I Recommend: Full Screen Text Editors

Technology is not without its flaws—one of the necessary evils of the internet is that there is too much to search and explore. It's not uncommon to feel overwhelmed by the massive amount of information at your fingertips. In this age of excess choice and complexity, sometimes it's just better to keep things simple. That's why I highly recommend a full screen text editor for those who wish to use their computer to write without getting easily sidetracked.

DarkRoom is a free, full screen writing environment for Windows. It's small, simple and easy to install. In a nutshell, DarkRoom is simply what it calls itself—a blank screen for you to pour all those constipated words onto.

While the editor's preferences are limited, DarkRoom does allow you to alter basic options such as background and text color, auto saving, transparency levels, and more. One outstanding feature is that it automatically opens the latest file you were working on.

DarkRoom also makes it easy for you to open existing documents by right clicking them and selecting "Open this file using DarkRoom." Some files, however, cannot be translated into purely text and print out a ton of code instead (Word documents). Not to worry though, you can easily copy and paste existing text from anywhere and start working in DarkRoom.

The developers of DarkRoom are currently brewing an upgraded version, so be on the lookout for that.

Q10 is another full screen text editor similar to DarkRoom. It's a bit lighter on its feat, booting up in a blink of an eye. And although Q10 is no longer supported by its maker, it does boast a few nifty features worth mentioning.

Q10 has a small info bar on the bottom keeping track of your running word count, pages, lines, paragraphs and characters, along with a clock at the right-hand corner. Here's where it gets good: you can set alarms for yourself, either by the clock or word limit—great for writers who want to hone their time efficiency skills. A timed alarm will even tell you within that same bottom bar how many words were written in whatever time amount you set it to. And setting a goal for a certain word limit, for example, will display the current progress on the bottom info bar in percentage and ratio.

The program comes with a spellchecker, but unlike Microsoft Word's default preferences, it doesn't automatically underline words as you type. This could be seen as both a blessing and curse—it's less distracting, but less convenient to spell check. But for what the program is designed to do, it works and is a nice escape from Word's red/green squigglies.

Losing your work is never fun, so Q10 can auto save periodically by the clock or with each new goal, such as a new paragraph or page. It also has a neat typewriter sound effect whenever a keystroke is entered. For those who wish to type in silence, there is an option to turn this off or lower its volume.

Whether you're looking to write a letter, that great American novel in your head or just brain storm without having to use pen and paper, a full screen text editor could be exactly what you need to get rolling without all the bells and whistles of other programs.

This post, along with past Cultivations, was written in both of the aforementioned text editors.