Apps For Undistracted Writing Mac
Nominally, a text editor is a program that allows users to edit the contents of a text file for any purpose: programming, prose, notes, etc. Since the early computer days, text editors have been amongst the most essential apps in our operating systems. Yet, few of us devote a lot of time to choosing the editor that we would likely be using for years and maybe even decades to come.
Jul 11, 2017 Beautiful alternative to Hazeover / UnDistracted / Window Focus.DeskCover hides your desktop icons behind a beautiful cover and automatically highlights the active application’s window while hiding everything else. DeskCover is a simple Mac application that allows you to. Aug 13, 2018 Some apps are best suited for short-form writing while others focus more on the long-form content creation. Ulysses is the only app which is equally good at both of them. You can as easily write a novel on Ulysses as you can a blog post. Mar 13, 2008 The best software for writers (Mac/PC) This post has been a long time (and a lot of fun experimentation) in the making. If you're a writer and you live in the modern age, you probably want software that will make the writing process easier and more organized.
There are hundreds of text editors available for all operating systems, including macOS. But it’s impossible to say which one is the best text editor for Mac. After all it depends on how it will be used as well as personal preferences and functionality requirements. It is possible, however, to provide a shortlist of the best text editor apps in each of the broad categories, which will at least start the conversation and provide direction for people on the verge of choosing a good text editor for Mac.
How To Choose A Text Editor For Mac
Text editors have a variety of applications, but most of them are used for one of two things: either writing code or producing prose (e.g. articles, ebooks, white papers). And although any plain text editor for Mac could help with both, the best text editor apps specialize.
Generally, any worthwhile text editor for Mac costs something, which makes it difficult to try a lot of them and decide which one is the best fit. It would be so much better to pay and get them all at once, so you can spend as much time testing each one as you need and easily switch in the future if need be.
Setapp gives you this opportunity by offering all the best text editors in its ever-expanding collection of apps. Become a Setapp Member (with a free trial) and test every app described below to understand which one you truly need and want.
Write good prose with a plain text editor for Mac
After the widespread domination of word processors, such as Microsoft Word, Apple’s Pages, and Google Docs later on, there has recently been a strong push to come back to the basics, simplify, and focus on essentials. Out of dozens of popular apps, Ulysses and Focused stand out here as most versatile and user-friendly options.
Combine power and simplicity with Ulysses
As virtually the most popular plain text editor for Mac, Ulysses puts your writing environment first, without obstructions, but at the same time supports it with a diverse set of features, from Markdown to built-in library to powerful exporting.
Markdown is a true blessing, as it allows you to mark up plain text without affecting its readability and simultaneously get it ready to be published on the web. Largely thanks to the Markdown support, Ulysses lets you export HTML, PDF, .docx, and ePub, and directly integrates with WordPress and Medium. This means that finally all your writing can be concentrated in one place and distributed everywhere else when it’s ready.
Built-in library that syncs through iCloud facilitates the centralized approach to writing, keeping everything easily accessible. You can created unlimited amount of folders, sub-folders, and individual notes — all of which are clearly displayed in the sidebar. That’s a huge improvement over what some other plain text editor for Mac might do, which is force you to save files in a regular folder on your computer, making it cumbersome to create new small notes and organize related ones in a project, for example.
Other wonderful Ulysses features include apps for iPhone and iPad, as well as the ability to attach images, PDFs, and other files. All of it makes Ulysses a truly great text editor for Mac and maybe the only one you’ll ever need, unless you’re looking for something more simple.
Eliminate all distractions with Focused
Sometimes you have to use over-complicated word processors, whether it’s for work or some other collaboration. So what you’re looking for on the side is a distraction-free environment to write your drafts. No features, just a perfectly serene writing experience. That’s where you can find Focused.
As the name implies, Focused eliminates all unnecessary features to lead with a minimalist proposition of undistracted writing experience.
Zen Mode lets you select an ambient soundtrack to block the noise and dive into your words full screen — always focused on the center of the page (typewriter style). Typography is carefully thought out and features six options, ranging from Avenir Next to Menlo typefaces. In addition, as the day progresses, you’ll find the theme color changing from white to beige to dark, which helps a lot with eye strain.
Besides all the visual design goodness, Focused supports Markdown syntax for easy web export as well as auto-saving functionality and the ability to retrieve older edits.
As far as choosing a plain text editor for Mac, Ulysses is the best option for those looking for a primary writing tool, whereas Focused is the ideal choice for a secondary distraction-free writing experience. If you’re looking for the best code editor for Mac, then consider a few other apps, such as TeaCode and CodeRunner.
Create software with a Mac coding editor
If your goal is to write software, simply using a good text editor for Mac won’t help. There’s no syntax support, no documentation, no code expanders. Overall, it’s a tough sell. What you need instead is a great Mac text editor for coding. There are dozens of popular ones out there but TeaCode and CodeRunner seem to offer something unique, whether used separately or in tandem.
