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viberoom, a darkroom but for writing

PyRoom fork rewritten by Gemini+Fable from GTK2 and Python 2 to GTK4 and Python 3

With a car you can go anywhere you want. With a text editor you can write anything you come up with.

viberoom is a distraction-free writing darkroom: a fullscreen text editor with nothing on the screen except your work. No suggestions/autocorrect/autocomplete, no toolbars, no chrome whatsoever. Nothing but a customizable font and color on a simple background, which can be just black nothing for OLED screens. Themes included.

the app

I am gonna spare you the AI overview and just include a screenshot of it in viberoom.

image

Ctrl+H for more or man viberoom if you're old a timeless conventions enjoyer.

install

On Ubuntu, Debian, and their derivatives: download viberoom.deb, then

sudo apt install ./viberoom.deb

That's it. Run viberoom to run it, viberoom somefile to edit somefile, or find it in your app menu.

If you use Arch btw or any other distro, the entire app is available as a single-file pyz. It requires Python 3 and GTK4 from your distro (on Debian-likes: python3-gi and gir1.2-gtk-4.0) but otherwise just drop viberoom.pyz somewhere in your PATH.

install -Dm755 viberoom.pyz ~/.local/bin/viberoom

source

The whole thing is opensource, GPL-3.0-or-later just as PyRoom was, so do not hesitate to package/use it any way you like.

git clone https://247365.pl/viberoom/viberoom.git

how to use it

I have a simple script to create new timestamped notes. All notes from the given day share a file.

#!/bin/sh

day=$(date -u +%Y%m%d)
note=~/notes/$day.note

timestamp=$(LC_TIME=C date -u +"%A, %d %B %Y, %R %Z")

mkdir -p ~/notes

if [ -f "$note" ]; then
    printf '\n\n\n%s\n\n' "$timestamp" >> "$note"
else
    printf '%s\n\n' "$timestamp" >> "$note"
fi

exec viberoom "$note"

some history

  • PyRoom (2008), the original: a Python homage to WriteRoom, built on GTK2 and Python 2, lovely but seemingly abandoned.
  • The rewrite (April 2026) when Antigravity surprised me by successfully carrying it to GTK4 and Python 3 in one prompt. There were bugs, there still probably are bugs, but I was very impressed.
  • The viberoom rebrand and fixes (July 2026) Fable patched some stuff, added the tests, drew the icon, packed the deb. I haven't read the code so hard to judge quality but it works.