Your progress is tracked as you work and displayed in the status bar at the bottom of the screen. You can set a daily word count goal or a timed goal for yourself in Focuswriter’s preferences. This helps your eyes lazily locate your current line of text, which can be especially helpful if you’re not a touch-typist or if you’re transcribing something you’ve handwritten on physical paper and must look away from the screen often. Line focusĪnother optional feature of Focuswriter is its ability to 'grey out' all lines of text but your current one. Even the contextual right-click menu only offers basic editing functions (copy, cut, paste, and so on) or spell-checking options. It lets you write text, and little else, into a document, by design.

It doesn’t have advanced search options or specialized options for code formatting or syntax highlighting. There isn’t much to Focuswriter’s editing capabilities. There’s a scroll bar hidden on the right, a document switcher widget on the left, and a status bar at the bottom. To access the main menu bar, you place your cursor to the top of your screen until it appears. Fullscreen displayįocuswriter not only launches fullscreen by default, but it also hides its menus and other widgets from view. You may doubt its efficacy, but you shouldn’t underestimate the satisfaction of making those sounds of productivity while also wielding the powers of modern text editing.

This audio theme is entirely opt-in, and it’s not on by default. When you press Return, the satisfying sound of a carriage return is your reward for completing a paragraph (or a line, if you write one sentence per line to improve version control). Once enabled, every keypress makes the sound of a mechanical typewriter key. Aside from its visual theme, it also has an optional typewriter audio theme. Because it’s easy to customize, there’s little chance of you being left without a theme you like.įocuswriter is actually fun to use. You’re not meant to become preoccupied with the theme, of course, but it does help you from getting distracted by some other application window or your computer desktop lingering behind your editor. The theme is generally benign-a writing desk is the default, but there’s also a starry sky, a faraway landscape, and so on.

When it launches, it loads a theme behind your document. Attractivenessįocuswriter doesn’t look like your usual computer application, much less your usual text editor. But that’s where its word processor features end because Focuswriter does mostly focus on writing, not on styling what you’ve written.įocuswriter encourages focus in a few different ways. Its default format is the Open Document Text (.odt) format, so it allows you to style and align text, mark headers, and toggle smart quotes on and off. Using Focuswriterįocuswriter is, admittedly, actually a cross between a text editor and a word processor. You can also install from source code, also available from the Focuswriter webpage. On Windows or Linux (if you don’t use Flatpak), you can install Focuswriter from its website. On Linux, you can install Focuswriter as a Flatpak from Flathub.

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