Darkroom: A Text Editor That Helped Me to Write Better Content

I’m busy with some other projects now and instead of leaving the blog alone for several days, I thought I’ll do a quick post on a helpful tool that I’ve been using for more than a year.
It’s called Dark Room and its a minimalist fullscreen word processor which forces you to focus on the writing process and nothing else.
This free Windows/.Net application transforms your entire computer screen into a dark background and removes all the usual word processor toolbars and quick buttons. The only thing you’ll see is the words. I feel that it really improves my ability to concentrate on the blog post or school essay I’m writing.
Darkroom is quite primitive because of the lack of features and in my opinion, that’s one of the reasons for its charm. You can tweak Microsoft Word and other standard processors to get the same look but I’ll rather use a simple application like this and keep the default look/feel of Word for other editorial purposes. Here’s a screen shot:

Some people have criticized it because of its poor functionality but personally, I think its terrific for that one essay or one blog post you want to crank out. You don’t want to use this to write a book. You use this to situate the 15 to 60 minutes of time you have in an environment that is more conducive for contemplation/writing.
DarkRoom is inspired by WriteRoom, a similar word processor for Apple’s OS X. There’s also a Java version of DarkRoom if you don’t want use Microsoft’s .Net framework. It works in the same way and has roughly the same features.
Try it today and let me know what you think in the comments!