Quadruple Your Creativity and Productivity: Go Full Screen - Power Productivity #2

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In this second edition of the Power Productivity Series, I am going to tell you about the advantages of using full screen text editors to simply rocket your productivity through the roof. Read Part 1, Part 3.

For writing your posts, you must surely be using some kind of text editor or the built in text editor of your blog platform. Can you count the number of different buttons on the dashboard or menu bar of your text editor? Several, in fact, many, right?

All of these buttons and menus contribute greatly towards distracting you, or taking your attention away from where it is needed the most, writing your post!

Be true to yourself, and try it yourself. How many times have you felt the urge to stop writing your post and click this button and check that menu out? Or how many times have you wanted to try different fonts or font sizes or colors. All of these things greatly damage your productivity.
So, what you need is something very minimalistic. Something which does not harm or hamper your productivity, but enhances it.

Because when there is nothing for you to fiddle with, all you have is your post in front of you, and just that. This is what enables your mind to think clearly. It’s like a road . When the road is clear and without any bumps or road blocks, the driving is smooth, easy and effortless. But when the road is littered with road blocks and traffic and guts and the type, the journey is not something you might want to remember

The Tools For The Job

What you really need to boost your productivity is simply an empty screen with nothing on it except your words materializing. Luckily, there is plenty of software out there to help you with it.

1.Write Room
The piece of software that began the avalanche. It’s a full screen editor with nothing on it except the cursor waiting for you. No pesky notifications about e-mail or IMs. Commercial and Mac only. WriteRoom

2.Dark Room

A free and robust full screen editor, again with nothing but you and your words. A Windows clone of WriteRoom. Simple and effective. Requires .NET Framework 2.0 to work. DarkRoom.

3.Q10
Another free, reliable full screen editor, my favorite. Q10 also contains a small bar at the bottom of the screen which displays a live word count, number of pages, number of lines

Simple. Serious.

and the number of paragraphs and characters, along with the path and file name of the current file and the time.

Typing in Q10 seems like typing on a typewriter, because there is a distinct typewriter-ish sound heard when each key is pressed.

Q10 also comes with a spell checker version, but I think the simple, non-spell checker version is the best, as it keeps you from checking for misspellings. Q10.

4. RubyRoom
Just like any of the above, RubyRoom is just another fantastic full screen editor. Free, Windows, requires ruby-gnome2 and Ruby to work. RubyRoom

5.WestEdit
WestEdit is another great, free full screen editor, inspired by WriteRoom. No fancy functions, no flash, serious business. Windows XP only, requires .NET Framework 1.1. WestEdit.

6.WordPress 2.5! Surprise!
Who thought the fancy WordPress text editor could make it into this list? But, WordPress 2.5 offers make the default text editor go full screen. Great for those who want to remain close to the warmth of WordPress…

So, Watcha use?

Have you been using a full screen text editor to write your posts? If so, why not enlighten us all with the software you use and your experiences with it?