Software for Writers: q10
q10 is a minimalist, full-screen text editor with several special features for writers. When you run it, it takes up the whole screen (including the space usually reserved for the start bar), allowing you to focus only on your writing.
Lower left corner of q10; click for full screenshot.
q10 keeps a running word, character, and page count in the lower left-hand corner. A built-in timer allows you to decide how long you want to work. It also has a pop-up window for keeping notes while you work (which you access by hitting ctrl-h — everything in q10 is done with ctrl-keystroke shortcuts, which are listed in a cheat-sheet you access by pressing F1).
The appearance of the application is highly customizable, allowing you to select background and font color, typeface, paragraph styles, and autosave intervals. In the full screenshot, you’ll see that I made the text dark brown on a light brown background, and set the type size quite large — soothing colors and large text for my old, tired eyes. Q10 is also portable, meaning you can run it from a flash drive so you can use it from virtually any Windows PC.
On the downside, the optional spellcheck doesn’t seem to work for me. There is a text expand function, that ostensibly allows you to create text shortcuts that will automatically expand into commonly used words, phrases, or full blocks of boilerplate text, but I couldn’t figure out how it works. Neither the program nor the website offers much in the way of support — you “gets what you pays fer”!
A bigger problem (for me, anyway) is that because it’s a text editor, q10 offers no options for formatting your text — which means no bold, italic, double-indenting, etc. That’s a bit of a deal-breaker for me, but I know many writers like to focus on letting the words flow and adding formatting in a later draft; for them, q10 is perfect, minimizing distractions and letting you focus on just writing.
Oh, and one other thing: q10 has a built-in typewriter sound effect, that you’d think would be quite annoying, but it’s actually kind of invigorating, like being in the newsroom with Woodward and Bernstein or something. All in all, a cool if slightly flawed program.
q10 (Free)
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April 18th, 2008 at 8:12 am
Downloaded and installed
Impressive. I was using Darkroom before but q10 beats it with word/char count features and yeah the typewriter effect. I’m lovin it 
Thanks for the post
April 18th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Ashish: Glad you’re liking it. The typewriter effect is the only thing that keeps me from deleting it; I so rarely use plain text (except for technical stuff like HTML, which I use a programming text editor for), but when I do, I love to hear the typewriter. Weird, huh? My only fear is that the unauthorized use of Amelie’s picture and the sound sample from the movie will get q10 shut down someday, and we’ll no longer have it to play with.
April 20th, 2008 at 8:04 am
Q10 is a very nifty little app. I use JDarkRoom for my desktop minimalist writing needs (I use Linux). But I do have a copy of Q10 on a USB flash drive (which houses PortableApps) that I always carry around with me.
April 29th, 2008 at 9:47 am
I am just writing a general ‘thank-you’ here.
I came here from another ‘writers blog’ and, when I have surfed yours a bit longer, I’m going to go back there and thank him for the excellent link to you! I recently found a full-screen (monochrome green against black; just like in the ‘bad old days’) that I liked but, just like in the ‘bad old days’, it didn’t have a word counter. For a blogger, that’s relatively important. It’s a serious pain to cut / paste / delete to use online word counters (although they otherwise work quite well and I want to thank those who have so generously provided them).
My dream editor would be something along the line of Windows Live Writer that would allow full-screen editing of the text and place all the bells & whistles behind ctrl+key combinations. Then, when it came time to insert graphic elements, it could revert to WYSIWYG mode.
* Full screen text only with the word count feature
* User-selectable screen and text colors
* delayed spelling check
* WYSIWYG for graphics work.
I don’t want a ton of programming stuff in a menu bar — I have minimal interest in programming; but it would be great to somehow resurrect the pure writing efficiency of Wordstar 2000 or Wordperfect or many of the earlier DOS-based efforts.
April 29th, 2008 at 9:59 am
Bill: Agreed. There is a plug-in for Windows Live Writer that will do a word count, though I’d prefer if they’d just add a running word count as in Word 2007 — especially if you could also get word counts for highlighted selections.
Maybe because I came late in life to word processing (the first real one I used was Word in Win 95) I have no nostalgic feelings for the old days of white-on-blue. I had to use WP 5.5 in DOS for 8 months at a non-profit I worked at in 2000, and it was horrible. Absolutely hated it. Which maybe explains why Darkroom and such don’t do it for me. Q10 has enough going for it to make it interesting to me, but not enough to make it a regular part of my workflow. But I think folks who remember the DOS days more fondly probably find it more suitable.