Hi all,
Hope your writing is going really well. I’ve decided to share some recent experience.
I was feeling very distracted by social media and political/economic events lately. It made concentrating on work and hobbies very difficult. Finally I cracked and gave up on social media. I deleted it all and decided to go old school permanently.
I also tinkered with the idea of using an old computer for writing. Something that had no real support for the modern internet. I thought about a DOS machine running Wordstar or Word (both freely available from abandonware sites) or an 80s Macintosh. But I felt that an old machine could suddenly die on me in the middle of writing before I had a chance to back up.
I also thought about buying an Olivetti typewriter and modifying it with a kit from USB Typewriter so that it would save text files to an SD card. Actually, I’m still thinking about that 
I did find one of my old PowerBooks from 16 years ago. I installed Scrivener 2.5 on it and it runs perfectly.
But finally I concluded that all the above was just a hassle. I would instead turn off the wifi on my new MacBook Pro and give Scrivener a retro theme that made it look like a DOS word processor. It took very little work to achieve that. One of the many great things about Scrivener is the customisation features that allow us to modify the look and feel of the app.
I attach to this post my DOS preferences and theme for Scrivener 3. It basically defaults new documents to 12pt Courier and in Composition Mode it presents a solid black screen with white text scaled to 125% for better readability.
Enjoy!
Retro.zip (57.2 KB)
Update : this theme doesn’t work with Scrivener 3.1.1.
