I've been writing nonsense for a while now and have probably spent more time writing since graduating than I did through my entire University career (of course, in physics you don't do a lot of writing).
One of the key things for me and writing is finding the right tool. When blogging, I use the Blogger interface, which I think is awesome, or the Word Press interface, which is also quite good if you're admin for the blog as well. I use ConTEXT for any html or xml work I need to do. It's a great little freeware program for Windows.
However, writing prose is a different beast. I currently do most of my work in humble Notepad. I like its simplicity and I don't need a lot of features when banging out the words. I've tried working in Word (too busy/too slow) and WordPad (kill me). Open Office is not much better.
Notepad, however, suffers from the long line problem. Text displayed on long lines is more diffcult to read than that on shorter lines (look at newspaper columns). I hate websites that have text that runs the full screen. I want to reach into my monitor and punch the designer. Working in Notepad and its attendant full-screen line has been slowly driving me nuts but nothing better (and free) has really surfaced.
All of which makes me very excited about Dark Room (for Windows). It looks like it's what I've been looking for all this time. I haven't tried it out yet but I'm hopeful. Dark Room is a Windows version of WriteRoom for Macs, which, encouragingly, has gotten very favourable reviews.
Once I've spent a little time with it, I'll post a review here.
