a live word count in the title bar. That’s the one feature that I wish, I wish, I wish I could enable in TextMate.
People like me - people who often have to produce a certain number of words for a client - are prone to have joyful grins on our faces whenever we find a decent bit of writing software that includes a live word count. It matters, you see, when you’re trying to get exactly 550 words, and you’ve knocked out the perfect bit of well-argued prose and it ends up being 532 words, or 581 words. Either way, that live word count is essential for the clean-up process that follows.
It’s daft. I’ve been using WriteRoom full screen for years but it’s never occurred to me to use it differently until today. It’s not a TextMate replacement but it’s yet another writing environment to add to my list of favourites.
2 Comments
It’s amazing how rare live word count is. You’d think it’d be a default feature for every text editing/word processing app, yet as far as I know, WriteRoom is the only one on the Mac that implements it well, and most of the rest don’t bother at all.
Word, on the PC, lets you have the wordcount displayed on screen, but makes you press a little button to update it. Surely that would have been easy to automate. When I attempted NaNoWriMo a couple of years back, I used it a lot :-)
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