I've been doing this with emacs for years now. I usually have emacs running fullscreen on 4:3 monitor alongside my main monitor, or when I'm on laptop I run it fullscreen also. Makes me, for some reason, more focused.

clean darkroom

http://imgur.com/LloOY.png

and with menu

http://imgur.com/yTeUz.png

Would you mind posting your config? I'm a bit of an emacs noob but I would love to be able to do this.

well my .emacs is a lot of collected/revised cruft over the years. It's a mess really, and I'm always putting away refactoring for some other time - since it works for me. You'd also need all of the included dependencies and stuff (it's windows specific, but could be made to work on other OS' also). So I might zip up my .emacs with all of the dependencies files if you want me to.

I'd appreciate it if you did. I primarily use emacs on Windows, so that aspect is not a problem, and I weeding through all of your cruft might be fun :)

http://www.vga.hr/temp/home.zip - here is my home folder, just be sure to set HOME var as an environment variable to that folder. There are also minor install files in darkroom folder inside (you'll see). F12 toggles title bar, F11 toggles fullscreen (a bit buggy, so sometimes you need to press it a few times due to external program that sets it), F7 and F8 cycle back and forward between emacs buffer and F6 toggles line numbers.

I'm still waiting for the app that makes other household members shut up... now that would be distraction-free writing. :-)

It's not an app, and it doesn't work for others, but for you: use noise-canceling headphones.

I'm still waiting for the app which makes the voices in my head shut up. :-)

If you know of noise canceling headphones that are effective against the irregular waveforms of human speech, I'd be most interested.

In that case, you want something that actually blocks the sound, like these:

http://www.amazon.com/Etymotic-Research-Portable-Earphones-B...

35db of isolation. You basically can't hear anything, which is nice when you need to work somewhere noisy, or want to listen to music on an airplane. It's infinitely better than noise cancellation.

Thank you. I recently spent $80 on another brand that uses foam tips. It had the highest rating I could find amongst the choices at a specialty shop, at IIRC 31 dB attenuation. I haven't been in a suitable work environment since then, to try them out.

I'll probably give those a go, first, but if they do not suffice, these look worth trying, and at about $120 are within my price range (as opposed th the $300 plus that I've seen for some other items).

As you say, though, these work via passive blocking and not active cancellation. Some time ago, I came across an explanation by an audio engineer claiming that cancellation will never work fully with headphones. Even if the processing is fast enough, he argued, the distances involved between the speaker and eardrum just won't permit it. Perhaps this was in combination with the inertia and therefore delay in the speaker elements; I no longer recall fully.

When people state "wear canceling headphones", I've never yet seen the statement backed up with a real / real world use case.

EDIT: I guess/imagine it might be more a matter of the location of the microphone that drives the noise cancellation, than that of the speakers. Although I do seem to recall also something about the limitations imposed by pressure waves operating in such a small, confined space.

Being ineffective for speech is actually a "feature" of Bose headphones. I second the recommendation for Etymotic earphones.

Thanks, I appreciate the second. With so many products and opinions out there, it nice to have some concurrence in an endorsement.

I know I'm not the only one facing this problem of environmental noise as distraction, although I may be towards the extreme end. If and when I find a solution like this that really works for me, it will be for me one of if not the most effective workspace "hacks" in my toolkit.

Seems to be a open source clone of WriteRoom (http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom) - pretty much identical

The sad thing is that people are willing to pay for WriteRoom.

Yes, don't you just hate it when people make a living creating software? </sarcasm>

I paid for it! Strangely enough, I felt happy afterwards. Must have been me.

Mac users would pay for air if it had rounded corners.

OMMWriter for Mac - http://www.ommwriter.com

what about using vim with your terminal set to full-screen mode?

Edit: or in-terminal emacs ;) iTerm for Mac OS X has a nice full-screen mode

Honestly, I'd like to do this but have a margin on the sides but haven't figured out how.

I would forever be your e-servant if you know how to do that. I'm sure I could figure out some hack, but it's just something I'd rather not work on.

Here you go:

    (defun fullscreen ()
      (interactive)
      (let (f w l r cb b)
        (setq cb (current-buffer))
        (setq b (switch-to-buffer "*NOSUCHBUFFER*")) ;Temp buffer otherwise
        (setq f (make-frame '((fullscreen . fullboth)))) ;settings don't take effect
        (select-frame-set-input-focus f)
        (setq w (frame-width f))
        (setq l (/ (- w 80) 2))
        (setq r (- w (+ l 80)))
        (seq-default left-margin-width l
                      right-margin-width r)
        (delete-other-frames f)             ;Only one main window
        (kill-buffer b) ;Kill temp buffer - now original buffer will get new margins
        (switch-to-buffer cb)))
    
    (defun fullscreen-off ()
      (interactive)
      (let (f cb b p)
        (setq cb (current-buffer))
        (setq b (switch-to-buffer "*NOSUCHBUFFER*")) ;Temp buffer
        (setq-default left-margin-width nil
                      right-margin-width nil)
        (kill-buffer b)
        (delete-other-frames (make-frame))
        (switch-to-buffer cb)))

MacVim's full screen mode has the neatest implementation I've seen of this. Play with the 'fuoptions' setting, which gives you control over the margin color and the maximization behavior. If you disable maximization, it will just use the height/width values in 'lines' and 'columns' and the (borderless) window will be in the center of the screen.

Aquamacs: SHIFT-ALT-ENTER full-screens a frame. For side margins you can look at "fringe" settings.

hmmm sorry don't know how to do that. one semi-gross hack is to simply open up 3 vertical buffers in vim/emacs and have two of them be empty :)

AwesomeWM + emacs + turn off the other monitor.

Awesome helps because sometimes you really do need to switch to another application (a terminal or browser) while writing. With Awesome you can switch between applications without seeing anything else. Be sure to turn off the Awesome status bar and the emacs menu bar for maximum immersion.

Also, it's nice to use a web browser like Conky that makes random browsing less convenient.

Looks like it's targeted squarely at programmers, given the name ("Py*") and the screenshot (green monospaced font on black).

Why? It's not a programming editor. And, judging by the other comments, programmers don't want this, as they can get pretty much the same layout in Emacs.

Change the name and start using a better font for prose and you've got yourself a much larger and more suitable audience.

I used it quite successfully for Nanowrimo. The "Py" is probably because it's written in Python.

I use DarkRoom ( http://they.misled.us/dark-room ) on Windows, which is going to be open source if enough people can harass the author. He simply hasn't gotten around to releasing it yet: http://github.com/jjafuller/DarkRoomW

love it!

C-x 1.

i use this one http://focused.googlecode.com/