iA Writer

iA Writer is an opinionated text editor that has spent fifteen years removing things. There is one typeface, designed for the app. There is no formatting toolbar, because the formatting is markdown. Focus mode dims everything except the sentence you are in, which sounds gimmicky until you have used it on a paragraph that will not come out right.

The part that earns the money is the syntax highlighting. Turn it on and the app marks adjectives, adverbs, nouns, conjunctions and filler phrases in your own draft. It does not rewrite anything or suggest anything; it just shows you that four sentences in a row lean on the same crutch. Content blocks let a document pull in another text file, an image or a CSV table, so a long piece can be assembled from parts and still export cleanly to Word, PDF or HTML.

Your files stay ordinary .md documents in a folder you picked. Nothing is locked in a library, and sync is whatever you already use.

$49.99 buys the current Mac version outright. The company says clearly that minor updates are free and major ones may cost, so this is a version you own rather than a lifetime of releases, and the iPhone and iPad apps are separate purchases.

If you want a notes database with tags, backlinks and a sidebar full of structure, buy something else. This is for writing prose and then leaving.