Because WriteMonkey is minimalist, all you see when you launch it is a black screen with a blinking cursor. This is by design. But it leaves you a little "lost" as to commands since there is no visible menu or apparently anything to click. WriteMonkey, however, has a lot of power under the hood.
Right click when in WriteMonkey and a fairly complete menu pops up. Here's a screen shot:
Notice that all the menu items have keyboard shortcuts to the right of the menu selection. You probably want to memorize the ones you use frequently as it's much more efficient than bringing up the menu.
A few comments about some of the menu selections that are unique to WriteMonkey. The Toggle Repository selection leads you to a new page that is part of the document you are writing, but is not printed or exported normally. It's a great place for notes about your document and by pressing F5 you can jump quickly between your notes and document. Very handy.
BTW, note that the menu contains an error for the Toggle Repository selection. The Ctrl-R listed as an alternative keyboard shortcut to F5 should be Alt-R, which is shown correctly on the Help Card below.
The Toggle Segment Focus selection is another layer of distraction reduction. This allows you to hide everything except the section or even paragraph you are working on. In other words, you increase your focus on a smaller part of you document, without even the words before and after that segment to catch your attention.
The Jumps selection brings up a navigation pop-up that allows you to move around in your document by heading or paragraph. Very useful for long documents. The Bookmark selection is another navigation aid to set a place in your document and come back to it easity.
I'll talk about some of these features in more detail later in this article.
Press F1 and you get a pop-up help card that lists most of the keyboard commands. In fact, it may be all of them, but I say most because I have not actually explored (yet!!) to see if it is all. Here is a screen shot of the help card:
As I said above, I have not found a comprehensive help document (wiki, manual, etc.) for WriteMonkey. The WriteMonkey web site provides some help. Other reviewers and users have posted articles that include some help by way of what they discovered in using WriteMonkey. Below I link to the ones that provide some of the best help I've found.
WriteMonkey Online Help - this is the "official" help link on the WriteMonkey web site. Help consists of a limited number of topics linked to outlines of the major points of the topic. The Tricks link is definitely worth exploring. As far as I know, there is no manual or wiki or other comprehensive write-up of how to use WriteMonkey.
WriteMonkey at Google Groups - a discussion group linked from the WriteMonkey web site. Looking through the posts, it appears this is the primary way that bugs and feature requests have been submitted to the author. Some of the questions are about use. I plan to sift through the posts later and will report those that are useful to someone just getting started with WriteMonkey.
WriteMonkey on Facebook - WriteMonkey's Facebook page is mostly posts that either praise WriteMonkey or provide notice of a change or addition. There is a second Facebook page with a different ID that is a list of links to web pages where others have written about WriteMonkey.
A Little Off - a short blog entry that mentions a few of WriteMonkey's more unusual features.
Downloadsquad Review - short review that points out a few issues that reviewer had with WriteMonkey, but overall praises it and says it is useful for writing for the web.
Brian Carnell Blog - blog entry about using WriteMonkey. Talks about how he uses the repository.
Ben Hamilton Blog - blog entry about setting up WriteMonkey for use with Wordpress. Useful if you are using Wordpress as you blogging software.
Right Now in Tech - blog entry about using WriteMonkey.
SYAORAN.NET - one of the more complete blog entries about using WriteMonkey. Quite a few notes about setup and use.
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Writing with WriteMonkey
More Using WriteMonkey
Help Using WriteMonkey
Using Markdown in WriteMonkey
Copyright Jim Brown 2011
Last updated: 4/18/2011