Scrivener and me

Having seen much praise for Scrivener, and since I own a compatible computer, I thought I’d give it a spin. After a trial period it seemed to offer quite a bit that I would find valuable and I bought a licence. Subsequently I began to find it over-complicated. The PDF manual is huge and not always easy to navigate; the settings and menu system are likewise something of a maze. In the end, I realised that Scrivener is not for me. In so doing I finally crystallised what I want from a computer as far as writing fiction is concerned, and am listing my desiderata here in case you find them helpful.

1. A distraction-free editor with easy export of text to other software.

2. Complete control over the font, line spacing, line width, text colour and background colour.

3. Cross-platform compatibility.

4. Word count.

5. Spellchecker.

6. An outliner or some other means of organising notes in a tree system, with the option of collapsing branches to make the whole structure easier to comprehend.

7. A spreadsheet to calculate and keep track of dates as they appear in the narrative, so that I won’t make mistakes with characters’ ages, etc.; and to be sure that a certain date is a Sunday, or whatever. For one book I even used a spreadsheet to plot phases of the moon.

Scrivener covers all these except 3 (it is no longer available for Linux) and 7, of course. Whatever else it has to offer I do not need. Others’ requirements may be different and I am by no means knocking Scrivener here: it is a powerful, well-supported piece of software and many writers love it.

I migrated from a typewriter to a computer in 1984, using the BASIC editor that came with the Acorn Electron! Each line of text was a numbered line in a ‘BASIC’ program; pressing the Return key generated a new line. Having perfected the text, I would type the whole thing out. This was marginally better than typing directly on paper because I could correct mistakes as I went and was no longer subjected to the perfectionist typist’s mounting fear as the end of the page approaches. 

As you might imagine, the process was laborious and I was pleased when Acorn released a word-processor for that machine. It was called VIEW and was rudimentary by today’s standards. In editing mode it offered a screen blank except for two lines at the top. It almost qualified as a distraction-free editor.

From Acorn machines I went to DOS. There my preferred editor was XyWrite III Plus. This was a full featured word-processor using a command line and, once you had learned the keystrokes, macros and commands your use-case required, it too gave you, much like VIEW, a transparent and mostly distraction-free environment.

I never got on with Windows and bought my first Macintosh in 2003. Microsoft Word was the best option at the time; subsequently I tried other word processors and wasn’t really happy with them either.

That changed for me in 2014 with my discovery of FocusWriter, which then ran on Mac OS X as well as Windows and Linux. (Version 1.7.6 still runs on Apple Silicon, but not for much longer; I am using it now under Tahoe 26.5.1. The next update of macOS will render it unusable). Later releases are for Linux and Windows only, which is all right by me because my principal writing machine is a Linux laptop running Mint. FocusWriter is in the repository and easy to install.

I have already raved about FocusWriter here and here, so largely speaking this is a rehash of those two posts, updated for anyone thinking of converting to Scrivener.

FocusWriter ticks boxes 1 to 5 above, except for Mac compatibility. Number 6 is taken care of by the CherryTree outliner. This again is Open Source and in the repository. Downloads are available for Windows and Mac. It is easy to use but feature-rich, and is an ideal adjunct to FocusWriter. With it one can create a collapsible synopsis, keep notes on characters and locations, etc., and store chunks of text deleted from one’s draft which might contain material of use later. These functions are true of almost any outliner: I don’t know whether CherryTree runs on Apple Silicon. If not, some alternatives are described here. In this place I ought to mention Obsidian and other Zettelkasten-like software, but that is a rabbit-hole you may not want to go down.

The spreadsheet I use is LibreOffice Calc, also Open Source and free to use. This is available for Linux, Windows and Mac and is hands-down the best spreadsheet for, as it were, lay use. Microsoft Excel probably has more functions, but I understand that Calc is very close behind.

