1. Free Writing Software For Mac

Jill Duffy The Best Writing Apps of 2018 Novelists, screenwriters, book authors, and bloggers: Look no further for the best dedicated tool for your craft. Dedicated Writing Apps What constitutes the best app for writers depends on their process, genre, and conditions in which they are most. Additionally, it depends on what they intend to do with the finished work: publish it online, send it to an agent, or shoot a film.

There is no single best app for all writers, but there are plenty of excellent writing apps that cater to different needs, work styles, and genres. Priced for the Starving Artist (Mostly). Apps for writers tend to be less expensive than other kinds of software. Many sell for a one-time fee, although a few require a subscription. The least expensive writing apps cost only around $10.

Final Draft, one of the most expensive writing apps, costs $249.99, but even that is a one-time fee, meaning you pay once and own the software for life. Ulysses used to sell for a standalone fee but recently moved to a subscription model, now costing $39.99 per year. If you own an older copy of Ulysses, it's still yours to keep and use, but you won't receive any updates.

When an idea strikes, many writers want to be able to jot it down or immediately add it to an ongoing project. To do that, they likely need a companion mobile app to go along with their desktop software.

Free Writing Software For Mac

Support for mobile apps isn't particularly strong in the writing category. A few companies that make software for writers offer iOS apps, but it's rare to find anything for Android. Additionally, mobile writing apps typically cost a good deal more than what people are used to paying for an app. Scrivener for iPhone and iPad, for example, runs $19.99.

Storyist's iOS app is $14.99. To get over this price hurdle, I recommend thinking about the combined cost of the mobile and desktop software together and considering it a bundled purchase.

What's the Best Screenwriting Software? As a genre, screenwriting has unique requirements. Scripts for movies, television, and the stage must make clear the difference between direction, setting descriptions, spoken dialogue, and so forth.

This allows all the people involved in creating the final product—actors, film crew, editors, and directors —to do their jobs. As a result, the formatting for screenwriting is exceedingly precise.

A few writing apps cater specifically to professional screenwriters. Final Draft is one, and it continues to be an industry standard. If you're actively employed in film or television, you might already own a copy.

When you purchase Final Draft, you can use the app on two computers, and it's compatible with both Windows and macOS. Another app that specifically handles scripts is Adobe Story. The app costs $9.99 per month, but it's also available to anyone who has an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. Story is unusual because it's not just writing software. It also lets you make notes about the actual production of a script. For example, you can write a detailed description of shots you want to see or provide information about shooting locations. The app can generate a production schedule based on all the metadata associated with each scene.

Adobe Story is also compatible with, so after the footage has been shot, you can pipe in the script to run alongside the video, helping the editors do their job, too. Alternatives to Microsoft Word Why would a writer use a dedicated writing app instead of (or, or any other typical word processor)?

There's no reason you can't use any of those apps, but they don't have many of the special features you get from apps that are specific to writers. Fiction writers, book authors, and screenplay writers often change the order or scenes, sections, and chapters. That's easy to do when an app is designed specifically with professional long-form writers in mind. With the right drag-and-drop tools, you can quickly and easily reorganize your files.

It also helps if footnotes and endnotes renumber accordingly, when you move parts around. Another feature that office apps typically don't have is a writing target. It's common for professional writers to strive to meet a daily word or page count goal. So while Word, Google Docs, and Pages all have word count features, they don't have the same options for setting and tracking goals over time. Some writers need to keep exhaustive notes regarding plot points and characters, and possibly even visual references, such as an image of a shoot location or faces that inspire characters. The best writers' apps include tools that make it easy to see reference material and notes whenever the writer needs, and then get back to writing quickly. Finally, the word processors in suites are generally heavy-duty apps that can do everything from formatting and footnoting to headers, footers, and special pagination.

That's handy for many kinds of business and academic writing, but for the average creative writer, all this may just be a major distraction. What's the Best Distraction-Free Writing App? Writers who find themselves in the less-is-more camp will want a writing app that strips away anything that could possibly be the least little bit distracting. Distraction-free writing apps are a dime a dozen; the trick is to find one that also offers the tools you need when you need them. The best distraction-free writing apps hide the tools you need until the appropriate time, rather than omitting them altogether. With that criterion in mind, Ulysses is my favorite distraction-free writing app, and a PCMag Editors' Choice.

