Downloader: WriteMonkey is an unbelievable full-screen text editor

Saturday, May 1, 2010

WriteMonkey is an unbelievable full-screen text editor

I have a thing for full-screen editors. I also have a thing for Markdown syntax. I wanted to start writing some of my texts using Markdown in a text editor. Amazingly enough, I was not able to find a Win32 command-line implementation of Markdown.

Well, WriteMonkey saved the day. That's just one of the features of this utterly incredible full-screen editor. It's got everything I need for writing, and none of the extras; I get real-time word-count (which does not count HTML tags), I can write Markdown and copy it as HTML to the clipboard (sure, I can export the file too, but copying is so much more useful for me). It's got lots of other neat tricks too, such as automatically looking up words in Google, Dictionary.com or any other resource you configure.

The looks are very configurable, too. It doesn't insist on being full-screen -- you can hit Escape and use it as a regular window. You can easily change the text size (of course), but also the width of the text, its alignment, font, color, and page background color (can't use an image for the background, but it's not an option I would use anyway).

The only option I wish they'd add is simple syntax highlighting. I know this goes directly against the whole minimalistic vibe... I just mean highlighting for URLs and bold words, for example.

And the only thing which doesn't work right is the spell-checker... It's too simple to be useful. For example, it doesn't understand URLs in Markdown syntax, so it marks them as errors. Same goes for bold syntax in Markdown, which is done with asterisks. So I can't really spell check with it, which is a shame.

It's a lean application, too. After trying to use jEdit for my needs, this thing is as light as a feather, and super-fast. Don't get me wrong -- I love jEdit, but it's for coding, not for writing. For text, WriteMonkey sure hits the spot. Fantastic.

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