Some time ago I decided I needed a text editor with minimal distractions. I can’t stand the sheer volume of buttons on the average word processor. Even AbiWord, which is skeletal in comparison with OpenOffice or Word, is still too busy at times (I miss Q&A Write actually — the Word Processor I used to use back in the days of MS-DOS).
A google search at the time turned up WriteRoom, which is Mac-only. But not much else.
So, of course, I developed my own alternative.
It didn’t quite fulfill the vision, so I dumped it in the “deprecated projects” list after it languished, unused. But I’ve been coming back to the idea lately, and finally did a bit more research on the various buttons you can push in PyGTK.
So, the Vanilla text editor is now -slightly- more supported than it was before (i.e. I’m probably going to use it myself), and is a bit closer to the vision. It’s completely configurable (background and foreground colours, font, key map, etc are all set from an ini file), and now runs full screen (as it should’ve from the beginning).
Only the source is available at the moment (Python2.5 and PyGTK2.0 required), but I’ll eventually make a commercially supported package available if there’s any interest.
There’s always DarkRoom: http://they.misled.us/archives/501
DarkRoom is Windows only. So not very useful for me.