Byword for OS X

When I was a Windows user, the first piece of software I would install after the quarterly nuke and pave of my system was WinAmp. The second thing to be installed was usually Microsoft Word. Sometime in second year university though, around the time that I started writing real lab reports with somewhat complicated mathematical expressions, I finally got sick of the Equation Editor that came with Word and went off in search of a better way. Eventually, I fell in love with LaTeX and the beautiful looking documents it produced, all without the horror of having your document repaginate itself and break an equation every time you changed a section header. When I first transitioned from Windows (XP Pro x64 thank you very much) to Mac a couple of years ago, one of the first things I noticed was that there was a real movement singing the praises of plain text and Markdown. After my experiences with Word and LaTeX, I could see their point. Human readability and future-proofing are both good things.

There is no shortage of text editors available for the Mac. Each one has its own features and shortcomings depending on what your particular usage of the application is. Byword by Metaclassy is a full screen, distraction free text editor very much in the spirit of WriteRoom. The biggest difference between Byword and WriteRoom is that Byword is much more locked down in terms of options - you get to pick: (a) your font, (b) light or dark colour scheme, and (c) one of three document widths - that’s pretty much it for options.

Unlike WriteRoom, however, Byword has been built very much with Markdown in mind. Byword renders both Gruber standard Markdown and Fletcher Penney’s MultiMarkdown in an interesting and appealing way. Rather than highlighting Markdown to stand out from the rest of the text as a code editor would, Byword actually lowlights Markdown tags by making them only a few shades of grey different from the background. Initially I found this a bit weird at first, because up to this point I was doing the majority of my text work in TextWrangler. After a week or so of use I’m mostly managing to get used to it.

Where Byword really shines is in full screen mode. On my 27 inch iMac, my usual mode of writing involved having TextWrangler and Safari open side by each. When I started using Byword, I tried using it this way as well and it just didn’t feel right. When I switched to full screen view, however, things just clicked into place and in my opinion looked quite sharp. I haven’t seen Byword on a retina display myself, but those who have say that it does look good. In full screen mode, Byword truly is a minimalist app. The only thing you see other than text on the screen is a small information bar at the bottom of the screen showing you what kind of document you are editing, a word count, and a character count.


The intentional minimalism of Byword’s interface is its main attraction, and this is paired with an equally minimal but well chosen set of accessory features. Byword allows you to change your focus mode from whole document, to paragraph, to line. Changing to paragraph or line focus mode dims out everything other than the element actively being edited. I’m not sure if I would necessarily want to write like this all of the time, but in a busy document with a lot of formatting and links I can see where this would be handy, especially for proofreading.


Typewriter mode, as the name implies, makes Byword behave somewhat like a typewriter by fixing the position of the line being edited to the middle of the window, rather than moving top to bottom as with a traditional text editor. This may not necessarily be a flashy killer feature, but it does show that the designers and developers at Metaclassy are paying attention to details and getting things right. Another example of their designers and developers getting small things right is auto-wrap. If you select a word or block of text, typing a bracket or quote automatically wraps the text with that symbol. This doesn’t apply, however, to the back tick (`) character, which is strange because that character is used in Markdown to denote an inline segment of code.

Byword is fully enhanced for OS X Lion and Mountain Lion featuring support for iCloud, full screen, autosave, and versioning. The companion iOS app integrates seamlessly through iCloud and has built in support for TextExpander touch. Win. Previewing documents is straightforward with Byword’s built-in HTML preview mode for MultiMarkdown documents. You don’t necessarily need a separate previewer such as Marked, but running them side by side certainly is a pleasure. Getting your text out of Byword is pretty simple too. In addition to being able to save documents by default to plain text (with either .txt or .md file extensions), you can also export your file to LaTeX, PDF, HTML, RTF, or if you really must, Word.

I was only lukewarm about Byword when I first started writing this review. I just didn’t like the interface compared to TextWrangler and the whole idea of taking away customizability was just weird. I have to admit though, that after making a real effort to actually use Byword for a long piece of writing, I kind of like it. After I switched to a fixed-width font, I liked it even more. Byword’s most notable feature is a complete lack of visually loud things cluttering up your view and breaking your focus. For me, this wasn’t enough of a feature to sell me on Byword. I could get that from Vim. What actually sold me on Byword was the visual elegance of the app combined with thoughtful features that make writing a pleasure, rather than a potential exercise in technical support.