Banal Minutiae

I’m writing this in darkroom, a different kind of text editor. Basically, it exists in a completely different paradigm from other word processors. It’s purpose is to remove all the clutter from the screen and reduce the editing window to a simple blinking cursor.

This harkens back (for me, at least) to the days of old Unix text editors like Vi. If you’re a long time DOS user, it will remind you of Word Perfect 5.1, although, truthfully, darkroom is nothing like them.

That’s because darkroom is totally bare bones. It’s a text editor with search and replace. That’s it. There’s no fancy formatting, page setup, codes, mail merge, etc… Nothing like that. There’s no spell checker. No thesaurus. No fancy grammer checker. It exists in an almost Zen like total vacuum of features. The only keys that actually word are the standard Windows editing keys.

The major upshot of all this is the focus this forces you to bring to your work. There’s no distractions like figuring out the perfect font,  or how to add graphics or other frills to your document. This is a writer’s tool. Basically, just type out whatever you’re working in, save it to a file, and import it into whatever word processor you’re going to use to print it out.

I’ve been using it now for a little while, and I’ve started to really like it. The black background with neon green text reminds me of my heady Tandy days. The only changes I’ve made to the default settings are to change the default screen font from COurier New to Consolas, and the default size from 10 point to 16 point. The larger text size allows me to sit back and stare at the monitor without having to squint at the text.

After using this tiny (123k) program for a week, I’ve noticed that I write more. I really think the author is onto something here. Darkroom runs fullscreen by default, which eliminates all the desktop distractions that frequently plague members of the Ritalin generation.

Back when I was in graduate school, I wrote my thesis using LaTeX, which is a macro system running on top of TeX, which was originally a document preparation system. TeX works with pure text files, with all formatting denoted by braces, and backslash characters. It does particullarly well with equations, which is one of the reasons I think scientists embraced it for journal articles. Also, the fact that documents were text files meant that they could be emailed back and forth for editing and such. TeX was also an early pioneer in a platform independent format. If you were running on a VMS box, you could email your latest paper to someone running on an SGI box, and they would be able to view or print your paper exactly like you would.

Very cool.

Anyway, this little trip down memory lane made me think of the perfect writing setup. Right (write?) now, I’m writing a paper using this darkroom/LaTeX combination, and I think it might be the ultimate.

For me, at least, it forces my mindset to go to a very old school process for writing: write, then edit. You literally write whatever you want, then spell check/proof read it when you’re done. This proofreading phase also helps force a more critical eye on your work, leading to what I believe is better writing, and that’s what it’s all about.

Think about writing in Word. You’re typing along, trying to complete a thought, when out of the corner of your eye, a red squiggle under a word. A typo. Damn. Better go back and fix that. Later on, a green squiggle under a sentence. Bad grammer. Better rewrite that sucker. It’s easy to lose your train of thought, and start focus on mechanics rather than substance. I’m not even going to mention the fact that the dreaded Outlook blinking envelope to remind you of new email can distract you as well.

With darkroom, there’s none of this. It’s simply write as much as you can, then edit it later. Much nicer.

In my head, I like to put on my Akubra Federation Deluxe fedora, and pretend I’m a hard boiled 1940s copy editor when I’m editing, but you can just sit back and enjoy reading your own work, which is a very different feeling from editing it on the fly.

Why not try it? You might like it.