Write for Mac
A brand-new competitor in the textediting war arrives with a splash
At first glance, Write looks a lot like current text-editing darling Ulysses 3, only at a much cheaper price – even factoring in a paid-for iOS version for taking work on the move. Glances three through six are mostly devoted to looking for the catch, and being surprised that there really isn’t one – not a big one, at least. Write is a gorgeous-looking editor with a lot of power just a click away, from full Markdown support and iCloud syncing, to distraction-free writing, and a centralised library to hold and browse your documents – one that simply uses raw files in existing folders rather than adopting Ulysses’ database approach. It’s oddly being sold entirely around note-taking, but easily handles long documents, too.
Along with all the usual editing features (such as typewriter scrolling and both global and section-based word/character counts), Write has a few interesting tricks, such as support for previewing Fountain formatted scripts. It’s a tool best used for short pieces rather than your novel, though, since there’s nothing like, say, versioning support, or a way of connecting up documents. Likewise, even ignoring that editors like this avoid DTP options of tools that you’d find in Pages, Write’s theme/template options are weak. If you need full control over your documents, Scrivener takes the prize and then Ulysses. Both of those also remain the tools of choice for writers focused purely on text. If your needs are a little simpler, Write does a great job for much less. Richard Cobbett
An impressively powerful but humble writing app that complements the big boys well.