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Pay or no-pay: WriteRoom vs. JDarkRoom

WriteRoom JDarkRoomThere is a certain attraction to the old days of computing. You would be faced with a big, dark screen and blinking green square representing the cursor. And that was it. You could either type or not type.

Whether it’s from a sense of nostalgia or a determination to have as few distractions as possible, those days have been brought back in the form of word processors that emulate the old way of doing things. We’ve come across two of them for the Mac: the freeware (donations requested) JDarkRoom and the $24.95 WriteRoom. We’re all about freeware here at thriftmac, but what if it isn’t up to snuff? Follow along as we compare the two and help you decide whether you should go with pay or no-pay.

At first glance, there isn’t much difference between the two. You get the dark screen and the blinking green cursor: with WriteRoom it’s the more traditional block shape while with JDarkRoom it’s just a line. The default fonts are similar in that they look like typewriter letters.

Maybe it’s just me, but one of my first thoughts after firing up either of the programs was: “What if I want to do something else?” Yes, the whole idea is to keep you from being distracted by other tasks, but what if, for example, writing an article is part of a work flow that includes importing your article into a page layout program?

In both instances, getting out of the program involves hitting the escape key. When you do this with WriteRoom you’re switched to an ordinary windowed program along the lines of TextEdit. This seems like a reasonable compromise. But with JDarkRoom, you’re forced to decide whether you want to quit the program entirely.

You can save your article before quitting, but the save dialogue is non-traditional to say the least. I had a devil of a time finding my documents folder or even the desktop. To make matters more confusing, you save with control-S instead of command-S. WriteRoom, on the other hand, does everything the way you would expect in a Mac program: command-S brings up a save dialogue the same as any other.

JDarkRoom has other shortcuts that require the use of the control key or F-keys. Sure, you could learn them, but you’ll have to ask yourself whether you really want to.

The other big difference between the two apps is the wealth of preferences found in WriteRoom vs. the paucity in JDarkRoom. For example, I like the default font used in WriteRoom, but I found it too small. No problem — you can set the font and its size to whatever you want in the preferences. The only catch is that the changes apply only to a new document. The default font in JDarkRoom seemed about the right size, but I found the lines making up the letters to be on the thin side and would have preferred something bolder. The website for JDarkRoom seems to indicate you can change the default font, and even the background colour, but I could not easily find a way of doing this.

If you think I’m being awfully hard of JDarkRoom, I would hasten to note that it appears to be a genuine attempt at making a positive contribution to the Mac community. While it may pale by comparison with WriteRoom, it is still in many ways highly usable. Not only that, but the developer has improvements in the works and has asked for suggestions on how to make the program even better.

The final verdict comes down to this: if you can afford WriteRoom you’ll likely be much happier with it. If you can’t, JDarkRoom is a reasonable, if somewhat disappointing, compromise.

(By the way, that black rectangle you see at the beginning of this article is the icon for JDarkRoom. If you look very closely, you might see some green lines on it.)

Posted Friday, September 5, 2008 in

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Comments are open

  1. Free is good. And the developer seems open to suggestions.

    Partners in Grime

  2. I would recommend Bean as another full screen text editor. It’s free. It’s more of a traditional text editor like Text Edit, and in terms of functionality, it’s WAY more functional than Text Edit, but not quite as much as Word. It has a full-screen mode with nothing to distract you other than an exit button.

    http://bean-osx.com

    Matt

  3. Good point. With Bean you can toggle in and out of full screen mode with command-shift-F.

    Mark

  4. I wrote my last novel using WriteRoom and loved it. For editing, I still use a more traditional word processor, but the simplicity of WriteRoom is perfect for focusing on that important first draft.

    Rasmus

  5. Just tested JDarkRoom. It does bad job saving international characters (I used Cyrillic). So it is of no use out of Lating character space.

    aram

  6. Well I just checked jdarkroom out and I think it feels more “genuin” full screen text editor so to speak, but worth noting is that version 1.0 of writeroom is still free. Using it right now and loving it :D
    Last entry

    Tripod





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