I’ve been working on a bugfix release of FocusWriter for a while now, and because of how long I’ve been working on it I decided to add a few small features along the way. Of course, the risk when doing that is that I might introduce new bugs, and that is exactly what happened.

After some requests, I added a nasty hack to allow the user to disable the cursor blinking because I couldn’t find a way in Qt to toggle it for a specific widget (if anyone has any ideas, I’m all ears). The hack seems to work fine under Linux, but it has a few issues on Windows and makes FocusWriter completely unusable on the Mac. Because of this I have reverted the feature for now, and I will look into it again in the future.

I have released a new version of FocusWriter that has all of the new features I’ve been talking about recently: spell checking, document tabs, more statistics, and general interface improvements. Go forth and enjoy! Please let me know if you have any problems.

After adding statistics to FocusWriter, I decided to make it more configurable than simply choosing which of them to show. I don’t like hardcoding values into any program, and the 350 words per page number was bugging me. It’s not the industry standard of 250, but it is closer to the number of words on in an actual book instead of a double-spaced manuscript.

To fix that I added the ability to select the number of words per page. Then I figured, since I’d done that much, I might as well allow the user to choose between characters per page, paragraphs per page, or words per page. And once I had done that, I figured I might as well allow the user to choose between an accurate word count based on whitespace and punctuation, and an estimated wordcount based on the total number of characters divided by 6 to match the industry standard. At that point, I decided that that was enough selection for the statistics.

A few weeks ago I decided to add spell checking to FocusWriter. When I got that finished, I still found myself thinking about FocusWriter so I completed a large overhaul to the user interface that I had been planning for a while now. I wasn’t intending to get so distracted by FocusWriter, but I am glad that I did.

The first change to the interface is the way files are created and saved. It now behaves like other word processors in that you have to choose a filename for each file when save them the first time. When I started work on FocusWriter it was intended to feel like its own little world, in the same way that many people don’t interact with their emails outside of their chosen email client. However, because it uses plain text files it has become apparent that many users expect it to act like other word processors in the way it saves files.

Another interface change is the addition of a menubar. As a side effect of this, it means that you can turn off the toolbar, or change what icons are on the toolbar. I have modified the default list of icons to help with text editing, and not be a list of every function of the program.

The final planned change to the interface is the addition of a tab bar of open documents. Instead of opening files in a new window that obscures whatever other files you have open, they are now opened in a new tab. This makes it clear what files a user has open, and makes it very easy for them to switch the files, without forcing them to drop out of fullscreen mode and use their desktop environment’s method for changing windows.

Normally I would have made these changes as several smaller commits, but because of the way I developed them they interact with each other too much to easily split them apart, so I just made them one large commit.

Additionally, I added more document statistics after a request from a user. It now can track paragraphs, pages (based on an average of 350 words per page), and characters (both spaces and non-spaces), as well as word count. Any or all of these statistics can be turned off if the user desires.

I have added spell checking to the FocusWriter repository, but there are more things I plan on changing before making a release. I decided to use Hunspell as the spell checking engine so that I could use the same engine on all platforms. It turned out that the act of checking the spelling of a word was very easy (the functions spell() and suggest() in Hunspell do the actual work), but the integration was a pain and it took me a lot longer to write than I was expecting. FocusWriter now has “as you type” spell checking and a spell checking dialog.