DarkRoom 1.5a (Or Something)

This quick-fix is a lot like Darkroom, but it doesn’t have the scrolling error. It does have a tiny window on it that says, “Close Full Screen”, but that doesn’t really bother me, compared to being stopped as soon as I’m on a roll by the Darkroom rolldown error*.

In this mode, even the infamous red and green “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG” lines are, shockingly, much less annoying. I can actually ignore them. That’s impossible for me on a white background.

I’m running Word ’03, and I won’t change over until I’m forced into Vista, and if I can’t cotton to Vista, then I’ll just go back to my XP Pro.

I hate Word ’07. (The computers at school use it.) Not only is it completely NOT backwards compatible, no matter what the dialog boxes say, it’s annoying, ugly, bloated, and appears to resist this little “work-around”, which, to me, seems like the height of foolishness. If I want to clear my screen of bells and whistles, I should be able to, easily, and forcing me to “Embrace the Bloat” doesn’t endear me to Micro$oft or its products.

I mean, really.

Plus, I’ve got a touch of astigmatism, so the lower contrast and sharp, bright duotone are much more relaxing for my eyes.

I may set it to Courier 10, white text, and totally go all the way back to my humble beginnings on a Sony processor that actually had the typewriter BUILT INTO IT; activating “Manual” mode made the machine function like a typewriter, which is why I still remember far too much about margins, what tab releases do, and how to correctly hand-feed paper under the roller so it doesn’t come out twisted (eeew, crooked text)!

There was something very tactile about having to hand-feed the printer. It felt like I was performing an action that mattered--as if I had literally “had a hand” in the production of my work in a solid, physical sense. I love “Find”, and his luscious companion “Find and Replace”, and I adore how consistently wrong Word’s grammar check is, but I miss my processor sometimes.

The only thing I don’t like: in this mode, I can’t see the clock. I hardly ever obey the clock, anyway, but it does at least give me a sense of how much I should be panicking as the minutes speed by.

I wish Notepad would just come with a "Background" and "Text Color" option; I use it all the time. My first drafts of everything--even assignments--are always in Notepad. I put html italic things where I know I'm going to want emphasis. This has the added advantage of pre-formatting all my blog/Internet crap, which is also done in Notepad.

But, yeah, anyways, so, thus, therefore, or something.

*The DarkRoom rolldown error is this: I find that once I've typed about 3/4 a page of text, the cursor will suddenly leap back into the middle of the sentence, jammed, and any character pressed after that will be "invisible" and function as if I'd pressed the Enter key instead. There doesn't seem to be a bug report for this, and I tried mucking around with the margins and text treatment in Preferences, but that didn't solve it. So far, the only cure I've come up with is to save what I'm working on and shut-and-rerun DarkRoom. It's irritating and time-consuming, which is what drove me to look for alternatives.

And that's why you have this entry. You lucky people, you.