Most of the time I create a rough draft of my posts on here using FocusWriter or KWrite. There was a brief and horrible period where I tried to use jEdit which is quite possibly the second largest pig of an editor in the world. It definitely has the worst font rendering of any editor ever created. Sometimes I will break down and use UltraEdit if I’m on a machine which doesn’t have FocusWriter installed. If most of these seem like programming editors to you, please keep in mind I spent 30+ years as an IT consultant.
Text editors work well for me, especially the ones with dynamic word wrap and spell-as-you-go typing which can be turned on/off. It is too bad jEdit could never pan out. It is a pig because it is written in Java and tries to be all things to everyone. Because it is written in Java with a simple plug-in/add-on API, every first year Java developer seems to have created one for it and they all seem to be listed when looking for one. About anything you could want to do to text, other than being able to actually _read_ it already has something built in or quickly obtainable to do it in that editor.
As of late, since I haven’t had a KDE desktop in a while, I’ve been letting FocusWriter do the heavy lifting. This is a wonderful full screen distraction free word processor supporting the OpenDocument format. It does not have much in the way of formatting which is fine. There seems to be an army of one-off theme creators out there. The trouble is, their sites are here today and gone tomorrow. There used to be one site, which I can no longer find, that had my favorites. First, I will link you to some I just found. No idea just how long they will stay around: site 1, site 2, site 3, site 4
Now, here are my favorites. I haven’t been able to find them posted anywhere for a long time. If someone actually is the author and can prove it and they don’t want a particular free theme posted here they can reach me with a comment.
- Leathers theme
- Renaissance theme
- Sky-Paper theme
- Winter-Morning theme
- XT-Green-Terminal theme
- Zen-Paper theme
Other than applying full justification I don’t actually format the posts I create off-line. All of these links you see are a bunch of http addresses pasted into the document at some point after the paragraph they should go into. You may notice I sometimes have _ and _ around words in my posts. That is because I meant to underline or otherwise highlight the word and I missed fixing that after pasting into the crummy WordPress editor.
I call it crummy because it is horribly annoying. It has buttons for left, center and right justification, but none for full justification. Likewise, it has buttons for bold and italic, but not one for underscore. If you want either of these features you have to click the text tab then edit the raw HTML.
To get full justification you need to change <p align=”blah”> to <p align=”justify”>. To get the word underscore displayed with an underscore as above, you have to put <u> and </u> tags around the word in the text edit screen. When you switch back to visual you then see your paragraph is fully justified and the underscore word has an underscore.
How did I find out the WordPress editor had support for this kind of formatting? By cutting and pasting from FocusWriter then noticing my justification and underscores all pasted in.
Part of me is tempted to install BlueFish to write my blog posts. It has a Web preview function but the spell checking is less than intuitive. At least when you open it up to an empty document with the spell checking turned on it doesn’t seem to have any idea what to do. I didn’t spend much time looking at it to see if something as simple as giving the empty document a file name such as “a.txt” would kick in the English language spell check or not.
Edit: 2020-10-28
I put all of the FocusWriter themes I have into a zip file because most of the sites hosting them have gone away.
I hope you can find something you like.
