So, a lot of people have been looking at WriteRoom and wondering if it is truly worth spending $25 for. A lot of people out there say, “No, spend your money elsewhere and get a free alternative like JDarkRoom” or something else.
I say if you’re on Windows or Linux, there are better free alternatives (Like RubyRoom or textRoom). On Mac though, we’re pretty much stuck with the choice of WriteRoom or JDarkRoom for our full-screen just a simple text-editor purposes. You could install MacPorts or Fink to get the dependencies of RubyRoom, PyRoom, and etc installed on your Mac, then play around with it until it works, but it still doesn’t provide the features that WriteRoom provides.
The closest thing on Mac that’ll provide what WriteRoom does is MacVim, but that requires some tweaking and a lot of getting used to. JDarkRoom (in my opnion) is a good start, but it’s no where close to WriteRoom yet.

For those of you who haven’t even tried writeRoom yet, try it. There’s a 30-day full-featured trial for it. If you have Tiger, install the plug-in, if you have Leopard, get QuickCursor (there’s a link on the product page for WriteRoom). This is one of the major features that make JDarkRoom pale in comparison. These plug-ins allow you to use WriteRoom in any text-editor that uses NSText (I think that’s what it’s called). You can use it in Safari (like how I’m writing this post right now), and in several other applications. It’ll bring full-screen editing into many applications that don’t have it that you wish did.
Another thing that makes it better than JDarkRoom is the ability to leave and enter full-screen mode. Some people don’t like it because it “allows for distraction,” but I find it a necessity when I’m writing and need to consult some information about what I’m writing about.

Another reason I bought writeRoom was for NaNoWriMo. I wasn’t planning on writing my whole novel in it, but I did want to work on sections individually in full screen.
Scrivener already offers this, but I think I’m using Storyist for one novel and Scrivener for my other novel. Scrivener already has a full-screen mode. Storyist does not.
After installing the plug-in for writeRoom, I was able to use its full-screen ability to edit text on Storyist with ease and beautifully.
You might ask why spend $60 for Storyist and an extra $25 for writeRoom? Well, it’s all a matter of preference. I understand that people can’t spend crazy amounts of money (I can’t, but do anyways), but if you can afford it and plan on using it, get it.

In other news, I heard that many writing applications for Macs have promo codes out. Here’s a list of what I found (from here and here):
-$5 off WriteRoom: NaNoWriMo
-$15 off Storyist: AUGAB2008
-15% off Scrivener: NaNoWriMo
-25% off Ulysses: NaNoWriMo
-25% off StoryMill: nano