Blogging With PyRoom

I've decided to try a little experiment, and start blogging with PyRoom. For the curious, PyRoom is not a blogging platform, nor am I switching my blog from Drupal, PyRoom is a distraction free plain text editor. I've chosen to use it to write my posts, starting with this one. So why do it this way instead of creating a post as usual in Drupal? A number of reasons.

Distractions are just part of every day life when trying to do anything, there's always a million and one things trying to grab your attention online and offline. Where PyRoom is a little bit different is that it creates a full screen distraction-less environment to write in. It sits over everything, hiding your clock, icons, notifications, panel and applets. What it can't do anything with is offline distractions.

I have found some articles and blog posts are just too long to be worth reading all the way through; they can start to repeat stuff or ramble off the point. I am very guilty of this myself, so PyRoom is a way to be more focussed in the post itself and the length of the post. When the screen constantly shifts down to give you another new line, sometimes you're not aware of how long the post is becoming until you save it, or preview it. At this point you start to wonder if it's too long, if you're labouring points. With PyRoom it allows you to be an editor much easier. I am working on the idea that I have one space to write in, that the entire post must fit inside that space, and that I should be able to read the whole thing from start to finish without scrolling up or down. This is a self imposed limitation to fit the purpose, PyRoom has no such limitation.

Since PyRoom is a simple editor, it has limited options such as no spell checker, but this is why the final part of the process is to save it to a plain text file, close PyRoom, open the file in Mousepad (or any other plain text editor) to copy and paste to Drupal. I can them spell check it, turn list items into list items, add hyperlinks etc as required to finish the post. A basic guide to using PyRoom:

• CTRL+H - Brings up the help window at any time, including listing the commands
• CTRL+W - Returns you to the buffer you were writing your post in
• CTRL+S - Brings up the save dialog, allowing you to save your post wherever you like, called whatever you like
• CTRL+O - Opens a plain text file already created in PyRoom
• CTRL+Q - Quits PyRoom
• CTRL+P - Brings up the preferences dialog

The Preferences dialog is handy to have a play with to find your ideal environment. You can change a few things here from the font, whether the first line is auto indented or not, to the colour combination of the window itself. There are quite a few presets but you can choose your own combo. For some people a dark environment helps them think better, it's all down to you. You can also choose the size of the window itself both horizontally and vertically, as well as the margin size.

I do tend to write posts on more complicated ideas from time to time, so I have these maximized for my 1024x768 screen resolution. Just because I have the space, does not mean that I want to just write for the sake of filling the screen. The point is that even on the most complicated posts, I want to have the entire post as concise as possible and all inside one screen. If a post is only a couple of paragraphs, then that's what it will be.

How practical PyRoom would be for longer writing projects I'm not so sure, I haven't tried it for anything like that yet. It does seem ideal for blog length pieces though, which is the point of this post. Yes I know, very meta. To make it even more meta, I'm including a screenshot of this post as written in PyRoom to help emphasise it's usefulness.

One of many advantages to the multiple virtual desktops design in *nix is that you can CTRL+ALT+LEFT or CTRL+ALT+RIGHT to flick back and forth to a source website, or check if the person you're waiting for has come online etc. Yes that does defeat the point of "distraction-less" to some degree, but it's distractions on YOUR terms, which is a little bit different.