Write! – The Only Text Editor You Need For Distraction-Free Writing

If you are looking for an editor for Windows, macOS and Linux, look no further. Write! is a workspace that allows you to create notes, essays, writing projects and any kind of text. With a clutter-free interface, Write! has all the features that you’d expect to find on a word processor. Write! allows you to backup your documents to the cloud on their secure server, so you’ll never lose them again, and it also has some powerful document tracking features, along with sessions, notes and much, much more.

Every Write account comes with native cloud syncing, so you can sync your documents between Windows, Macs and Linux computers that have Write! installed. Write cloud automatically syncs whenever you make changes to a document, so you don’t need to worry about manual syncing.

Write has a two panel interface, the left being all the folders and the documents, and the right being the editor. Folders can be added, and documents can be moved around to those folders. If you have a document with multiple headers in, you can click on an arrow that will expand that document and show you all the headers so you can click on any of them and quickly jump to that section in the document.

The editor uses markdown, or if you want, Textile, Wiki or a combination of the last two. You can hide the folders panel, which brings you to the editor by itself. On the right, you can see a document overview with a lighter grey rectangle that shows where you are in the document, and you can drag around on this to quickly navigate to other places in the document. This can be hidden by clicking the small dot at the bottom right of the editor. Document statistics are also shown to the bottom right, and these can be changed to whatever statistics Write provides, such as reading time, page length, words, characters and more. Finally, the editor also shows you the language and time in the bottom right. Write also has quite a unique feature that is autocomplete, which is usually found in code editors. As you start writing a word, if Write recognises the word it will bring up a little autocomplete box beneath what you are typing. You can hit tab or enter to use the word that appears here. Whilst I find that this isn’t useful for short words that you normally type, it can come in handy if the word is pretty long. Another cool feature of the autocomplete is that it is self-learning, so it learns what text you write a lot. If you write in multiple languages in one document, Write also has you covered. In spelling collections, you can select the language you want to use, and then select the word. This is handy when you are typing one document in multiple languages.

Document cross referencing can also be used to link to other documents in your Write account. To add a cross-reference, you simply write an ‘@’ symbol, and Write will bring up recent documents in your account. Typing a word will search your account and bring up documents with that word in the title so you can easily add them. Once you have added the link, you can click on it to open that document in a new tab in Write.

Text formatting can either be done using markdown syntax, or by selecting text then right clicking. This brings up a menu that allows you to do multiple actions with a piece of text. You can make it bold, italic, upper case, and more. You can also change it to a heading or a list, highlight it, change the text colour and even Google the selected text, look it up in Wikipedia and more with research tools.

Write also has a great focus mode, allowing you to fade out all paragraphs except the one you are working on. Also, you can hide the document sidebar and go into fullscreen mode focus even more on a document. It’s actually very well done, as you can hide all distractions and focus on your work.

Using Write! fullscreen and in focus mode.

A unique feature of Write is ‘Writing Sessions’ – with these, you can separate your projects with cloud-synced sessions. For example, you could have a session called ‘Work’ or ‘School’. When you switch to a different session, tabs are saved together and you can easily open them again by switching the session. I use this a lot to switch between blog posts in one session to school work in another.

Fifteen styles also come with Write. These styles allow you to set what the preview for the document looks like. Write gives you a live preview of your markdown, so when you add a header, the header is rendered. With these styles, you can select how the preview looks and set the one you like as default. I would love to see a feature that allowed you to make your own styles, however this isn’t currently available.

Write has both light and dark themes, which will please many people. I really like the dark theme, and I find myself using Write in the dark theme most of the time, even in the day. Both the themes support the fifteen styles mentioned above.

Write also allows you to quickly and easily publish your document to either Medium or Write’s own document publishing service. If you publish using the Write service, you can view statistics of the document, switch the themes on it, add privacy to it so that only certain people can see it, and more. I think this feature is handy if you want to share a document you wrote to other people, so they can proofread it. Exporting to PDF, TXT and markdown is also supported, and you can do this individually with each document, or bulk-export multiple documents to the format you selected.

I’m really impressed with Write, especially with the cross-platform support with Windows, macOS and Linux. I think the tabbed interface is great as it allows easy switching between documents, and I really like the focus mode. I would like to see the ability to add images to the document, and I believe the Write team is working on this.

If you are looking for a markdown text editor for Windows and Linux, Write! is the way to go. On macOS, there are other options such as Ulysses, however I believe that Write is also a solid app to use. On Windows and Linux, Write! is by far the best markdown editor out there.

Write! is $19.95, which is covered with a 7 day money-back guarantee. Cloud access and maintenance updates are $4.95 per year after the first year of you using Write. I can understand with the cloud access, however I believe that maintenance updates should be free. If you are a student, you can get Write! for free.

Check out the Write! website here.

Thanks for reading!

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