There’s no shortage of applications designed to assist with and organize your writing, the implication being your writing will improve if you can just find that perfect app. I’m sure we’ve all (erroneously) thought it at some point: no wonder I’m not getting as much writing done as I’d like... my workflow is jacked! George brought this up way back in 2010 with the “magic software” idea. So, how about we add another to the list?
Write!, billed as a “minimalist text editor for distraction-free writing,” aims to pave over all the cracks on your road to productive writing. Takeaway: if you like Scrivener but can’t handle the learning curve or just how busy the interface is, you may want to consider Write! as a toned-down alternative with caveats.
Let’s look at what I consider to be some of the key aspects of the interface (for better or worse). Note that I used Write! to write this review.
The interface is pretty slick, definitely minimalist but not as minimalist as some (FocusWriter, for example, though you can turn UI elements on and off). It’s got a simple organizational tree structure on the left and a birds-eye view of your document on the right. The tabs on top will be familiar to nearly everyone as we basically live in our browsers now.
- There’s a “focus mode” which, when enabled, dims all other writing on a page except for the section you’re actively typing. I like this idea but felt it was distracting in practice, ironically.
One sticking point for many Profhacker readers, I’m sure, is the support of markdown, in addition to wikicode markup and textile syntax (and the standard WYSIWYG editor, of course, which a fairly decent array of font and paragraph styles). No syntax highlighting that I could find, though, so that seems like a bit of a novelty.
Write! stores your work on its own cloud servers, which is probably pretty polarizing to the academic community, so consider that. You can write locally, however. You can publish directly to WordPress, as well.
It has typewriter sounds. Yay?
- Includes the standard spell-check and an autocomplete option that you can configure to show suggestions after a few characters. Handy when you need to keep typing postphenomenological and get dizzy halfway through.
Statistics for your writing sessions are available and you can set goals like limiting a particular document to word or page limits, which I found to be pretty useful. I wanted to keep this review under 500 words (which I went over) and Write! let me know when I was getting close to that limit (but not when I blew past it as the status bar auto-hides when in fullscreen mode; otherwise, the word count turns red when it’s past the limit).
There are some basic researching tools—Google, Thesaurus, and Wikipedia—that are frankly pretty useless for academic writing but could be useful for more general copy writing or blog posting.
I do really like the Session concept (see the thumbnail) that mimics saving a collection of browser tabs that you can open all at once. If you’re working on a large project and want to use separate tabbed documents for different chapters/sections/etc., this is pretty handy. One click and everything’s there.
Overall, I basically like Write! and think it could be pretty useful for general web content writing (like this post) but I have a hard time seeing myself using it for writing chapters or articles. Maybe for really rough drafting or brainstorming, but even for that I’ve always been a big fan of Workflowy. Beyond the basic research function, it feels like it’s more geared toward creative writing and less toward research-based writing, though it could be pretty useful for students. To be fair to Write!, it’s not aimed at becoming an ecosystem for writing a scientific journal article, though I think it could potentially get there with a few tweaks or maybe even the release of a different bit of software that focuses more on that.
Are you looking for some new magic software? Tried Write! before? Have an alternative that you can’t write without? Let us know in the comments!
Disclosure: the Write! team provided me with a paid copy of Write! in return for a written review.
[Images from the Write! team press kit.]