
- #Best plain text editor for mac pdf#
- #Best plain text editor for mac software#
- #Best plain text editor for mac free#
- #Best plain text editor for mac windows#
Mou even lets you post directly to Tumblr and Scriptogr.am, though not to WordPress or Blogger. It’s also very flexible, letting you choose themes-including those you create-for both the composer and preview panes. The app includes keyboard shortcuts for Markdown-syntax formatting, and notably offers very good support for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages.
#Best plain text editor for mac free#
Mou Chen Luo’s Mou is a free (donation requested), Markdown-focused text editor that includes a live preview in a two-pane window: editor on the left, preview on the right. It also offers no true distraction-free mode, doesn’t include full-screen mode, and doesn’t explicitly support Markdown formatting, though if you use it in conjunction with Marked 2 (see below), you can write in Markdown and preview your formatted documents. But despite its many formatting options, TextEdit is a “plain text” editor at heart-it’s the direct descendant of Apple’s aptly-named SimpleText, and the much older TeachText, both simple tools designed for editing and displaying text documents. It can handle serious formatting, such as lists and tables can work with graphics, videos, and audio files and can export to a variety of formats, including RTF and Word. TextEdit Many people can get along just fine with OS X’s built-in TextEdit, which is actually a full-blown word processor. FoldingText lets you collapse your document sections, move them around, and reorganize them. When you’ve finished writing, you can export your document to HTML, or copy it to the clipboard as HTML or rich text. You can also move sections around like an outliner, but FoldingText is still, at heart, an app for writing and working with text. This feature lets you write longer documents, keeping a big-picture view without having to tediously scroll up and down. The $25 app is a combination of a text editor and an outliner: You format your text with Markdown syntax, but you can “fold,” or hide, sections by clicking on header characters.
#Best plain text editor for mac software#
Hog Bay Software offers an alternative to WriteRoom called FoldingText, which, while not exactly a focused-writing app, does something interesting.


I like Byword’s paragraph focus, which highlights the paragraph I’m working on while dimming the rest of the document.

But if you like iA Writer’s approach and attractive styling, you’ll find it to be a great tool to write without distractions. If you don’t like what’s here, you should look elsewhere. In fact, that’s one of iA Writer’s hallmarks, love it or hate it: Little in the app is customizable. You also get a decent Markdown-preview window, though it’s not customizable. The app offers a formatting bar at the bottom of the window that lets you quickly apply Markdown formatting, even if you don’t remember which syntax characters to use. IA Writer’s Markdown support is very good. (I’d prefer it if Focus Mode highlighted the current paragraph rather than sentence, since many writers think in terms of paragraphs, but the app’s sentence-level focus seems to be popular.) iA Writer is a minimal, yet powerful writing app. The app also includes a Focus Mode that restricts the view even further, letting you concentrate on a single sentence at a time.
#Best plain text editor for mac windows#
While it doesn’t let you choose your own typeface, the company’s Nitti is a beautiful mono-space font, and working in iA Writer lets you ignore everything around its document view-I often use iA Writer’s full-screen mode to block out the other windows on my Mac. Information Architects’s $5 iA Writer wins hands down for simplicity and for its attractive (and only) font. (Note for this feature to be useful, the apps must use a common sync platform such as iCloud or Dropbox.)

Data such as word count and character count are essential to many writers some people may also want more-advanced statistics such as reading level and estimated reading time.
#Best plain text editor for mac pdf#
(Since OS X lets you create a PDF from any file, as long as a writing app has a mode or view that shows your text with proper formatting, the app doesn’t need a specific PDF-export feature of its own.) Multiple export formats, such as HTML and RTF, for publishing or sharing your styled text.Support for the Markdown writing language, a simple syntax for formatting plain-text documents that can be easily converted to HTML for use on blogs or web pages.A full-screen mode, so you can shut out everything else on your Mac’s screen.A distraction-free environment-or at least a special view or mode-that allows you to focus on your writing without worrying about toolbars, palettes and other formatting tools.Today’s best focused-writing apps are made with writers in mind and offer some or all of the following features:
