Byword Review - My favourite text editor
/I'll start my Byword review by stating that Byword is a beautiful app and has become one of my favourite apps overall. It's awesome.
Why Byword?
But why go for Byword when TextEdit comes bundled with every Mac and it's a very capable application?
Well, Markdown is why. Ever since I started writing in Markdown I’ve been looking for a simple text editor that supports it.
All I really wanted was an app that:
- Converted Markdown to HTML.
- Looked good.
I went to the Mac App Store and found several that met my two requirements. After reading up on the most interesting ones, I narrowed it down to two options: iA Writer and Byword. Both very similar.
Byword vs. iA Writer
iA Writer looks amazing, and I really like the font it uses: Nitti Light. I wrote a comment about iA Writer after an excellent review by Ben Brooks, and came very close to buying it. I actually use and love iA Writer for iPad, so it seemed like an obvious choice.
However, it turns out the font looks huge on a big screen and there’s no way of customising it. iA Writer has no preference pane. And although I think minimal options are a great idea, the fact that font size is set means it looks different on different screen sizes, which makes writing on a big monitor a aweful experience.
Byword, on the other hand, has the perfect preferences pane. As you can see in the screenshot, Byword lets you customise:
- Colour scheme: Dark text on light background or light text on dark background
- Column size: Narrow, medium, wide. Perfect for different screen sizes
- Font: Again, solves the screen size problem
- Text Format: Plain text, rich text, or markdown
Byword has exactly what I want. No more, no less. Did I mention Byword is awesome?
Byword feels extremely simple in use, but has a good combination of features that get out of the way when you don’t need them. Like:
- Full Screen, which removes everything but the text
- Paragraph Focus, which fades everything except the paragraph you’re typing
- Typewriter Mode: which centres the line of text you’re writing so it’s always in the middle of the screen (my favourite)
- Word and character count
- Export to different formats: It can convert Markdown to HTML, RTF, Word, PDF, Latex
I use Byword with the black text on white background as I find it easier on the eyes. It’s really a light grey background and dark grey text, which looks so much better than just black and white.
I use a “medium” column size on my MacBook as it’s easier to read. It makes the column size similar to a pocket book.
Even though Byword comes with a few good font/size combinations built in, I chose to use the open source Inconsolata XL. It’s a version of Inconsolata that adds a bold version. It’s a monospaced font that reminds me of writing on an old typewriter.
I also set the deafult text format to Markdown. Byword does a great job with it. It gives you a visual representation of what you’re writing. For example, bold and italics actually turn into bold and italic font. And Byword turns links into a very light grey that almost disappears into the background. It’s difficult to describe, but it’s a great way to write in Markdown.
Hopefully this Byword review is useful. I highly recommend it.
You can get Byword from the Mac App Store.