A minimalist, distraction-free tool for writing online.
Daily use of the PC always involves some type of typing. While most would be short, snappy tasks like posting on social media, composing emails, or writing a blog post, there are often times when you find yourself writing more than usual. There are plenty of apps out there to meet your word processing needs, but most create more distraction than simplicity. Today we present to you an app that takes care of this nuisance and is appropriately called ZenPen. It is a free web application that allows you to write any text you want in a clutter-free environment.
ZenPen is about as basic as an app. It flaunts a very minimalist interface with fewer features to show off, which means there really isn’t much to tweak. It doesn’t even let you open documents from your local drive, essentially making it a tool for typing and copy-pasting text elsewhere. But on the plus side, you can easily save anything you write to your computer.
The app focuses on simplicity from the ground up. There’s no complex registration, no confirmation emails to agree to, and no installation. All you need to do is simply delete the default text from ZenPen’s home page and bingo, you’re ready to write.
While the app is super simple in design and usage, it still offers standard text formatting and editing features. When you highlight a piece of text, a small floating bar appears in addition to the highlighted text giving you the option to insert quotation marks, add hyperlinks, and/or make the text bold or italic.
Here’s another quick look at what each floating icon actually does with the formatting of your text. However, to our chagrin, ZenPen’s Quote feature did not seem to work as advertised during testing.
Another useful feature of ZenPen is the ability to set your target word count. Although the name pretty much says it all, setting a target count can help when writing short, snappy essays and you want to be automatically notified when a certain word count has been reached. How it works is quite simple: when you click on the target word option from the left (more on that later), a tiny popup appears at the bottom and all you need is to enter the target word count and start writing.
When your set target word count is reached, a thin green line appears next to your browser’s scroll bar, telling you in real time if you’re still under the limit or not.
There are also now four more options that further expand ZenPen’s functionality. Look closely and you’ll notice a faded bar on the left, which allows you to do more interesting things. For example, clicking the icon at the top of this vertical bar toggles full screen mode.
The second icon on the bar allows you to invert the colors of your writing workspace. This is especially useful for people who don’t like to write in white space, since reversing the colors changes everything from white to black and back again. The third option in the vertical bar is the target word count mentioned above.
The last button allows you to save your work on your PC. The app allows to download the text version as markdown, HTML or plain text file.
In a nutshell, ZenPen is a great app that helps you stay focused while writing something important.
