Ommwriter

There is an emer­ging genre of what might be called the min­im­al­ist word pro­cessor (cf. Scrivener, Write Room). These applic­a­tions are designed to cut away visual dis­trac­tion and leave the screen look­ing some­what like a plain sheet of paper in a type­writer (or, if that’s too far back for you, then look­ing like an old pre-GUI text editor).

Ommwriter — for that is its name of one such — is avail­able as a beta from here. You just need to provide a valid email address to obtain the down­load link.

Text is entered into a small win­dow that floats above a back­ground. By default, this back­ground is a snowy scene with two black trees off to one side. Otherwise you see noth­ing but the blink­ing cursor and the text you type.

That’s about it.

I’m impressed. If there’s any­thing dif­fi­cult about writ­ing on a com­puter — which, let’s face it, makes it easy in a mind-bogglingly large num­ber of ways — it is distraction.