So there you have it. A free and Open Source, potential alternative to Scrivener for some writers, which, with the possible exception of the outliner, works without a hitch on Windows, Linux and Intel-based Macs (and, for FocusWriter, those modern Macs running Tahoe 26.5.1 or below).

FocusWriter revisited

I came across this nice video about FocusWriter, which I reviewed in 2014. It does not, however, make fully clear that it is possible to have an entirely uncluttered screen, like this:

FocusWriter keeps getting better and better, and must now be the best distraction-free editor in the world. Used together with a powerful spreadsheet like LibreOffice Calc and a powerful outliner like Cherrytree, it provides pretty much all the functionality you will ever need in constructing, drafting and editing your writing.

All these programs are free and run on Linux, Windows and Mac, though getting Cherrytree onto a Mac requires some technical skill.

Some superb fonts

If you spend much time staring at computer text, you ought to consider very carefully which fonts you use.

Philipp H Poll and his team have provided us with the elegant and readable Linux Libertine. It out-classes Times New Roman by a country mile. The package includes Linux Biolinium, which is an open-source replacement for Linotype’s Optima.

 

Click to enlarge

Linux Libertine looks great when printed, and if you want serifs on your display font then Libertine is your man. However, I’m coming to prefer a sanserif face, and a monospaced one at that, and Ralph Levien’s crisp and humane Inconsolata is now my first choice for the screen.

FocusWriter

I think I have found the perfect software for writers – for this writer, at least.

My ideal features are:

1. Distraction-free mode.

2. Choice of any installed display font, colours and spacing, plus automatic indentation of first line of paragraph.

3. Ability to load and save plain text, with normal access to the filing system. This is most important to me, since plain text can easily be loaded into a tablet or e-reader, or converted (for example with jEdit) into html; or simply edited with another app.

4. Find-and-replace (with regular expressions if possible).

5. Word-count.

FocusWriter by Graeme Gott provides all this and much more. It has the following extra advantages for me:

1. Cross-platform. It runs under Linux, Windows and Apple’s OS X. I have a Linux desktop and a Mac laptop.

2. You can define any number of “themes” (i.e. customizations of the display) and easily switch between them.

3. If you move the mouse pointer to the right of the screen, a scroll-bar appears.

4. If you move the mouse pointer to the left of the screen, you can access a navigation bar which shows the first line or two of every “scene” in your text, the start of a scene being definable by any string you choose. The current scene is highlighted. Keystrokes allow you to move a scene up or down in the navigator and hence in the text.

5. A single keystroke will select a whole scene: useful when counting words.

6. The line currently being edited can be highlighted; or rather, the other lines can be dimmed. You can also highlight the three current lines, or the entire current paragraph. These settings are switchable using keystrokes, so you can quickly turn highlighting off when you move from editing to reviewing.

7. FocusWriter supports smart quotes (including global replace of straight with curly quotes) and allows for easy insertion of special characters.

8. FocusWriter is Open Source software. It is free to download and use, though I strongly recommend “tipping” Mr Gott because he has put a great deal of thought and effort into this program over the last six years and is still developing it.

There are other features which for me are not so important but you might value:

1. A decent spelling checker with the option to check as you write.

2. A motivation tool that lets you set a daily work-target (time spent or words written).

3. Besides plain text, FocusWriter will load and save in rich text (.rtf) and Open Document (.odt) formats, so you can preserve italics, bold, superscript, etc.

4. You can have multiple files open at once, selectable via a tab-bar that appears when you move the mouse pointer to the bottom of the screen. A status bar also becomes visible then, showing you statistics. These are configurable and can display word-count, number of pages, number of paragraphs, and/or number of characters. The way the program counts words and the nominal number of words to a page are also configurable.

Until recently I used PyRoom as a distraction-free editor (see here), but bemoaned the lack of a search function and devised a clunky workaround. FocusWriter is infinitely better.

