Distraction-Free Writer

Distraction-Free Writer is a quiet page for writing. No toolbars, no formatting, nothing between you and the words.

Pick a room from the cloud button and it settles in behind the page: rain running down the window, a fireplace glowing below, a summer night full of fireflies, or the warm lights of a corner café. Each comes with its own sound, or none at all, and you set the volume.

Start a writing sprint of 5, 10, 15, 25 or 45 minutes. A thin red clock runs across the top of the page and the words you have written count up beside it. Turn on Keep going mode and the line you are on starts to fade if you stop typing for a few seconds. Write again and it comes straight back. Nothing is ever deleted.

Your ribbons keeps a shelf of the last 12 weeks, one silk ribbon for every day you wrote, red where you met your goal. Your streak sits on top.

Save today's writing as a 20-second video of the page writing itself, with your word count and ribbon growing as it goes.

Turn on Focus and the rest of the page dims. The sentence you are writing stays lit, and with typewriter scrolling it stays in the middle of the window. The title, outline and counts fade while you type, and come back as soon as you move the mouse. Prefer to see the whole paragraph? Choose that in Settings.

Turn on Dictate and speak. Your words appear on the page as you talk, in grey while you are still speaking, then set in ink. Say "comma", "period", "question mark" or "new paragraph", and "scratch that" takes back the last phrase. Dictation is in English and runs on your PC. No internet, no account, and nothing you say is uploaded.

Read aloud reads your draft back to you in any Windows voice, from the sentence where you left off. The sentence being read is lit on the page, so you can follow along and catch what your eyes skipped. Pick a voice and a speed in Settings.

The style lens marks adverbs, passive voice, long sentences, repeated words and clichés right in your text, and counts each kind at the foot of the window. You decide how long is too long: 20, 25, 30 or 40 words.

The time machine replays your document writing itself, keystroke by keystroke. Drag back to any moment, and bring that draft back with one click. What is on the page now is kept, so nothing is lost. It also keeps a copy of your writing every few minutes in Versions, and keeps your draft even if you close without saving.

Set a daily goal, from 250 to 3,000 words. A red bookmark ribbon on the page grows as you write toward it, and the count sits right on the silk.

Save as a plain text file, Markdown or Rich Text, or print and save as PDF. It opens .txt, .md and .rtf files, including the documents you saved with earlier versions, which open as plain text. Start a line with #, ## or ### to make a heading, and your headings become an outline beside the page.

Four typefaces: Book, Classic, Georgia and Typewriter. Font sizes from 12 to 36, snug, airy or double line spacing, and narrow, medium or wide pages. Word, character and line counts, reading time, find and replace, reader mode and full screen. Light and dark themes, or match Windows.

Your settings from earlier versions carry over.