When it comes to putting text on a page, OS X has all kinds of options for writing. There’s more than one way to write down what you’re thinking, with each way having its own advantages and disadvantages.
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These are some of the best prose text editors for OS X. For what it’s worth, these are intended for people writing regular text, not code. That’s a whole different can of worms.
Here are our Top Picks for Best Text Editors on Mac
iA Writer
iA Writer has won a large following for its simple, no-nonsense approach to composition. By taking away almost every option you see in regular text editors, iA Writer promises to help you focus and write effectively.
It’s my favorite way to compose TechNorms articles for its simplicity and speed. Text rendering is near-instant. You can also turn on focus mode to highlight the current sentence, a godsend for copyediting.
iA Writer supports Markdown syntax, exporting to Word and HTML.
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is the old man wheezing in the corner about how he can do all these cool things and no one appreciates him for it.
Word 2011 for Mac falls short of other alternatives for being woefully outdated, slow and bloated. It also insists on using keyboard shortcuts that don’t match Mac standards. That said, it’s still the industry standard in a lot of industries and you’ll have to use it eventually.
Microsoft Word is good for composing documents to share between computers because the formatting and syntax will almost certainly work.
Pages
The new version of Pages is in many ways an inferior alternative to its 2009 version ever since Apple gimped it to create feature parity with the iOS apps.
However, it still does a good job of filling a niche between minimalistic writing programs like iA Writer or Byword and the complexity of Word. This is a good program for writers who need a little formatting but aren’t worried about it being exact.
Byword
Markdown App For Mac
Byword is another Markdown editor in the vein of iA Writer. It features minimalistic writing with a monospace font on a white background in Markdown, so we’re not breaking totally new ground here.
Byword approaches its text editing slightly differently than iA Writer. It lets you change the document font to anything on OS X, as well as a built-in night mode you only get in the pro version of iA Writer and preset document widths.
Like iA Writer, Byword is a great app for minimalistic text editing. I love its night mode. It also has a better word counter than iA Writer – iA’s word counter lags a lot.
The only missed opportunity is its focus mode, which highlights lines or paragraphs, not sentences, which seems like a more logical choice.
Other than that, Byword is a pretty great editor. I liked it enough to finish this article using it over iA Word.
TextEdit
Lest we forget, OS X ships with a built-in text editor. TextEdit comes on every Mac, and it’s… not bad. Certainly not any good for creating real documents in terms of word processing or Markdown posts, but it lets you put text down and has enough to make rich text files. It’s the baseline against which we compare other OS X text editors.
TextEdit is good enough for low-end work, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody looking to do serious writing.
Final Thoughts
Out of these, Byword was probably my favorite. It and iA Writer are excellent composition tools, but Byword comes out just barely ahead with better font support and night mode.
Did we forget an app? If so, let us know in the comments.
MacDown is an open source Markdown editor for OS X, released under the MIT License. The author stole the idea from Chen Luo’s Mou so that people can make crappy clones.
Visit the project site for more information, or download MacDown.app.zip directly from the latest releases page.
Install
Download, unzip, and drag the app to Applications folder. MacDown is also available through Homebrew Cask:
Screenshot
License
MacDown is released under the terms of MIT License. You may find the content of the license here, or inside the LICENSE directory.
You may find full text of licenses about third-party components in the LICENSE directory, or the About MacDown panel in the application.
The following editor themes and CSS files are extracted from Mou, courtesy of Chen Luo:
- Mou Fresh Air
- Mou Fresh Air+
- Mou Night
- Mou Night+
- Mou Paper
- Mou Paper+
- Tomorrow
- Tomorrow Blue
- Tomorrow+
- Writer
- Writer+
- Clearness
- Clearness Dark
- GitHub
- GitHub2
Development
Requirements
If you wish to build MacDown yourself, you will need the following components/tools:
- OS X SDK (10.8 or later)
- Git
You may also need to install Xcode’s command line tools with the following command:
Note: Due to multiple upstream bugs, Xcode may fail to build certain dependencies if you use the CocoaPods with versions lower than 0.39. Please upgrade CocoaPods, or use Bundler to execute a local version (as suggested above) instead.
An appropriate SDK should be bundled with Xcode 5 or later versions.
Environment Setup
After cloning the repository, run the following commands inside the repository root (directory containing this README.md file):
and open MacDown.xcworkspace in Xcode. The first command initialises the dependency submodule(s) used in MacDown; the second one installs dependencies managed by CocoaPods.
Refer to the official guides of Git and CocoaPods if you need more instructions. If you run into build issues later on, try running the following commands to update dependencies:
Translation
Please help translation on Transifex.
Discussion
Markdown Reader Mac
Join our Gitter channel if you have any problems with MacDown. Any suggestions are welcomed, too!
Text Editor For Mac
You can also file an issue directly on GitHub if you prefer so. But please, search first to make sure no-one has reported the same issue already before opening one yourself. MacDown does not update in your computer immediately when we make changes, so something you experienced might be known, or even fixed in the development version.
MacDown depends a lot on other open source projects, such as Hoedown for Markdown-to-HTML rendering, Prism for syntax highlighting (in code blocks), and PEG Markdown Highlight for editor highlighting. If you find problems when using those particular features, you can also consider reporting them directly to upstream projects as well as to MacDown’s issue tracker. I will do what I can if you report it here, but sometimes it can be more beneficial to interact with them directly.
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Tipping
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If you find MacDown suitable for your needs, please consider giving me a tip through PayPal. Or, if you prefer to buy me a drink personally instead, just send me a tweet when you visit Taipei, Taiwan, where I live. I look forward to meeting you!