Expand code quickly with TeaCode
For a minute, let’s step aside from our goal of finding the best code editor for Mac and mention how we can make any native Mac coding editor better — by using code expanders with TeaCode.
Code expanders allow you to specify repetitive functions, components, or templates, and then paste them right into your chosen Mac coding editor using pre-defined abbreviations. In a way that makes TeaCode your personal coding library that can be used in whatever text editor for Mac you prefer.
The app comes with more than 70 code expanders for Swift, PHP, HTML, and other languages to give you a glimpse of its possibilities. After that, you can create any amount of snippets in any programming language and use them as you see fit.
TeaCode also supports shortcuts for searching and pasting code expanders, so you can focus on writing your code and let it assist you from the background of your menu bar. And when it comes to the best Mac HTML editor to use with TeaCode, look no further than CodeRunner.
Write and debug any code with CodeRunner
Choosing the best text editor for Mac can become a never-ending quest if you keep jumping from one option to the next. Of course, you should try all the promising apps when you begin your search, but it’s generally a good idea to settle down and master a single Mac text editor for coding completely. Here’s why it could be CodeRunner.
CodeRunner is a general multi-language programming editor, which means it’s equally suitable for beginners and experienced developers alike. Rather than trying to be the best HTML editor for Mac, it supports more than 25 languages right out of the box, but can also be easily extended to run any other ones you need.
Besides language support, CodeRunner features extensive documentation right in the app, so you never have to distract yourself by going online. Check all the methods, function, and objects you don’t completely remember exactly when they become a hurdle.
Even more importantly than writing high-quality code is speedy debugging. After all, most of the code you get to deal with at work has already been written, which makes debugging so much more important. CodeRunner gives you great options to set breakpoints to quickly scan your code for errors, explore the call stack, and edit any misused variables — an invaluable feature in any Mac coding editor.
Choose the text editor for the job
When it comes to picking a good text editor for Mac, always keep your final goal in mind. Ulysses can become your reliable everyday machine for writing actual text, whereas Focused excels at getting that first draft out of you with no distractions. TeaCode is an amazing utility that will supercharge any Mac text editor for coding, especially CodeRunner, which is a great choice for software developers concerned with versatility and speed.
Best of all, you don’t have to rush to a decision. As mentioned before, all these apps are available on Setapp, along with more than 150 other high-quality apps and utilities to suit any Mac user’s needs. Indeed there has never been a more perfect time to create!
If you turn phrases for fun and/or profit, your best option for a Mac writing app depends on what you want to write, and how.
Sure, you could stick with a word processor to pour your thoughts onto the page — but you've got better choices. If you want something a little less stuffy, cluttered, and nine-to-five, or more focused on creative writing, we've found four solid choices that take two very different approaches to helping you express yourself. All are either Essentials or Editors' Choices in the Mac App Store.
Ulysses
The first three apps on this list all take a similar no-frills approach to writing. They sport clean, minimalist interfaces, keep all your writing in a single window, can swap documents between their iOS and Mac versions, and use some variation of the Markdown syntax to handle all text formatting.
Ulysses impressed me most among this crowd for its breadth of features and ease of use. An outstanding series of introductory texts ease you into using Ulysses, one simple step at a time. Their witty writing allows you to learn the program while you're using it.
If you want to track your own productivity, or challenge yourself to meet a certain word count, it's easy to set goals from Ulysses's dashboard. Don't know Markdown XL, Ulysses's native tongue? No worries — a handy cheat sheet of syntax waits behind a button at the top of the program. (Ulysses also supports old faithful keyboard shortcuts for bold, italic, and linked text, if you don't want to type Markdown XL's extra characters.)
Ulysses keeps these two features and a handful of others, including options to export your work to text, ePub, HTML, PDF, or DOCX formats, in pop-over menus that you can tear off and keep onscreen for easy reference.
Ulysses isn't WYSIWYG; you can download themes to change up its color scheme at the Ulysses Style Exchange, but you can't view the effects of your formatting until you preview or export it. The Style Exchange also offers a host of free templates for PDF, HTML, and ePub exports, with different looks, fonts, and styles.
Ulysses comes with built-in iCloud support to hand off documents between its Mac and iOS versions. It can also publish your work directly to your Medium or WordPress site, once you enter your account info. And its subscription model means that your monthly $4.99 fee unlocks the app on both the Mac and iOS.
Ulysses offers a lot of options in a polished, user-friendly package. Unfortunately, it has a good portion of its thunder stolen by…
- $4.99/month with a 14-day free trial - Download now!
Bear
Nearly everything Ulysses does, Bear does just as well, in an arguably prettier package. Bear's fonts and color scheme, while still clean and stark, go easier on the eyes than Ulysses's utilitarian gray. Its stats panel is much easier to read, though less detailed. And Bear strikes a happy medium between full WYSIWYG formatting and Markdown simplicity by clearly labeling different header tags as you create them, and offering the option to actually show text as bold or italic when properly marked.
