Clear Dis­trac­tions and Con­cen­trate on your Writ­ing With Q10

I never find the time to write! It’s ironic, because writing is one of my great pleasures in life. I will likely jabber your ear off if I ever get the pleasure of meeting you, and that has translated into me loving to also share knowledge in the form of writing through the Internet. I also like to jot down the things I’ve learned today and transfer my thoughts onto a computer in order to really get it out of my head. I guess it’s a sort of therapy.

Unfortunately, there always is something to do. When there isn’t, Facebook, Tumblr, Gmail, and Twitter beckon my attention. I’d considered turning off my Wi-fi and just escaping into my room to write, but what interface would I do it in? Word was too business-y, and definitely overkill. Notepad was not my flavor. I needed a distraction-free environment! I found it in Q10.

Q10 is a perfect example of when simple becomes brilliant. What you see in that screenshot is all that you’ll see while you’re writing in Q10 — not exactly the most complex interface, and no bells or whistles. It makes a beautiful clicking sound like a typewriter would, and a nice ringing sound when you input a line break. One of the most important things in this first screenshot is the information in the bottom left hand corner — let’s have a closer look:

This display shows you how many words you’ve gotten, and how many pages you’ve written. Key for all sorts of essays, writing assignments, or if you’re on a limited supply of paper. (No joke, I was on like five sheets for the last week.) On the other side of the screen, the time and filename are displayed.

Great inclusion, especially for those time-strained freaks who don’t want to put too much of it into writing. (Strictly joking folks, I’m quite tight with time myself.) The * appears when the file has not yet been saved. As you can see, the file is saved as a plain text .txt file.

What if you don’t like the color combinations? Can you customize Q10 to your liking? Most definitely! Press F1, and this windows will pop-up, showing all possible commands and keyboard shortcuts (which are important, because there’s no menu to activate them from!).

What kind of settings can you tweak?

That’s just a simple example of what you can adjust. You can also adjust settings like the margins on the side of the text, auto-correction, as well as information that is being displayed, such as including line and paragraph counts.

If you want to find out more about Q10, you can learn more at the Q10 website, which assures us that it will always be freeware. 🙂 I’m absolutely in love with this remarkably well-executed minimalist interface, and it has definitely allowed me to concentrate on writing more often and with more intensity.

To put into perspective the value of Q10, there’s another program called WriteRoom which does practically the same thing as Q10 but syncs between devices, and costs $25. If this feature is useful to you though, you might want to check it out!

Last updated on 8 Feb, 2018