Markdown is an inline formatting syntax often used on the Web instead of heavy WYSIWIG interfaces, but it’s also used by the blogging engine that powers this blog, toto. There’s no scrollbars–it uses the iOS style scrollbar that hides when not in use–and when you start typing all text info fade away, leaving you with just the text.īut on top of all this, IA Writer actually uses Markdown to manage formatting.

It gives you word count and reading times on demand, it has a clever “focus” mode, it has a full-screen mode, and best of all it has a healthy margin on the side of the page. It is much like my stripped down version of TextEdit, only better. By design it seems to be the perfect editor. When IA Writer came out it generated a bit of buzz, and its features and introduction video caught my eye. But at the end of the day, this isn’t a huge issue, so I stuck with TextEdit for most of my writing. For some reason I couldn’t force the app to stay in the page layout mode, and working without a healthy margin on the side of the page is uncomfortable.

My only real problem with TextEdit were the nonexistent margins–you can view the document in a page layout mode, which has margins, or a simple text mode, which loses the margins to the point where the text almost touches the side of the window. TextEdit is a very basic tool that allows minimal formatting, much like WordPad on Windows, but it also lets you hide most of the formatting tools and work in plain text, giving you a minimalist writing tool. I’ve used and liked WriteRoom, but oftentimes I’ve found myself going back to TextEdit, a text editing app bundled with Mac OS X. In fact they specifically eliminate all of this to leave you with just enough tools to focus on the writing, which in most cases means giving you a blank screen with a blinking text cursor.įor Mac these include WriteRoom, Byword, Ommwriter, and now IA Writer. These apps don’t have any fancy WYSIWIG controls for formatting and laying out text. Recently a new genre of writing apps has appeared: the stripped down, minimal writer.

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