A while ago I looked at the design and rhetoric of Zenware, distraction-free software (mainly writing programs). Today I found another: the cross-platform FocusWriter.

FocusWriter is a fullscreen, distraction-free word processor designed to immerse you as much as possible in your work. The program autosaves your progress, and reloads the last files you had open to make it easy to jump back in during your next writing session, and has many other features that make it such that only one thing matters: your writing.

It doesn’t have the same level of invocation of Zen and Buddhism as OmmWriter, and interestingly the reviews I’ve seen mirror the software’s self-description– by not invoking them, either. One reviewer praises it for “immers[ing] you as much as possible in your work.” But another complains,

There are a myriad of distractions out there begging for a writer’s attention, and FocusWriter knows that. Unfortunately, that’s all it seems to know about writers…. FocusWriter is nothing more than a very simple text editing program, not even better than TextEdit.