A well-designed interface makes Ulysses easy to use and easy on the eyes. It has good tutorials and help menus for newcomers, including a cheat sheet for Markdown language. Markdown is a very lightweight set of codes that can be used instead of the rich formatting options that are common in word processors. If you've ever typed asterisks (.) around a word in a chat app to make it bold, that's similar to Markdown. It's very simple, and takes no time at all to learn, especially when you have a cheat sheet to guide you. The idea behind Markdown is that you can apply basic formatting, like marking titles and subtitles, bold and italic text, without moving your fingers from the keyboard. It's also less distracting than having a panel with 50 alluring typefaces that you're dying to try.

Ulysses is only available for Mac and iOS. Windows users might also try yWriter.

Note that we have reviewed, but it didn't score well enough to make this top-ten list. If you're curious why, please feel free to read the review. What Are the Best Writing Apps for Novelists?

Book authors spend a lot of their time simply organizing their manuscript. Whether it's fiction or nonfiction, the work doesn't always shape up as the author originally intended.

Chapters sometimes move. Stories aren't always told in a linear fashion.

And scenes sometimes become more effective when their order changes. To facilitate the shaping of a story in this way, you need a library, or a pane within the writing app showing file folders and their organization. Not all writing apps have one, as you can see from the chart above. Writing for Medium, WordPress Blogs, and More. Book authors and screenwriters aren't the only types of writers, of course.

Many writers create shorter pieces that they publish online directly, without ever passing through the hands of an agent, publisher, or movie producer. If you're publishing on Medium or WordPress, it sure is handy to have a writing app that can export each piece directly to your platform of choice. Ulysses and iA Writer both have integration options for those two platforms. Like Ulysses, iA Writer is a distraction-free writing app, but it's much more pared down. It has some neat functions, such as text transclusion, that can be fun to learn for people who think more like programmers than traditional writers. Text transclusion allows you to create a final document of many smaller pieces by, essentially, giving commands about which files to pull together and in what order.

'First display the introduction. Next add an image. Then include my argument. Finally, show my author bio.' The text of your document could be all of four sentences long, but it might whip together a piece that, when exported, is 25 pages.

Your Writing, Your Choice Every writer has unique needs and desires. Do you need an app that works on both Windows and macOS? Is learning a new way to format text a deal-breaker? Does your final submission need to meet industry standards the way screenplays and teleplays do?

The range of software dedicated to writers is impressive. If nothing tickles your fancy from the full reviews linked below, you should also read our, as well.

Finally, if you decide that a dedicated writing tool just isn't for you, and you'd rather just use a plain old word processor, we've rounded up the, too. Pros: Well tailored for screenwriters. Powerful tools for both writing scenes and crafting the larger story. Plenty of view options.

Offers a variety of templates. Collaboration supported. Cons: Collaborative editing restricted to one person at a time. Inadequate default auto-save and revision history.

Bottom Line: Final Draft is the software you need if you are in the screenwriting business or aspire to be. It has all the tools you need to get the script right, both from a story perspective and a technical one. Pros: Beautiful and clean interface. Excellent selection of distraction-free modes. Tracks writing goals.

Filters help organize content. Can publish directly to WordPress. Cons: Now sold as subscription. Requires some learning, especially for those unfamiliar with Markdown. No audio file uploads. Bottom Line: Ulysses is the most elegant distraction-free writing app for Mac. It's ideal for writers who prefer a minimal interface and total flexibility, rather than a lot of structure and hand-holding.

Pros: Inexpensive. Uses distraction-free style with Markdown language. Offers transclusion method for embedding images, tables, and so on. Can export directly to Medium and WordPress. Cons: Few tools for organizing and arranging files. No templates for genres.

Not ideal for code-phobic writers. Bottom Line: Taking minimalism to the extreme, iA Writer might be the writing app with the fewest built-in distractions, and it's inexpensive, too. But this Mac app is also BYOE: bring your own everything.

Pros: Distraction-free writing app with support for Markdown language.Supports direct publishing to popular online sites. Good export options. Cons: No library or tools for reference materials. Not ideal for long-form writers.

Lacks templates. Solutions to common technical problems require macOS Terminal.

Bottom Line: Byword, an inexpensive writing app for Mac and iOS, publishes your work directly to Medium, WordPress, and other platforms. It's not ideal for long-form writers, however.