I'm now looking at tools that are designed– or are talked about– as promoting concentration or Zen-life calm (though just what people mean when they invoke Zen is as worth digging into as what people mean when they talk about calmness), and I'm struck by a several things. Five, really.

First, so far most of the tools I've come across deal with writing. Nick Carr and Sven Birketts complain that the Web has made it harder for them to read; there seem to be an equal number of software developers who feel that the Web has made it harder for them to write, and who have created programs to get their focus back. I'm sure there are Zen photo editing tools, or Zen musical composition tools. Or are there?

Second, Zenware (as these programs sometimes call themselves) are really focus specifically on the act of writing, and devote no resources for (or offer any distraction through) printing, publishing, formatting, or whatever. The assumption is that you have other tools that you can use for those functions, and that the distinction between the creative act of writing and less creative acts like playing with page numbers of style sheets can be usefully segregated. (Or at least these are less creative for writers; for type designers, book designers, and others, they can be very creative.)

Third, for most of them the key idea is radical simplification. A program that doesn't let you play around with lots of formatting options, or choose from a huge menu of fonts, the thinking goes, lets you concentrate on words and ideas: it works by stripping away distraction (or, more accurately, things that we experience as distrations). As Life Optimizer says about JDarkRoom:

The fact that there’s nothing else displayed on the screen allows me to focus entirely on the task in front of me. No disruption, no eye candy, nothing. Just me and the task. Just me… and the task. Such situation gives me a peace of mind, a “mind like water”. It is a good condition for me to enter the “flow” state, a condition where I lose track of time and have my creative juice flows freely.

JDarkRoom is another example of this minimalist-by-design interface: it's a full-screen editor that has no bells or whistles, a default mode featuring green letters on black text, and a blinking cursor. As one writer put it,

When you’re in it, you’re in it. You can’t see your system tray, your Start button, your desktop or anything else. Just the editor. It’s fantastic for getting things done. There’s no IM window popping up to let you know your annoying friend from MySpace just came online and is trying to get your attention. You don’t see the clock ragging at you, telling you you’re up past your bedtime. You don’t have the distraction of that stupid little animation on the web page trying to get you to click. Nothing.

That’s great for getting things done. It is — you can just concentrate on what you’re writing and get it done. It’s a Godsend. NaNoWriMo’ers, take note!

(NaNoWriMo, incidentally, has influenced its Linux's Q10, for example, features a timer for word wars, a writing competition made popular by NaNoWriMo.)

All of these draw inspiration from WriteRoom, which I've used for a few years. In this respect, WriteRoom turns out to be like Cream's version of "Little Wing": it's spawned a whole host of copies that stay pretty close to the original. (If JDarkRoom– and its predecessor, DarkRoom– are like covers of WriteRoom, OmmWriter is like the Gil Evans version of "Little Wing:" recognizably part of the family, but pretty far out.)

Fourth– and now things start to get really interesting– their notion of simple or Zen or stripped-down isn't a sheet of paper, but an old-fashioned computer interface. WriteRoom, JDarkRoom, WriteMonkey, and their ilk share

the assumption that the way to achieve a Zen-like simplicity is to invoke an older kind of human-computer interaction. Write Room makes your computer screen look like something from the 1968 Engelbart demo– or maybe a little earlier. To a generation of computer users who've grown up with color screens, ever-fancier transitions, cliipies, etc., this is simplicity. Or at least it's an interface that signifies simplicity, which works out to the same thing.

JDarkRoom calls out the same history: "If you… feel a pang of nostalgia for the retro colour scheme," the programs' developers write, "JDarkRoom might be the editor for you." MacWorld concurs: "Anyone old enough to remember word processing on an Apple IIc or IIe may feel a fond glow of nostalgia." This isn't just nostalgia, though: it has some functionality, as well. As Life Optimizer reports,

the black background is less irritating to the eyes. I can stare at the monitor for long time without making my eyes tired. This ability to look at the monitor for long time is another good condition for me to get into the “flow”.

The Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro writes,

WriteRoom seems to have cast a shiny new Mac laptop back to the dark ages of DOS. There are no menus, toolbars or icons to suggest that you can do something besides write. And that's the point…. These applications aren't just curmudgeonly exercises in computing nostalgia. Computers really were worse 20 or 30 years ago, and reverting to a DOS or Apple II program will not make you more productive.

But programs sometimes throw information at us, rather than help us process it. Some only magnify the problem with pushy behavior, like when an application throws an alert or dialog in front of whatever you are doing.

As another says, "When I am writing, all there has to be is me, a blank screen, my words and the current wordcount. No fancy toolbars, colorful buttons, floating windows or other useless distractions from the things that really count."

Not everyone is impressed by this: as The Lone Sysadmin explains how to "make your own Darkroom / WriteRoom / JDarkRoom in 60 seconds:" 1) "open a terminal. 2. Set your terminal colors to green on black. 3. Click the maximize button. 4. Run nano, pico, vi, emacs, whatever." Now that's old school.

Fifth and finally, while these writers tend to extol the minimalism of these interfaces, some also talk about the programs in spatial terms. For example, Virginia Heffernan puts together minimalism, focus, and space in her Virginia Woolf-inspired rave about WriteRoom:

With WriteRoom, you don’t compose on anything so confining as paper or its facsimile. Instead, you rocket out into the unknown, into profound solitude, and every word of yours becomes the kind of outer-space skywriting that opens “Star Wars.” What I mean is this: Black screen. Green letters. Or another color combination of your discerning choice. But nothing else.

For those of us who learned Basic on a Zenith Z19 and started word processing on a Kaypro (anyone?), the retro green-and-black now takes the breath away. It’s not just the vintage features available on WriteRoom, it’s also that the whole experience is a throwback to a time before user-friendly interfaces came to protect us from technology’s dark places. In those days, the mystery of the human mind and the mystery of computation seemed both to illuminate and to deepen each other.

Likewise, OmmWriter's overview video describes the program as "a writer's haven," adds, "If you are new here, hello," and promises that even in the new version, "you are still alone with your thoughts."

This seems inconsistent, yet important. There's nothing remotely spatial about WriteRoom or its progeny: they're as flat an interface as you could imagine (OmmWriter again is the exception). Yet clearly this idea is meaningful for plenty of people: the program is supposed to be like shutting yourself in an inspirational, meditative space. At the very least, this suggests just how powerful spatial metaphor remain in our thinking about computers and human-computer interaction.