My fellow distracted writers,
All day yesterday, instead of writing, I typed in search for the perfect distraction-free word processor. Yes, I’m aware of the irony. If I’d just spent those hours pumping out words in Word I’d have a thousand good ones or more. Thus you can see what a weak grip my writing projects hold on my focus and why everything on my screen–my clock, my menus, my quick launch icons–must be blacked out!
I’d been devoted since August to JDarkRoom, “a simple full-screen text editor,” installing it on both my XP desktop and my linux netbook. Storage was the glaring imperfection in this solution. I first tried keeping my files online, emailing them to myself or uploading them to box.net. What a pain that was. And I never I could keep track of which hard drive held the most recent revision. So I picked up an 8GB thumb drive at Costco, which held all five of my stories with enough space left over for the collection to grow. Too bad it sported history’s most distracting LED. And what if I lost the little thing? I kept thinking: I wish Google Docs would just come out with a way to dim the lights on its full screen mode.
Turns out it’s been possible since the July update. Here’s the hack:
- Open a blank Google document
- Click View > Fixed-width page view
- Click Edit > Edit CSS
- Paste the following code:
.pageview body {
background-color: #000;
border: 0;
}
html.pageview {
background-color: #000 !important;
}
.editor div.writely-toc {
background-color: #000;
border: 1px solid #000;
}
body {
font-family: Garamond !important;
font-size: 12pt !important;
color: #c0c0c0;
}
h1 {
text-transform: uppercase;
font-family: Garamond;
font-size: 24pt;
color: #c0c0c0;
}
h2 {
font-family: Garamond;
font-size: 18pt;
color: #c0c0c0;
}
h3 {
font-family: Garamond;
font-size: 14pt;
color: #c0c0c0;
} - Click OK
- Click View > Full-screen mode (Ctrl+Shift+F)
- Press F11 to enter your browser’s full screen mode
Cool or what? Just keep a blank copy of the document as a template and do a “File > Save as new copy” whenever you start a new project. Install Google Gears to work on your documents while offline. And if Garamond gray on black isn’t your thing, you can always go back to “Edit > Edit CSS” to change the default styles. Or just use the dropdown menus.
I would also suggest the FullerScreen Firefox Add-on, and a Firefox theme with a dark scrollbar to remove even more distractions from the screen. I tried and tried to eliminate that dang bright line on the left edge, but I think I have to leave that one up to Google. Fortunately, the Full Flat Absolute Black theme masks it well:
I should give credit to S. W. Shinn, who came up with a similar, but resolution-dependent hack, and Pete Rugh, who took a ten minute break from Guitar Hero to save me hours. Thanks to them I have all I need to be productive again. Starting tomorrow.
-Nat Foster
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