Momentum Writer
I make this promise to you. This is the last Nano related post from me until next year. I started Nano out with a search for a free word processor to use during the month of November. After examining several, I settled on Momentum Writer. The “No Backspace” policy is what really drew me in.
Momentum Writer is the free product by the same developers who brought the public Liquid Story Binder XE. It advertises itself as a “typewriter for your PC”. Users are prevented from editing previous written material. No backspace, formatting restrictions, distraction free, no scrolling kind of software. The file size is under a megabyte. You can download it to a flash drive and take it anywhere. Contains several color schemes to choose from. You would think it has a lot of potential to be a good Nano software. Personally, I would have preferred a typewriter over this.
Where to begin? The “no backspace” feature is optional. You can go in to preferences and switch it on if you want. What fun is it to have that temptation hovering over my head? I was looking forward to a word processor to let go of my backspacing habit. Break the cycle. Backspacing is optional but scrolling isn’t. Seriously? How can you advertise it for editing if you can’t scroll? Scrolling is kind of vital for me. Someone should tell these people you can edit using some typewriters. There’s this little invention called a correction ribbon. Maybe a little difficult lining everything up but can be done.
The text formatting is wonky. You have to adjust the margins for the text to extend across the screen. What typewriter forces you to write only a few words before moving to the next line? The download page states you can open and edit RTF files using Momentum Writer but you will lose formatting. So, basically, this software is not good for editing…period.
I used Momentum Writer for two seconds and moved on to yEdit. Wasn’t totally in love with that software either but it was better than MW. Something I could tolerate for an entire month.
Comments are closed.
Write Anything 
Did you see Q10? I loved using it for NaNo. I made the screen black and my text a purplish color. It was really easy on my eyes. I don’t think you can remove the ability to backspace but there are timers, word count, partial word count, and you can scroll. Here’s the link for it http://www.baara.com/q10/
You might be interested in something like Markdown or Asciidoc.
That said, I personally do most of my drafting with pen/pencil and paper. And, once in a while, I break out a manual typewriter I acquired not too long ago. 🙂