Yesterday, I wanted to find an editor for writing. At first, all I can see is about programming editors, and that absolutely was not what I intended to have.

After few more tries, some keywords started to show up from my search results. One of them is “creative writing program,” of which the word “program” is not meant the computer program but a course for learning or studying creative writing. So what exactly is “creative writing?” This question I couldn’t answer, at least, because I am not a native and never have any advanced class of English. Needless to say, English writing wouldn’t be one of my skill (I hope someday it will be). According to those web pages, it can be a creation of a novel, a film screenplay, a poem—or anything can inspire your by your imagination, or—the keyword—creativity.

Back to my intention of seeking an editor, I was expecting a editor, a simple text editor—not a word processor. By which, you can focus on writing whatever you are working on, it can providing necessary accessibilities, such as dictionary/thesaurus lookup, grammar/spell check, or sort of things can essentially be helpful to writing.

I did saw some applications but almost all of them are for Windows or mainly for Mac platform. Nevertheless, it seems that Linux users do not deserves having one, I still managed to find one. And even better it’s a free software (not as in freedom), JDarkRoom. Obviously, it’s a remake of another software, inherits the idea of the original and extends the concepts to better implementations. Full black background with green text color (with a nice music if you have one), then it does help. At least for me, I can concentrate now. This somehow solves the problem, and, be honestly, I was not aware of that problem before.

JDarkRoom is written in Java, so it’s capable to run on many operating systems, including Linux. Its only purpose is helping concentration, but I believe that we can count on it more. The current feature can be part of a bigger program, a editor for writing. I have some ideas, I might be starting to work on a new such editor, but I am not so sure.

You may already know I am a Taiwanese speaking Chinese, but I am kind of resisting using Chinese by any means. Ridiculously, my English is not fluent and I can barely speak with blah-wa-la-e-ya accents. I have no idea how or when this all happened. Back at school, Chinese writing is just my average skill, I was never good or showing interest at Chinese or literature—for this, it’s still true today. As of English, it’s the same story.

Five years ago, I heard of blogging, and started to do it in English. The reason of using English is an unsolved puzzle to me, too. I discontinued for a year, then I on-and-off wrote some postings since. Many questions are unanswerable, even you have one, you will still doubt of it. So, quit questioning it. Just write it!