I have been typing like a maniac since installing the awesome Q10 editor – a simple full-screen editor whose slogan is: your inner critic will hate this editor. This small (400 KB, or 900KB for the spell checker version), completely portable editor is for Windows only.

Opening up Q10 blackens your screen, and displays eye-friendly orange text, reminding me of my beloved old 286 computer. You can change these colours as your moods dictate; the background and foreground colours are customizable, as are font and font size. Another cute touch is the typewriter sound effects, which can be turned off for your more introspective writing moods.

Q10 is really great for writers who need to track word, pages, paragraphs or character counts. The values are all updated in real-time, and can be displayed at the bottom of the screen to help cheer you on. It has autosave (customizable to save every x minutes or every paragraph, etc), autotext, margin settings, paragraph indentation, spell checker and more, without being distracting. It provides save status too (an asterisk denotes an unsaved document), which is a must for obsessive writers like me.

Another handy feature is the timer. If you’re a procrastination expert, writing in timed sessions really helps get the job done! I usually use Instaboss, which is based on the Dash method (work a certain amount of time, take a break, repeat); however, having the timer within the same app is even better! You can even set targets, like 250 words or 1 page for example, and it will let you know, unobtrusively in the status bar, that you’ve reached your target.

Q10 is restful on the eyes, helps you to focus on your writing and gives you helpful tools and feedback, like a timer and real-time word counts, that help stimulate your writing. It makes writing fun again!

LifeHacker mentioned an awesome bare bones word processor recently for retro freaks called JDarkRoom. This java-based writer is a full screen text writer with no extra frills that could distract you from your writing obligations.

I thought I’d write this post with it; it sure brings back memories! A completely black screen with green text – no windows, menu bars or pop-up windows. Personally, I find it’s a wonderful tool to work with because it forces me to concentrate on content as opposed to wasting time formatting text and other things we do with our word processors when we can’t seem to get those juices flowing, like play with fonts and text colours. I also happen to prefer green (or amber) text on black backgrounds and usually change my word-processors to these colour-schemes.

Documents are saved as text files which you can then open in your usual word processor for formatting, spell checking and whatever else. Switching to your OS while writing is easily done, at least in Windows, with the ALT-TAB keys.

Since JDarkRoom is written in Java, it’s portable on a flash drive as long as the computer you plug into has the Java run-time. And at only 105 KB, it’s a great space saver for those with smaller drives.