Nowhere Man pointed me out to PyRoom, a more faithful implementation of WriteRoom that's written in Python. It invalidates much of what I wrote earlier, but I'm happy because it validates the very existence of this blog.
PyRoom is better than my previous suggestions because it really does use up the whole screen but still puts in the aesthetically-pleasing padding on the left and the right of the text area. It's a GUI application so you don't need to go into console mode. Its command keys are also more sensible. It supports multiple buffers (which you scroll through using Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDn).
There are a couple of caveats to using the current version of PyRoom, however:
it doesn't bother to confirm when you quit (Ctrl-Q); it just exits, and not just the buffer your working on but all buffers
there is no autosave function
there's no block editing function
Still, it's a pretty nifty piece of work. I can see why folks are raving over WriteRoom. Then again, WriteRoom does cost almost $30 so PyRoom is a no-brainer choice any day. PyRoom's tagline, incidentally, is "Why shouldn't it be free?"
You can't install PyRoom from the repositories just yet. You will have to download it manually as a tarball.
Once downloaded, follow these steps to install PyRoom on your system:
Now you can invoke
PyRoom is better than my previous suggestions because it really does use up the whole screen but still puts in the aesthetically-pleasing padding on the left and the right of the text area. It's a GUI application so you don't need to go into console mode. Its command keys are also more sensible. It supports multiple buffers (which you scroll through using Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDn).
There are a couple of caveats to using the current version of PyRoom, however:
Still, it's a pretty nifty piece of work. I can see why folks are raving over WriteRoom. Then again, WriteRoom does cost almost $30 so PyRoom is a no-brainer choice any day. PyRoom's tagline, incidentally, is "Why shouldn't it be free?"
You can't install PyRoom from the repositories just yet. You will have to download it manually as a tarball.
Once downloaded, follow these steps to install PyRoom on your system:
tar xzvf pyroom-0.1.tar.gz
chmod ugo+x pyroom-0.1/pyroom.py
sudo mv pyroom-0.1/pyroom.py /usr/bin/pyroom
Now you can invoke
pyroom from the terminal at any time. You can also add PyRoom to your applications menu or menu bar.
Posts
