Whether you’re planning to write a bestselling novel, research paper for your college, or write work reports for the boss, writing apps always help you in these situations.
Several writing app options are available to Mac users, from the basic TextEdit to Microsoft Office and Google Docs. Here are some of the best writing apps for mac.
This list isn’t in order of best, but rather moves from most popular, most readily available, down to niche apps designed for specific purposes.
Best Distraction-Free Writing App for Mac
Ulysses Writing App for Mac
It’s a fully-fledged distraction-free writing app for Mac that provides a pleasant, focused writing experience combined with effective document management, fast syncing, and flexible export. It makes Ulysses the first choice for writers of all kinds.
Reliable and convenient document management allows you to organize your complete writing projects in one place. Whether it is simple notes, daily blog posts, or the next best-selling novel.
It’s a multi-platform, multi-device writing tool. You can use Ulysses on all your Macs, iPads, and iPhones.
You can sync the complete library between all your connected devices via iCloud and are always be ready to work where you left off.
Features:-
- Ulysses Organizes All Your Projects in One Place
- Lets You Work Anywhere, Anytime
- Transform your texts into beautiful PDFs, Word documents, and eBooks. It also lets you export to HTML.
- Clean and distraction-free user interface
- It offers a simple and intuitive workspace you can customize according to your taste.
- Markup based text editor
- Plain text enhanced
- Themeable Editor
- Keyboard navigation
- Typewriter mode
- Single & unified library for all texts
- Hierarchic Groups – Groups let you organize your writings project- or subject-wise.
- Attachments – Additional information that belongs to but not in a text can be attached to it: Images, PDFs, notes, keywords, you name it.
- Filters
- AutoSave & Automatic backup
- Writing Goals – Goals help you track your progress and let you brag about it on social media.
- Full iCloud Sync
- From iPhone to iPad to Mac – Ulysses is available for all your devices, and the apps share an identical feature set.
- Support for various file formats
- easily publish stories to WordPress and Medium
- Live Preview
- It comes with several export styles for all supported formats and different use cases.
- lets you conveniently share your texts or send them directly to third-party apps.
Bear – Distraction-Free Writing App for Mac
Bear is the most flexible writing app for mac that enables you to compose, sync, and store your notes and prose on various devices such as iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
It’s an ideal writing app for writers, lawyers, chefs, teachers, engineers, students, parents, and more!
All notes are stored in plain, portable text and easily organized using hashtags. Link all your messages to each other to build a body of work.
You can use the Bear writing app for all your writing needs, from quick notes to code snippets, to in-depth essays.
Features:-
- flexible writing app for crafting notes and prose
- Rich previews while writing so you see prose, not code
- A focus mode helps you concentrate on your writing.
- Full in-line image support
- Powerful Search Triggers to instantly search all your notes
- keep yourself on task by adding to-do’s to individual notes
- Advanced Markup Editor that supports and highlights over 20 programming languages
- Crosslinking to build a body of work, quickly reference other notes, and more
- Quickly add todos to individual notes to keep yourself on task
- Multiple export options including HTML, PDF, DOCX, MD, JPG, and more
- Smart Data Recognition of elements like links, emails, addresses, colors, and more.
- Hashtags to quickly find and organize notes.
- One-tap formatting on iPhone and iPad
- Store all your notes in plain text for the ultimate portability.
- Secure multi-device private sync via iCloud
MarkNotes for Mac
iCloud and Markdown-based document writing app for mac helps you take notes or write papers with markdown. Also, provide various formats to export your messages into HTML, PDF, or image.
Features:-
- Write with markdown
- Type beautiful math formulae.
- Create mermaid diagrams
- Sync notes with iCloud
- Easily access your notes with any devices
- shares stories with your friends
- Live preview while writing
- GitHub Flavored Markdown fully supported
- Syntax highlighting
- Organize your documents with tags
- changes are track with versions
- Instant search on your notes
- One-click to publish your messages as a blog post on this site
uFocus for Mac
uFocus is the distraction-free writing app for mac that lets you open all types of plain text files and keeps them organized inside libraries. It makes it easy to arrange your stories into chapters, articles, sections, etc.
To give you a clean and minimalist writing environment, uFocus only supports reading and writing to plain text files.
Features:-
- Unobtrusive interface
- Text statistics
- Markdown: easily add headings, quotes, ordered and unordered lists, italics, and bold
- easy to export your documents to HTML, PDF, print them and copy the selection as rich-text
- Highlight mode
- Jump from one sentence to the previous/next with Cmd-Left/Right
- Typewriter scrolling
- NoWayBack mode
- Sound mode
- Fullscreen Mode – focus on your words and hide everything else that is on screen
- iCloud, autosaving, and Versions are also supported
- Print either a single file or a whole directory
Diarly – Distraction-Free Writing App for Mac
Diarly is a simple journal, diary, and notes app for Mac. It allows you to track personal milestones, record fun moments, and enhance your writing skills.
Diarly App also allows you to sync your writing between your devices (iPhone, iPad, and Mac)via iCloud. So you can start your hand wherever you go.
A simple and minimalistic user interface with an in-built markdown editor gives you a streamlined and distraction-free writing experience.
All your content is secure behind powerful encryption and password protection.
Features:-
- Compose your diary entries on Mac, iPhone, and iPad apps.
- Secure cross-device sync via iCloud.
- A streamlined and distraction-free writing experience
- Add word count targets and writing statistics.
- Customize your journals and entries with themes, fonts, and templates.
- Add in-line rich media with photos, emojis, files, and links.
- Write in plain text using the advanced Markdown editor.
- Powerful encryption and password protection to secure your content
- Search your favorite entries using Star favorites and hashtags
- Store all your diary, journals, and notes in one place
- Import and export to Markdown to back up your entries.
- Typewriting mode pins the cursor pinned to the middle of the screen while writing.
- Find a specific date, place, or topic with an in-built calendar, lists, and map.
Paper – Distraction-Free Writing App for Mac
Paper writing app is a highly customizable minimalistic text editor and writing app for mac.
Features:-
- Gorgeous plain-text writing environment
- Highly customizable
- Minimal Markdown formatting
- Syncs with iCloud
- Previews in Marked 2
- Publishes drafts to Medium or WordPress
- Exports to PDF, HTML, RTF or Clipboard
iA Writer for Mac
iA Writer creates a clean, simple, and distraction-free writing environment when you need to focus on your words.
Features:-
- Focus Mode
- Simple Writing apps for Mac
- Search, sort, and quickly swap between documents from different clouds.
- Highly customizable,
- you can open documents and launch frequent actions in no time with the new Quick Search.
- iA Writer includes an inverted light-on-dark-mode, perfect for working day and night.
- Spot superfluous adjectives, weak verbs, repetitive nouns, false conjunctions, and clean your text of the usual rumble.
- Customize your templates and export to WordPress or Medium, HTML, Microsoft Word (.docx), or PDF.
- Embed links, pictures, tables, and text files in plain text and see them in preview.
WonderPen for Mac
WonderPen is a writing app for Mac specially designed for professional and amateur writers.
Features:-
- Tree view
- drag-and-drop to reorder.
- Easy to Use a Text editor with markdown.
- It supports full-screen mode, lets you focus on writing.
- Docs easily exported as Image, PDF, Word, HTML, etc.
- Autosave while editing. You can backup all docs as a single file and restore it from it later.
- Add a memo for each doc.
- Focus on one node of the doc tree.
- Search in all docs.
- Dark mode support.
- History snapshot for each doc.
- Automatic backup.