I liked Bear's tagging system, which makes it really easy to organize files. Just type in a hashtag anywhere in your document, and Bear will either create a category for it on the fly in its list of documents, or add that document to an existing category. I was also impressed with Bear's ability to share a note to any program you've added to your Mac's Sharing menu, including Facebook, Twitter, and Reminders.
Beyond that, Bear duplicates a lot of Ulysses's virtues, from its overall interface to its friendly help files. And the program's basic version, which packs plenty of power, is absolutely free on both Mac and iOS. However, to match Ulysses's features, you'll need to subscribe to Bear Plus, for $1.49 a month or $14.99 a year. That subscription gets you features like iCloud synching, ePub export, and customizable export themes, all of which Ulysses includes right out of the box.
- Free to download, $1.99/month or $14.99/year Bear Plus subscription - Download now!
iA Writer
iA Writer is inexpensive -- just a one-time $15 fee -- and it packs a reasonably robust feature set. iCloud sharing and synching with its iOS sibling is built in, as is WordPress and Medium support. Like Bear and Ulysses, iA Writer offers downloadable export templates, and its help files include instructions to make your own with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. But for all these virtues, iA Writer still falls short.
Its stark black-and-white interface makes Ulysses look colorful. It feels brusque and utilitarian, not welcoming. On first use, the program dumps you right into its interface with no introduction. Its lean, efficient Help files explain the program well, but after Ulysses and Bear's gentler tutorials, iA Writer's lack of frills can feel jarring.
Word count and other stats are crammed into a tiny menu at the bottom of the window, and you can't set goals for any of those parameters. They're squeezed into the same small space as iA Writer's Format and Syntax menus, which can format text or quickly highlight all the nouns, adverbs, adjectives, or other parts of speech in your document — a nifty feature undercut by lackluster interface design.
Finally, a real-time preview window can show you what your text will look like when it's finished and formatted. But it feels odd to have the same text side by side; if you want to see what text looks like when formatted, why not just have a WYSIWYG editor?
iA Writer isn't bad on its own merits, but with such impressive competition, it can't help but suffer in comparison.
- $15 - Download now!
Scrivener
At the opposite end of the spectrum from its spartan rivals, Scrivener is a jumbo-sized Swiss army knife stuffed with a sometimes overwhelming array of fun and useful tools. The other programs in this roundup are undeniably more versatile, lending themselves just as well to note taking, blog posts, journalism, or technical writing as they do to writing fiction. In contrast, Scrivener's built to serve the needs of folks writing novels, short stories, screenplays, and — given its ability to store pictures, cached web pages, and other research material alongside a given text — possibly term papers. For $45, you'll definitely get your money's worth.
Scrivener's somewhat long in the tooth compared to its rivals here, with a dense but coherent interface filled with the kinds of colorful icons that seem to have fallen out of fashion among Mac apps. It arguably needs such a crowd of buttons to display even a fraction of the features stuffed into its every nook and cranny. (My favorite: A ridiculously options-laden name generator for authors in need of inspiration.) Scrivener's user manual, however engagingly written, is 546 pages long. It's not messing around.
Even after years of using Scrivener, I still sometimes find myself hunting through its menus in search of that one command I need. Consistently formatting text files in a given project to anything other than Scrivener's default settings can be a pain, and it keeps its settings for targets and statistics in separate popup windows.
But despite this complexity, Scrivener does a good job of getting out of your way. Scrivener offers an outline mode, and a corkboard mode that displays each of your scenes as virtual notecards on which you can hash out what happens when. But if you just want to start writing without worrying about its bells and whistles, you won't have a problem. Because it's so like the Finder, Scrivener's system for storing scenes in various folders makes sense immediately. And like all the programs mentioned here, Scrivener offers a fullscreen mode that blots out everything but the text you're working on, to avoid distractions.
Scrivener also offers a respectable if occasionally glitchy screenplay mode. It won't replace Final Draft, but if you want to have fun writing a cinematic masterpiece about Dominic Toretto battling Dracula, you'll end up with a decently formatted final product.
Scrivener also shines when it's time to publish your work. Its voluminous list of export formats includes all the usual suspects, plus ePubs, Final Draft screenplay files, and even Kindle books. You can even select only specific chapters or files to compile and export — handy when you've got multiple drafts of a novel in a given file, but only want to create a PDF of the most recent one. However, this versatility has one glaring exception: Scrivener doesn't support iCloud, though it can share documents between its iOS and Mac versions.
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- $45 - Download now!
Which app is best?
If you want a jack-of-all trades writing app with WordPress, Medium, and iCloud support built in, Ulysses is your best bet. If you're not willing to shell out $4.99 a month indefinitely, try the similar Bear first. You may not ever need its advanced features, which would give you a terrific writing app for free.
But if you're serious about creative writing, and you want a stalwart companion to help drag stories out of your brain, Scrivener's your best bet. Its learning curve is steeper, but its powerful features make that climb worthwhile.
Got any favorite apps we haven't mentioned here? Let us know in the comments below.
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