On a sidenote, I also use AutoKey (Linux) and Keyboard Maestro (Mac). These allow one to define, among other things, customized keystrokes. Thus if I press Alt-S (Linux) or Ctrl-S (Mac), the word “said” appears at the cursor; keys Z, X and C are reserved for the names of the three principal characters in any story, etc. Pretty much anything you can do with the keyboard or mouse can be assigned to a hot-key. AutoHotkey does the same for Windows users.

To keep track of character-names, locations, chronology and whatnot I use a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet running in another workspace. Combined with FocusWriter, this gives me all the features I shall probably ever need.

PyRoom and search

PyRoom is my favourite distraction-free editor, described here. Despite what I wrote back then, I do rather miss a search function. One was slated at LaunchPad, but that was in October 2009.

PyRoom produces plain text files, and these of course can be manipulated with any other text editor. I like jEdit, which I use with its XML plug-in to turn my texts into HTML and thence into ebooks.

Here’s the thing. If a file is open simultaneously in jEdit and another application, and the other application changes and saves it, jEdit can automatically detect the change.

PyRoom runs principally on Linux. A Mac version is here; installation is not for the novice. jEdit is available for the Macintosh as well.

Like the Mac’s OS X, Linux supports multiple “workspaces”. You can switch between them in various ways, including a keystroke combination, which is handy because PyRoom takes up the whole screen. If you have PyRoom open in Workspace 1, say, and jEdit open in Workspace 2 it is easy and quick to swap from one to the other.

To use PyRoom and jEdit simultaneouly, save your PyRoom file with Ctrl-S. (Saving to the desktop is easiest here.) Switch to Workspace 2. Click on the file’s icon: if jEdit is configured as your default text editor, the file opens at once. (Otherwise, right-click and choose jEdit in the “Open With” dialog.) Hit Ctrl-F and you’re ready to search. If you make no change to the file, simply go back to PyRoom and continue drafting. If you have changed something with jEdit, save the altered file, and then, in PyRoom, empty its buffer with Ctrl-W. Hit Ctrl-O and reopen the file. This takes no more than a couple of seconds. On opening a file, PyRoom puts the cursor at the end, so you should try to keep the “coal face” there: in other words, if you have odd and sods of text that you want to retain in that file, store them at the beginning. The alternative is to page-up back to your place, which is tiresome because ... there’s no search function :-)

When you need to go back to jEdit, save the file again with PyRoom and you’ll find a jEdit dialog telling you that changes have been detected.

When your session comes to an end, save the file using PyRoom (I also “Save As” on a USB stick in case the hard disk blows up). In jEdit, hit Ctrl-W (close file) and Ctrl-Q (quit) and you’re done.

This is a work-around, I know, but it does work, and needs only a few more keystrokes than a built-in search function.

To conclude, here are some PyRoom tips.

The choice of font is important. Depending how big a font is “on the body”, the text will appear more or less dense. As I noted in my other post, you can increase the line-spacing (i.e. the leading) in the Preferences, but this introduces unsightly gaps between paragraphs. It is best to keep the extra line-spacing to no more than 2 or 3 pixels.

I have tested a lot of fonts. The best professional-quality, seriffed font I have found for use with PyRoom, having an acceptable amount of built-in “leading”, is Bitstream Charter. The best professional-quality, sanserif font I have found is Droid Sans (Droid Sans Fallback looks identical to me). Both Bitstream Charter and Droid Sans [Fallback] will be found in a typical Linux distribution.

PyRoom does not support italics, bold, or smart quotes. Nor will it automatically convert ellipses, short or long dashes, etc. You can add these by hand, but that’s fiddly and time-consuming. It’s easier to keep to plain text until your draft is complete.

