If you spend any time doing serious writing then you’ll enjoy this. PyRoom is a clean, simple text editor that bills itself as offering “distraction-free” writing. No fancy buttons, formatting or embedded images. Just straight forward text editing.

PyRoom is a Python-based clone of the fantastic WriteRoom which runs on Mac OS X and which I discovered during a recent spell working on a Mac for some graphics projects.

PyRoom operates in much the same way as WriteRoom: When you launch PyRoom it blacks out the screen and offers you a single blinking cursor. All other menu bars, open windows and applications are hidden behind PyRoom. The first impression is that of the old-school green-on-black monitors many of us used when we first started using PCs.

Although the colours of the screen and the text can be customised the green on black is great for focusing your attention on the work at hand.

Because PyRoom hides all other windows -including your addictive Internet browser and incoming email – it makes it easy to get on with the job at hand.

Installing PyRoom is simple enough: Visit the PyRoom website and download a copy. The current version is PyRoom 0.3.

With PyRoom downloaded you can either run it directly from the download directory:

./pyroom

or you can install it system-wide by running the following as root:

python setup.py

When you launch PyRoom you can use control-H for help or change settings by hitting control-P for the preferences window. The rest is fairly intuitive: control-S for saving, control-O for opening file and so on.