Anyone who has tried to write their masterpiece will tell you that one of the main enemies of creativity is time. Another one is the internet. I speak from personal experience here; writing The Great British Novel is all too often abandoned in favor of exploring a few dull weblogs and reading some dull email.

To really get creative writing done, I need to filter out all the distractions and let the words flow. I need an editor with fullscreen mode.

Recently there was some discussion on 43 Folders about Ulysses, a text editor aimed at writers that includes an excellent fullscreen mode designed for just this sort of situation.

In fact, flicking through the comments on that 43 Folders post, you’ll see that a lot of people said they considered the fullscreen mode the best feature of Ulysses - and had been exploring other options for achieving the same effect.

I’ve been playing around with some simple fullscreen-alikes too.

My TextEdit fullscreen template
TextEdit template as a fullscreen editor

It’s simple to knock up a template in TextEdit that is near-as-dammit fullscreen. OK, you still see the Menu Bar, and have to hit Command+Option+D to make the Dock go away, but the result is perfectly good enough. In fact, you could set up almost any editor to achieve a similar effect — see the TextForge screenshot below.

TextForge as a gentle-on-the-eyes fullscreen editor
TextForge, one of my favorite editors, with a screen-sized window and its lovely white-on-blue editing theme

But as far as I’m concerned, the best alternative is the brand-new, still-beta-but-hey-it-works version of MacJournal 2.7, which includes a superb fullscreen mode right out of the box! Um, disk image. Look:

MacJournal 2.7 in fullscreen mode
Green on black, just the way it Should Be

Delicious green-on-black text; proper fullscreen effect, with no Dock and no Menu Bar in sight. This really does cut you off from the rest of the world; you have to make the conscious choice to hit Escape and go back to the normality of your Desktop. But of course you won’t, will you? You’ll be far too busy writing.

I’ve got so many great editing tools now, it’s hard to know which one to use