I use a simple set of characters for markup, as follows:

= open and close =italics= (I find this easier on the eye than the underscore character)

* open and close *bold*

" double-quotes (both opening and closing)

' apostrophe, close-single-quotes and elision marks (e.g. fish ’n’ chips)

` (U+0060) open-single-quotes (there is usually a key for this on PC keyboards)

-- en-dash

--- em-dash

... three full-stops for an ellipse

Angle brackets enclose headings and chapter breaks, e.g. < PART ONE >, < chapter break >

Curly brackets enclose other things I may need to attend to individually, such as:

{pb} pagebreak

{fl} flush this line left

{fc} centre this one

{fr} flush this one right

{e/} accented character, é in this case; others are {a"}, {c cedilla}, etc.

The regular-expressions option in jEdit’s search-and-replace dialog will swiftly help you to convert these into HTML tags and entities. The rule when “smartifying” double quotes is that each " preceded by a newline or space becomes an open-double-quote. Change these first, then the rest will be close-double-quotes. I haven’t got round to learning how to write a jEdit macro to automate the S-&-R, but it’s on the to-do list ...

Playing FLAC files on an Apple Mac

Please note: this solution is for Macs with Intel chips only. Before bothering to read on, check “About this Mac” to see whether you have an Intel chip.

FLAC is what’s known as a “lossless audio codec”, which means it’s a music file format able to retain all the information from the original source. Many other music file formats (like MP3) are “lossy” – in order to save disk space, they leave out some of the data.

If an MP3 file has been made at a high enough bit-rate (the maximum is 320 bits per second), hardly anyone can tell the difference. Lossless codecs, however, are perfect for keeping an exact copy of your music, whether for archiving or as a guarantee against further changes in technology: once you start converting one lossy format into another (MP3 to AAC, for example) there is a rapid fall in quality.

FLAC has other advantages as a lossless codec. Unlike WAV, it is able to store metadata – track titles, etc. It uses a clever technique of decompression on-the-fly, a bit like ZIP, so that, while FLAC files are themselves compressed, they are unzipped as they play. Finally, FLAC is Open Source software, non-proprietary, with no restrictions on its use.

If you’re reading this, I assume you already have a collection of FLAC files, possibly acquired while you were using Windows or Linux as a computing platform, and now wish to play them on a Mac without the tedious business of conversion to some other format.

iTunes does not support FLAC, though you can use Fluke. Many people dislike iTunes itself, though, and want a lighter-weight alternative. The ones I know about are:

Songbird
Cog
Vox
Clementine
Amarok
Fidelia
VLC

Songbird is not a particularly lightweight program and I believe development has ceased, or the project has changed hands, or become commercialized. In any case my experiment with it was not a success. Cog failed to run altogether on my Mac. Vox is nice, but ignores track numbers – it plays tracks in alphabetical order, which is especially disastrous for classical music. It apparently also has problems with Lion, the latest OS X. Although Clementine looks promising, it’s in its early stages; my copy refused to work. Amarok is primarily a Linux player, but the OS X version is very definitely in beta. Fidelia is commercial software and I am too cheap to go down that road – the MacBook I’m using for this is on its last legs.

VLC is great, and if you just want to play one album at a time and are completely familiar with your collection this is the one to use (hint: sort the playlist by “Author” to get the tracks in the right order). If on the other hand you want a music player that builds a database to allow browsing and searching, as far as I can see your only native-Mac options are iTunes + Fluke, Songbird, Clementine, Fidelia and Amarok.

My favourite music player is foobar2000, which runs on Windows. It works reasonably well under Wine in Linux: and Wine is also available for Intel-based Macs.

Installing Wine on a Macintosh is not a trivial matter for a non-geek like me: a tutorial is here. I went off in search of a disk image. You can find one listed at Softpedia (be sure to get the 1.2.2 binary).

Once the disk image has downloaded, click on it in the usual way and follow the prompts. In Wine-speak a Windows program is called a “prefix”. Grab a copy of the latest foobar2000 installation package here, click on it, and again just follow your nose.

