Marave, a distraction-free text editor.

One of my friend from plurk mentioned ommwriter, a simple text editor for windows and mac. Unlike any other text editor, ommwriter is a fullscreen text editor, aiming to make writing a pleasure once again, by removing anything on your computer that might prevent you from concentrating.

I tried to run ommwriter with wine on my maverick install. No such luck. So I googled around, and found several alternatives, such as KoalaWriter, FocusWriter, and my choice, Marave.

At this moment, the author of marave doesn’t provide a .deb package for marave, so to get it to work on Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, I’ll need to compile it from the source.

First step, to get required packages, such as:

• python-qt4
• python-qt4-phonon
• python-enchant
• phonon
• phonon-backend-gstreamer

To do that, open a terminal window, and type this:

surfer@Mach5-M:/$ sudo apt-get install python-qt4 python-qt4-phonon python-enchant phonon phonon-backend-gstreamer

Then, get the source code for marave here. You’ll also need to get a patched spelltextedit.py and numberbar.py, since a bug from the current package prevents the “save” and “save as” dialog from showing correctly.

Now, to install marave, untar the package by typing:

surfer@Mach5-M:/$ tar zxvf marave-0.7.tar.gz

put the patched spelltextedit.py and numberbar.py to the editor folder. You’ll be asked to overwrite the current one.

surfer@Mach5-M:/$ cp spelltextedit.py marave-0.7/marave/editor/
surfer@Mach5-M:/$ cp numberbar.py marave-0.7/marave/editor/

The next step is to compile marave by typing:

surfer@Mach5-M:/$ marave-editor

Some minor bugs:

– typing sound doesn’t seems to work correctly