Several weeks ago, a Barcelona-based company released a free beta version of a text editor called Ommwriter.

The idea behind Ommwriter is to provide a calming, distraction-free environment in which to write on the computer. Like the popular WriteRoom, it’s a stripped-down, full-screen word processor. When you open the program, you’re greeted with a dove-grey winter landscape and New Agey background sounds (chimes, birdsong, flowing water etc.). There’s the outline of a box in the middle of the screen in which you can write and some minimalist controls off to the right (to change the font, background, music, etc.), all of which fade away as you begin to type, leaving you alone with the wintry landscape and your thoughts.

As its name would suggest, Ommwriter inspires a meditative approach to writing. Judging from the reviews I’ve read since it was released, this approach is rather divisive: either you buy into the “yoga for writing” vibe (as one commenter described it) and really like it, or you hate the background and the ambient music and really don’t like it.

I’m personally quite a fan of the mellowed-out thing. I love the default snowy tree background because I adore wintry landscapes and it makes me feel as though I’m looking out the window at the countryside instead of staring at my computer screen in my flat. And rather than being distracting, I find the ambient sounds remarkably calming; around here, the only birdies I get to hear are squawking seagulls, and the sound of flowing water usually means someone in the building has let their bath run over.

Ommwriter is an immersive experience which relaxes you into writing (unlike WriteRoom, which I find somewhat intimidating; that big, silent, blank expanse…blank, blank, blank, just waiting for you to write something, anything…). Sadly, I can’t use Ommwriter all the time because I usually need to have a million different tabs open in my browser to look things up as I’m writing. But today, as I was working with Word documents and PDFs, I kept Ommwriter running in the background so I could still listen to its soothing soundscapes. It didn’t entirely block out the sound of our elephantine upstairs neighbors, but it did make me somewhat less inclined to want to go upstairs and murder them—and anything that can do that is a winner in my book.