Click to enlarge

Tell foobar where to find your music (File > Preferences > Media library). If it’s on an external hard disk, keep going up one level in the file browser until you come to a list of technical, Unix-looking stuff, then open “Volumes” and you’ll find your disk drives listed. You can then drill down to the folder where the music is stored.

The senescent MacBook in question runs OS X 10.5.8 (Leopard). If you have another version of OS X your mileage may vary, but this is worth a try. Some features of foobar don’t work: checking a file’s properties with Alt-Enter, for example, and the equalizer fails, but software equalizers are not a good idea anyway. If your stereo doesn’t have tone controls, you’re probably not the sort of person who’d use a software equalizer anyway.

Finally, when shutting down foobar, be sure to eject an external hard drive from the Mac before turning off its power supply. Next time, turn the drive on before opening foobar.

Update, 19.8.12: A commenter suggests aTunes (freeware); Audirvana Plus is another commercial application for the Mac, reasonably priced. I haven’t tried either of these myself as I’ve now adopted a Linux netbook as my music server.

PyRoom - a distraction-free editor

PyRoom is a full-screen text editor: it adopts a minimalist approach, largely doing away with icons and menus. Your screen shows the text being worked on and nothing more until you invoke a simple help screen or the preferences dialog.

It’s a clone of WriteRoom for the Mac and runs under Linux. Other full-screen editors are listed at this Wikipedia page.

What appeals to me about such writing tools is their simplicity. For many years I used a DOS word-processor called XyWrite; this, despite an unfriendly interface and a potential for infinite, time-wasting customization, can offer an uncluttered working screen. It’s perfect for immersive writing, when the machine becomes transparent to the user and all that matters is the text. Except under emulation, I no longer use DOS at all, or Windows for anything except a music server.

PyRoom is not a word processor. Its files are pure ASCII, and it does not support smart quotes or highlighting of any kind. Those need to be added when the first draft of your text is complete. (Just adopt some arbitrary characters to denote the beginning and end of bold or italic regions.) PyRoom is fast: even on a humble netbook it loads a 125,000 word book almost instantaneously.

The working screen looks like this:

Click images to enlarge

The theme preferences dialog lets you choose the colours of the “ink”, “paper”, and a border if you want one, together with the size of the text area relative to the screen. I set up the grey-blue theme illustrated because I find it restful on the eyes.

The general preferences dialog is largely self-explanatory.

The “indent” option is nice because it permits a book-like appearance and obviates a double keypress at the end of every paragraph. However, increasing the line-spacing produces a slight extra space between paragraphs, which I find unsightly, so I chose a font which is small on the body.

The PyRoom command-set is as follows:

Control-H: Show help in a new buffer (a “buffer” is a full-screen window)
Control-I: Show buffer information (buffer name, file path, number of characters, words and lines)
Control-P: Show preferences dialog
Control-N: Create a new buffer
Control-O: Open a file in a new buffer
Control-Q: Quit
Control-S: Save current buffer
Control-Shift-S: Save current buffer as
Control-W: Close buffer and exit if it is the last buffer
Control-C: Copy
Control-X: Cut
Control-V: Paste
Control-Z: Undo last typing
Control-Y: Redo last typing
Control-Page Up: Switch to previous buffer
Control-Page Down: Switch to next buffer

The Linux mouse-buffer works: text highlighted with the mouse can be pasted elsewhere by clicking the middle button. Highlighted text can also be dragged into a new position.

And that’s it. There is nothing more to play with or distract you. At first I felt the absence of a search function, but soon realized that I had formerly wasted much time on looking for repetitions of phrases and constructions – something that is much better done at the polishing stage, using a full-blown word-processor.

Once you have set up a theme to your taste, all you can really do with a distraction-free editor is compose the first draft. There is no potential for electronic pencil-sharpening; the software brings you to the coal-face more quickly and lets you spend longer there. I think I’m becoming a fan.

3 March 2014: This post has been expanded and updated here.