Lifehack Presents: The WriteMonkey Mini User Guide
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At that place is a lot of attending given to "lark gratis" and Markdown writing environments now-a-days, but most of them existence for the Mac. In that location seems to be a lack of these environments on the PC. In my quest to notice a Markdown editor for Windows I came beyond WriteMonkey. WriteMonkey gives the user "an extremely stripped downwardly user interface, leaving yous alone with your thoughts and your words".
I would say that'southward about right.
Anyways, permit's dive into WriteMonkey for Windows and show you what you tin practise with it.
Installing WriteMonkey
Installing WriteMonkey is a picayune dissimilar than the normal "click, click, click" type of Windows installation. First download the WriteMonkey zip file from their site and then extract it to the Programs folder on your auto. Once that is done yous will have a WriteMonkey executable there that y'all tin can run or create a shortcut for your desktop or quick launch.
First run
Remember how I said that WriteMonkey is a distraction free writing surround? Well, on the first run of the plan, WriteMonkey will remind you of that by making itself full screen. Your beginning menu goes away, title bars, everything. You could just start writing this way, but if you want to go out of this fashion simply hit the escape button to get back to a windowed screen.
You will notice that your championship bar of your window says "SCRATCH". This is the default name for a new window, kind of like a scratchpad. Yous will also notice that there is no carte bar. To become to all of WM's options merely right-click the screen.
Options galore
I sort of lied when I told you that WM was a lark-free writing environment. At kickoff glance information technology looks that way, but after yous dig in, especially to the preferences, y'all will be distracted. But, the squeamish affair here is that at that place is some handy things that you tin do in the settings of WM. Let's walk through them now. Showtime, to become to your preferences menu. You tin can right-click and choose "Preferences", or simply hitting F10.
Adjust your colors, font, and display
The "Screen Elements" tab will allow you to change your font and the colors of your screen. You tin change the font to whatever font you have installed in Windows. My personal favorite is to take a Consolas font with a darkish gray background and off-white text. But that's simply me.
There is too a nice feature called "Save to permanent slot". Later you lot have made your color changes, by clicking this yous can relieve your color and font scheme to easily switch dorsum and along.
Suit your screen elements
In screen elements y'all tin can enable the Info bar that shows at the bottom of your screen. You lot can see the proper noun of your file, how many words yous take committed, the current time, and even the status of your file.
You will notice a cheque box chosen "Testify visual progress bar". This choice will enable a bar along the bottom of your window that shows how far you are in the word count that you can limit to yourself under the "Progress" selection (F12).
To go a menu bar back in windowed way, click "More" and choose "Show standard menu bar in windowed mode".
Open up & Save
The Open & Save tab give you options of what you'd like to see on startup, how you want the program to launch and shut down, and even gives you an option to brand incremental backups to a certain directory. Too, if you want to go along WM running even when you "x-out" the program, you can enable a "soft-get out" that will minimize it to the arrangement tray rather than closing information technology completely.
Replacements
The replacements tab lets you setup special text "snippets" that expand to whatever y'all want them to. For instance, yous can use the snippet "/sig" to insert your name, or "aaddr" to insert your address. Snippets are a very handy style to salve some time while writing.
Jumps
Jumps allow yous to include regular expressions to identify special headings and markdown syntax so you can employ the Jumps card to navigate your certificate. If you lot are using Markdown (which you should be, by the way), you can open the Jumps dialog by right clicking and selecting "Jumps" or simply using ALT+J. With Jumps y'all can merely click on the headings, bookmarks, and paragraphs that you want to go to. It makes navigating your document a breeze, specially if information technology is long-winded.
Likewise, to bookmark something in your text (so the Jumps bill of fare will encounter it), right-click and cull "Bookmark" or press ALT+Grand. There will be 2 '@' symbols that are entered. After them, type the name of your bookmark without spaces. Then you volition see it in your bookmarks menu.
Lookups
Lookups are pretty darn amazing. Basically, you can select some text out of your certificate, hit a key combination, and your browser will open up to whatever search engine you would like and search for the highlighted text. Need a Brittany Spears picture for you 500 discussion masterpiece? No problem. Select "Brittany Spears" and press ALT+iv. This will search for her in a Google Image search.
You lot can also setup other search engines and use the [lookup] cord to suspend the text to the search query. For instance, if yous wanted to use DuckDuckGo as a search engine, y'all could create a new lookup and give information technology this URL:
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=[lookup]
Profiles
If you lot have gone crazy tweaking and customizing the look, feel, and options for WM, you can get alee and create a profile to save them. Press F10, click on the "Profile" push button on the bottom left, type in the name you desire to save the profile as in the "Contour proper noun" box and printing "Relieve".
You can create a number of different profiles and switch back and along with the profile's screen. Overnice.
Markdown support
The reason that I found WM was because I was looking for a Markdown editor for Windows. There are so many of them for Mac that it's sort of hard making the determination. But for Windows, the choices are much more limited. WM does a decent job of handling Markdown and also exporting information technology as HTML to be used for web writing.
We won't go into how to write in Markdown (because we already accept), but there are some niceties that WM affords a Markdown user like being able to highlight and bold something by pressing the standard Windows Ctrl+B, or italicizing by Ctrl+I.
Export
Here is where WM excels. If you know how to use Markdown and are anywhere shut to being decent with CSS, and so yous tin create some exporting options that can help yous produce finished documents for web or even for PDF and printing.
Markup consign
To export your writing right-click and choose "Markup consign" or press Ctrl+Shift+E. From here yous have some options. You can export to Print preview, export to your default web browser, or fifty-fifty export to Microsoft Give-and-take. When yous are exporting yous can choose a stylesheet that will format you text in a certain style, edit the stylesheet and use information technology, or even get some additional templates from the WM site (that is, when they become available).
Usually my process is to export to my default web browser, right-click in the web browser window, select view source, and then copy my HTML output from in that location and apply information technology. I do wish that there was an selection to consign to HTML and then it got rid of the middle steps, simply for now this is acceptable, peculiarly because of all the other awesome stuff that WM can do.
You can also choose to export the file that you are creating to a folder so you can use it or relieve it for later past clicking the "Export to binder" box.
Decision
If you are looking for a writing application / Markdown editor for Windows, the WriteMonkey is the pick. There may be a few others out there, merely none that come up close to what WM can do. With its fullscreen mode, Replacements feature, and markup export options, WM is hands-down the best Markdown editor for Windows.
There is a lot to the program and this mini guide just touched the surface to the cool things that you tin do with WM. Happy writing!
Source: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/lifehack-presents-the-writemonkey-mini-user-guide.html
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