The Geekette Speaketh

I recently decided to take up freelance writing projects again. That said, I wondered if there was a text editor out there that was made for writers. Something lightweight yet still retain some of the features found in word processors. Searching through the net for the writer's text editor, I came upon TextRoom.

TextRoom is very much like a couple of full screen, distraction free text editors I've used in the past. Like Dark Room and JDarkRoom, TextRoom can give you a blank screen to help you concentrate just on your writing and nothing else on your computer desktop. But TextRoom has a few more features that most writers just can't do without.

First, TextRoom has a word count feature. I know it's something that any self-respecting word processor like MS Word and OpenOffice would have. But in TextRoom, a live word count is displayed at the bottom of the screen to let you know how much you've written so far. You can specify a target word count in the software settings. That way, you'll be able to see the completed percentage on the status bar.

The other nifty feature of TextRoom is the timer. This is great for those timed writing sessions and word wars. Just set the timer and start writing. When the time is up, you get to see how many words you've written within the period. You can set up a date deadline as well.

The software doesn't come with a couple peeves though. Supposedly, TextRoom has a typing sound to simulate that of using a typewriter. It seems there's a slight bug in version 0.5.4 that has caused this. The author does promise to fix this in the next release. But it's a minor thing. The other thing that bothers me is the scroll bar. Instead of the usual vertical scroll bar, TextRoom makes use of a horizontal scroll bar to scroll up and down your work. It's a bit confusing for me. Fortunately TextRoom responds to my mouse's scroller.

All in all, I give TextRoom a 4 out of 5 because of the extra features. TextRoom is available for Linux and MS Windows for now. But the software's team is working on releasing a Mac version very soon.