One of the more useful editors for creating blog posts, roughing out a chapter, etc. is a cross platform word processor called FocusWriter. Several times per year this becomes my favorite tool for getting things done. It has a wonderful “distraction free” mode which takes up the full screen presenting no menus or anything else. You can have one full monitor devoted to nothing but your thoughts. Under Ubuntu’s ugly Unity desktop the current version still leaves the icky Ubuntu top bar and far right bar on the screen so it isn’t completely distraction free, but it is on good Linux desktops.
Another wonderful feature is the community of people creating themes for this word processor. It comes with some default themes which are serviceable but idle hands have created some truly spectacular themes. A little bit of effort with search engines can probably find hundreds of themes.
While I have only copied and modified existing themes, they do seem rather easy to change. Hopefully you clicked that link to see some screen shots of the themes. If you have some fantastic cover art you can use it as a screen background while writing your book. If you happen to be writing a book which seems to be in the universe of one of the existing themes why not use one to put you in the mood? Yes, you can even find themes like Moleskin and Leathers which look like old hides one used to write on with a quill.
One note. FocusWriter does support the OpenDocument format as well as a few others, but, it is not as fully featured a word processor as many out there. You can justify and center text along with the standards of bold, italic, etc. It just doesn’t have much support for generating a TOC (Table of Contents), index or creating complex documents. This is a word processor designed to put you in a mood and let your thoughts flow.
Edit: 2020-10-28
The site I linked to appears to have long since gone away. I have reached out to Mr. Gott himself about adding the themes to the main FocusWriter distribution but that was only minutes ago. Because I tend to set up machines for projects and because I need to create RTF documentation when it will go into source control with everything else, I have created this zip file.
