![]() Because FocusWriter is designed primarily to be run in its fullscreen state, your files appear as tabs located at the bottom of the program. Sometimes it's useful to have multiple documents open at once, be it additional stories, notes, or reference material. Through the Spell Checking tab of the Preference dialog, you can enable or disable automatic spell checking, customize your own personal dictionary, and add new dictionaries for other languages (downloadable from ). FocusWriter has an optional automatic spell check (on by default), as well as the good old standby spell check dialog that you can call upon only when you want it. While some people find an automatic spell check distracting, others get thrown off-track to know that a word has been misspelled but can't remember exactly how it's supposed to be spelled. Let's face it, we all make mistakes from typos to simple misspellings, they crop up in everyone's work. Additionally, FocusWriter doesn't stop the progress count at 100% so as to not cap your creativity if you're having a really good day, why not challenge yourself to try for 200% or even beyond? ![]() These are charted by day and not by session, so you can feel free to come back at tinker at it several times throughout the day to reach it if you need to. To that end, FocusWriter has two types of optional daily goals: word count, and time spent typing. Sometimes the hardest part of writing is keeping yourself motivated, and having a daily goal can be a big help. Enable or disable any of them to customize what you want to track. Fast and easy to check, so as not to wrench you out of your zone. Word count, paragraph count, page count, and character count almost anything that you could want to know about your progress, updated live as you type. Use an astronomy photo in the background to put you in the mood for writing science fiction, or a seaside bluff to inspire your summertime murder mystery novel set in Cape Cod. You can have multiple environments with different fonts, colors, and background images to create ambiance or inspiration as you type. However, it's good to have quick and easy access to the features of any program, so FocusWriter utilizes a hide-away interface: simply throw your mouse to the top, bottom, or right side of the screen to gain access to a number of customizable options and useful information, then flick it aside when you're no longer interested. The most important thing about writing is your words, and FocusWriter puts them front and center, without cluttering up your view with anything else. The program autosaves your progress, and reloads the last files you had open to make it easy to jump back in during your next writing session, and has many other features that make it such that only one thing matters: your writing. The application is extremely well explained, with numerous screenshots at /focuswriter.FocusWriter is a fullscreen, distraction-free word processor designed to immerse you as much as possible in your work. Generous open source programmer Graeme Gott has produced this helpful program for Windows and the Mac, and provides source code it you want to compile it for Linux. It makes sense, since the object of FocusWriter is to make you write, to establish a daily minimum in time, pages or number of words to output each day. This is highly unusual in a program of this scope, and a welcome addition indeed.Īnother feature is the "daily goals" setting. You can set your own theme for the program, such as a soothing (or noisy) wallpaper, that can help to set your mood for writing.Īnd there is a full spellchecker. FocusWriter saves your documents as either flat text files (.txt) or rich format like a word processor (.rtf). The program includes a full set of settings including how much to show in the toolbar, along with a full set of font options. Drop the mouse to the very bottom, and the statistics bar appears with your word count, along with all the tabs of your open documents. Move it right and you have the scrollbar. But move the mouse off the top of the screen, and a full-featured toolbar drops down. ![]() You're writing along on a full screen word program. It's a nice idea.įocusWriter diverges from the nothing-or-all approach of other minimalists by giving you the other stuff common to a good editor or a bare-bones word processor, but only when you ask for them. You never see the toolbar in FocusWriter until you need it and move your mouse to the top of the page to pop it up.įocusWriter gives you the "black screen" for writing, but puts project tools extremely close by, for when (not if) you need them.
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