Distraction Free Mac Writing Apps – Roundup

There has been something of a backlash against bloated writing software. Not so long ago you had a couple of options when it came to writing on the Mac – you could use one of the big box brand name word processors (such as Word or Pages) or you could fire up a basic text editor (such as BBEdit or TextEdit). Neither of these options was particularly adequate.

Thankfully a new breed of writing tool has burst onto the scene in the form of the distraction-free editor. These applications strip everything down to its basics and concentrate on the simple act of actually writing. Formating of text is largely ignored, menu-bars are banished, all uncessary embellishment is discarded.

For the purposes of this round-up we’ve decided to take a look at three of the better distraction-free writing tools available for the Mac. They are iA Writer, ByWord and OmmWriter.

iA Writer – App Store – $21.99

If you’re like me, then one of the first things you do after installing some software is to have a poke around inside the application’s preferences window. Well don’t bother looking for that in iA Writer because it doesn’t exist – what you see is what you get. There are some options you can toggle on and off in the menubar, but that’s about as sophisticated as it gets.

iA Writer employs a clean, paperlike writing surface in the default full-screen mode. Words are incredibly clear and crisp and stand out beautifully against this background. Nothing else is displayed in the text window – no word or character counts, no file information – nothing. It’s only once you [escape] out of full-screen mode that you can see a word and character count and also (interestingly) a suggested reading time indicator.

This minimalist white work environment is further enhanced by the software’s innovative Focus Mode. In Focus Mode, only the sentence that you are currently working in is displayed at full opacity – all your previous sentences are greyed out. This enables you to concentrate on the words you’re currently writing and not stress too much about the ones that went before. This means that you spend less time flitting backwards and forwards through your text changing things and more time actually writing. It’s a great system that works brilliantly.

iA Writer utilises its own very basic form of markup. Put asterisks around some words to make them bold, make a header by put an asterisk and then a space in front of the words. Ultimately this is all you need to work on your text – you can worry about things like fonts and graphic embellishments once you’ve actually finished writing. After years of horrendous Microsoft interfaces I must say I found this writing environment to be near-on perfect, but it is worth noting that it’s three times the price of OmmWriter.

OmmWriter – App Store – $5.99

While iA Writer takes the spartan distraction-free environment to its limits, OmmWriter actively seeks to enhance your mindset. It can be set up in a very similar way – plain white with clear black text – but offers more options. The fonts, while looking very crisp are not, however, as clean as iA Writer’s and look slightly bitmapped. Moreover, several font sizes are offered to enable you to customise the environment to the size of your screen. You can also choose a simple sans serif font, a serif font, an old-school script font or a blocky courier style font.

OmmWriter makes a couple of minor concessions to the interface, but these remain hidden until you move the mouse. When you do move the mouse you’ll see a configurable text entry box, a word count and some icons placed on the right side of the window. The size of the text box can be altered to cater for your personal requirements – some people like to write in smaller column based layouts, others prefer wider text windows – you can use either. You can also alter the height of the text entry window meaning you can have a traditional paged based layout or a very slimline paragraph based look.

When you first start OmmWriter, the splash screen advises you that it is best enjoyed with headphones on. Surely this is the first case of a text editor making such a claim? The reason for this is that the software comes with a selection of ambient sound environments that are designed to help isolate your brain and let you concentrate on the matter in hand. While I’m happy to work with the right kind of music in the background, none of these sonic environments did much for me – however if I was in a busy office I’d probably have a very different opinion. There’s also a configurable keystroke sound that I personally found very distracting and turned off immediately.

To complement the sonic soundscapes, OmmWriter also includes several page environments beyond the default plain white paper look. There’s a barren white snowscape, a dark grey textured cloth, a light spring green abstract look and even one that cycles gently through a pastel palette of colours. If you find all these settings a bit distracting (or, you know, pretentious) then you can simply turn them off.

ByWord – App Store – $12.99

Lying somewhere between the design and features of iA Writer and OmmWriter, ByWord incorporates features of both these other apps. It has a preferences window for a start, but there’s so little in there that you do wonder why they didn’t just use a toggled on-screen options layout.

There are two colour schemes – Light and (yes, you’ve guessed it) Dark. Use of either is, of course, a personal preference but I found the dark screen a bit too imposing and quickly switched to the light paper-styled option. Unlike iA Writer and OmmWriter you can also use any font you have installed on your system. After a bit of experimentation I switched from the built-in fonts (Cochin, Courier and Georgia) to Helvetica Neue with a nice big 18point font size.

There’s an implementation of iA Writer’s Focus Mode in ByWord but it doesn’t work nearly as well. You can pick the size of the focus from one to nine lines in length, a paragraph or completely off.  I definitely preferred iA Writer’s sentence mode. Also ByWord faded out the non-focused text that little bit too much so that if you did want to quickly glance back at a previous paragraph you practically had to squint.

ByWord includes some basic text formatting options which are accessed either from the menubar or from a popover window. Neither of these worked very well for me and smacked of the old word processor. However the main problem I had with ByWord was that text eventually sank to the bottom of the page and there was no way of moving it to the more comfortable centre eyeline position without sticking a load of carriage returns in.