Husker du?
Pardon my abysmal Danish, if you will, but ‘do you remember’ (husker du?) when a CGA monitor was the hot thing in computers? Are you old enough to even know what a CGA monitor was?
I’ll be honest with you … I’m old enough to more than simply remember that time; I’m old enough to recall not having to wrestle with my word processor just to get a few simple ideas in place. I’m old enough to actually miss those days when I could type an entire article with my hands over the keyboard. In fact, there was no where else they needed to be.
Dark Room, by Jeff @ they.misled.us is the bomb!
Yeah! Let the good times roll!
This is “dark room”, a full-screen text editor with minimal bells and whistles but even fewer distractions from the job at hand — writing. Or, more specifically, composing. In use, it looks pretty much like a monochrome screen monitor from the bad old days … except for the much higher resolution available today. It’s easy on your eyes and easy on your mind.
Dark Room allows you to change the font, the font size, the background color and the font color and precious little else. So, with the font jacked up to Courier New and 20 pts, the background set to black and the font color set to a shade of pink that shows up really well against the black, I’m rockin’ & rollin’ with this review.
Just about the first thing I noticed is that it really flies. Despite running on Win XP, this program really moves. I used it to write the first draft of this review. Then I selected all the text with a CTRL+A two fingered salute and dropped in into Windows Live Writer with a hearty CTRL+V.
The second point that catches your eye is the lack of clutter. For some of you who cannot imagine leaving your fingers on the keyboard when using a computer, this will come as something of a cultural shock.There simply isn’t much need for a mouse as there is nothing for it to point to during the course of editing.
My needs are simple. I need to be able to create, edit, save and print. I do not need to mail merge a blog posting. I do not need to email from a text editor. If I need to surf to some distant land, I’ll open a stand-alone browser and do the job properly.
I like Dark Room. If you are serious about getting words from your mind and out through the tips of your fingers, I think you will like it too.
It probably won’t handle a large document. It doesn’t insert graphics, play audio or any of those other ‘gitchee gotcha’ things. But it’s pretty good at getting words down in a hurry.
Allow me to recommend it. Oh, and did I mention that it’s free?
| 2.5 |
Br. Bill @ May 2, 2008