You’ll be happy with either one, although it’s worth experimenting with both to see which one suits your writing style and workflow best. It’s difficult to recommend one over the other, as they’re both tremendous word processing apps. IA Writer is similar to Byword, with a minimalist design that prioritizes a clean, focused writing experience over advanced formatting features. The app also offers a full screen mode, which gives you a distraction-free space for when you need to hit deadlines. I enjoy crafting news stories with the narrow setting – it reminds me of the column width used in newspapers – but usually revert back to the medium and wide options for long-form pieces.ĭocuments can be written in Markdown, a plain text formatting syntax created by John Gruber, or rich text, before being saved locally or to an iCloud account. The typefaces are stellar and the three text width options offer some flexibility for different writing styles. The minimalist design is timeless I prefer the light color scheme, although I’ve switched to the dark one for a few night-time writing sessions. Since I grabbed it from the Mac App Store, I’ve never looked back. I wanted a word processor for Mac that was fast, lightweight and beautiful to look at. Byword (£6.99/$9.99)īyword is the app that I use to write almost all of my articles at TNW.

To make your life just a little bit easier, we’ve drawn up a list of our favorite writing apps for Apple’s desktop operating system. Whether you’re penning a research paper for college, a report for your boss or your next bestselling novel, there’s an app that’ll help you get the job done. If you own a Mac, there are plenty of word processors to choose from.

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