If you find writing a chore, if you prefer to work from home on days when you have to write up big reports, you’ll love Q10.
Distraction Free Writing
Q10 is a writing tool with very few features and that is what makes it so attractive. It’s a great way to start writing a piece as you can’t procrastinate into formatting headings and changing fonts etc. It’s a full screen text editor, which means that the “page” fills the entire screen and shields you from distractions. There are no tool bars and no paper clips popping up with helpful suggestions. Using Q10 is the software equivalent of going into a quiet room and closing the door behind you.
If you’ve not used a full screen text editor before you should give it a try, especially if you do a lot of writing. It has to be said though, people tend to fall into two camps over full screen editors. They either love them or hate them. Personally, I love them. I have one for my Mac called WriteRoom and was really pleased when I found this equivalent version for the PC.
Return of the Typewriter
Q10 is about as close to an old fashioned typewriter that you can get nowadays and it doesn’t leave you with sore fingers. It even makes a typing sound just like an old fashioned type writer whenever you type a character or
Ching, do a carriage return.
Ching.
That may sound annoying and not in keeping with Q10s philosophy of only including essential features. When I first installed Q10, I thought it would be the first feature that I would switch off, but I actually like it. I find that the keystroke sound is a positive confirmation that I’m writing something which starkly contrasts with ominous silence of staring at the screen.
I should just point out that I do have an office to myself and I think that the typing sound might annoy others, so use it wisely.
It Must Have Some Features?
So if there are no tool bars, there can’t be any features right? There are features, but they’re all available via keyboard short cuts. They are all easy to remember though and if at any point you can’t remember a short cut, just hit F1 and it’ll bring up the complete list.
The main features that people who write for a living will like are the timers, targets and page stats.
Hit Ctrl + t and you can set a timer for a given number of minutes. This let’s you concentrate on you writing, sets a deadline for you and makes sure you won’t be late for your next appointment.
Global targets can also be set. Rather than working to specific time deadlines, these alert you when you reach a certain number of words, lines, paragraphs or pages. You can also choose to have all of these stats displayed in the info bar at the bottom of the screen if you prefer.
There is of course a spell checker (hit F7) included and when you download Q10 you have the option to download a version with or without the spell checker, though the file is so small anyway, you may as well choose the spell checker version.
The final nice touch that I like is the auto-correct feature. You can set various combinations of letters to automatically change so that you can easily type © symbols by typing (c) for example. This is all configurable and you can add common misspellings that you’d like corrected as you type or a set of acronyms and abbreviations that you’d like to always be written out in full.
If you’re a Portable Apps user, you’ll be please to hear that Q10 is also available in a portable version.
Q10, is a rare example of an application that has all of the complexity stripped out of it in order to make your life easier. You probably won’t write the final sentence of your best selling book in Q10, but you might write the first chapter and they’re both equally important.
You can download Q10 from www.baara.com/q10
Filed under: Free Fridays, Free Software , full screen text editor, q10, text editor, writing
I find that the q10 editor is a nice editor to use for serious writing purposes. It doesn’t have all that screen clutter that you find with most other windows based applications, thus allowing you to only focus on the text, rather than the workings of the program.
Of course, most people will still want to have all that eye candy on the screen because that’s what they’re used to, but for the blogger, or serious author, q10 is the perfect tool to use. I liken it to a portable quiet room that you can take with you to write in.. It doesn’t let you get destracted by all that screen clutter, and it lets you think and write.
I love Q10 because of its overall simplicity. It makes for an excellent notetaker. It is great for blind computer users because it seams to handle screen readers quite well.
Q10 is so small that it could fit easily onto a USB flash drive with no problems whatsoever. If you ahve access to standard HTML colors, such as those used on web sites, then you can fully customize Q10 to look exactly the way that you want it, so you’re not just stuck with the black screen and green type.
I strongly recommend Q10 to anyone and everyone who needs a really simple text editor program.
Unfortunately Q10 doesn’t run on Linux or MacOS. It is possible to run it through Wine though. There is TextRoom for Linux.
@Enis Salih Reyhan
Yes. it’s a shame that Q10 isn’t interoperable as it’s the best implementation of a simple full screen editor that I’ve found.
I have WriteRoom on my mac but don’t like it as much and I just use Open Office Write on full screen when I’m on Ubuntu.
I simply want to have a full screen typwwriting capacity to type letters and then print on my epson stylus printer. I have haqd this feature on my i mac but it somehow got cancelled out. PLEASE RE INSTALL FOR ME. THANK YOU.