Pyroom – another minimalistic word processor
June 18th, 2010
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Wow, first I find one good writer’s editor and then I trip over another. Last week I wrote a little bit about Q10, a minimalistic word processor for Windows users that can also be used on Linux machines using Wine emulation. This week I would like to talk a little bit about the word processor that has taken my fancy and replaced Q10 on the desktop of my main machine. And, with no further ado, I’d like to say…. Welcome to PyRoomPyRoom, is functionally very similar to Q10in that it provides the minimum of screen clutter an just lets you get on with the job of writing. |
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Please click on the screenshot to see it larger. |
PyRoom is described (by its authors) as a fullscreen simple text editor, without a toolbar, a menubar or anything that would distract the user from the most important task: writing. It is more configurable than Q10 and it comes with a bunch of good looking themes which are easy to modify (you could use one as a base from which to create your own), and has, if possible, an even more minimalistic interface. It doesn’t have the scrollbar on the side and I find this makes me less likely to stop concentrating on the job in hand. |
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I ran the setup script (as detailed in the readme) python setup.py but it didn’t work on my machine (Running Mint 8.0 -Helena.) The problem apears to be that the files are copied over to /usr/share/pyroom but the script expects pyroom to be at /usr/bin This was easy enough to fix though. I just renamed a text file to a .kme extension and then, in Nautilus, highlighted the file – went to Properties and then Open With and then scrolled down to the pyroom icon to indicate that files with a .kme should always be opened with pyroom. This threw up an error (as pyroom was registered at /usr/bin) but, upon editing the path to pyroom to /usr/share/pyroom/pyroom it worked fine. |
Please click on the screenshot to see it larger. |
Pyroom is available in the Mint Repository (and I would assume the current Ubuntu one) where it is described as… “PyRoom is a free editor that stays out your way – and keeps other things out of your way, too. As a fullscreen editor without buttons, widgets, formatting options, menus and with only the minimum of required dialog windows, it doesn’t have any distractions and lets you focus on writing and only writing.”
It is also available for download from http://pyroom.org/ where it is available in a variety of Linux flavours.
It is not currently available with a Windows installer and, you know, that actually makes me quite happy!
I suppose that if anyone was technical enough to be able to install Python on a Windows machine just to run PyRoom…..
They probably be running some kind of Linux anyway!
Conclusion
I suppose that I have come to this evaluation with some firm ideas about how the process of composition should be done (at least for me.) I believe that writing should be done in plain text via a minimal interface (the nearest thing there is to a computerised typewriter), and only made print-ready after (or at), the editing point (I like to edit printed manuscripts.)
Q10 impressed the hell out of me and I started last week’s article expecting to rave about Q10 (and rave, I suppose, I have) but, the real shocker has been pyroom.
This simple python application is, for me, more attractive on my Linux machine than Q10 (purely because of that silly scrollbar – how petty can I get?)
It integrates better into my machine than Q10 and aleviates the requirement to run Wine (currently Q10 is the one of only two applications that I run under Wine, the other is Palm Desktop so that I can read my e-books.
All the best
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