#Alternative app to writeroom full#

There’s also space to detail all of your characters, plot points, locations and any research that you’ll be referring to. In the left-hand panel you can create and edit your stage play, manuscript and film script pages, as well as unformatted text files. It’s geared heavily towards novelists and screenwriters though, which could be a problem if you’re writing for another purpose. Storyist is a popular alternative that offers a similar experience – the ability to write and review multiple documents in a single window – but with a simpler design to wrap your head around. Scrivener has a fairly difficult learning curve and some advanced features that many writers shy away from. There aren’t many formatting options though: Scrivener recommends that you take your finished draft into another word processor, such as Pages or Microsoft Word, for final adjustments. The right-hand side of the app is the main text editor, which you can use to change the current file. Media, meanwhile, supports a wide variety of file types for you to reference as you write, similar to Evernote, and Trash is pretty self-explanatory. Draft allows you to split your document into separate sections or chapters, before compiling them into one long document at the end. The app’s document hierarchy is shown on the left, split into three default folders called Draft, Research and Trash. Scrivener cleans up this mess with a well-designed, straightforward interface tailored to anyone working on a long-form piece of text. In short, it’s just not very productive or intuitive. References, notes and ideas are often contained in separate documents, which result in a long-winded back-and-forth scenario while you write. If you’re writing a dissertation, novel or script, it can be difficult to organize your workflow. As a word processor it’s also incredibly capable, offering most of the features found in Microsoft Word. While plenty of services solve this problem, Google Docs is the one that I often fall back on.

I’m often in a rush and need to save some text so that I can pick it up later on another device. You don’t have to worry about native apps and all of your progress is saved and synced automatically. Regardless of what device you’re on, you can just navigate to your Drive and begin typing straight away. Its accessibility and non-existent price-tag is what makes Google Docs such a compelling word processor. A cloud-based storage solution and a set of productivity apps all rolled into one, it’s never more than a few clicks away – especially if you’re a Chrome user. I’m fairly invested in Google’s expansive portfolio of products and services, which makes it all the more difficult to ignore Google Drive. Documents can be saved to iCloud and also exported as a Microsoft Word, PDF, HMTL and. I’m also a fan of Reading Time, which shows not only your word and character count, but how long it would take for an average person to read your completed text. The app also supports Markdown formatting, which you can preview at any time in a separate window. IA Writer has a few special tricks that are worth considering, such as Focus Mode, which dims everything but the last three lines that you’ve been working on. 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.

#Alternative app to writeroom full#

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.