Byword Ratings and Reviews

I am a casual writer. I like to write, and I like to write in markdown, so I don't need anything super flashy in a markdown text editor. My previous favorite editor was Ulysses, but their recent business practices left a bad taste in my mouth, so I went on the market to look for a replacement. I tried a LOT of different text editors. And many are very good. But Byword is really, really great. It’s very simple and straightforward, and it lets me write the way I want to write. Just simple flat text files that I can imbed pictures in for my journaling. That’s all I want, and Byword does this for me wonderfully. I also like that I can change the editor font to what I want. One of the big contenders I was considering didn’t let me do that, and that was the deciding factor in favor of Byword.
So I am now a happy markdown text journal writer again! Just so long as Byword never becomes subscription-based, I will be a happy customer.

ByWord has proven to be one of the best "minimilistic" apps for writing. It does a wonderful job for what it was built to do and doesn’t try to do more like many other apps in the same category. My only problem that I have isn’t with the app at all. It is with the developer. Their support is not nearly as good as the quality of their design and development. I have emailed them 3 questions, 1 as old as 2016 and NEVER recevied a response. I also had to purchase the app twice because of this. Their flat out ignorance to their customer should stop you right now from clicking the Buy button and that is the ONLY reason. Who knows maybe, hopefully, they will respond to this review becasue they haven’t updated Twitter in almost a year and emails just get delivered to account that they never look at.

My writing has been scattered all over the place - Pages, documents, cloud - and I am completely disorganized in trying to get them together in one place. Then along comes Byword and I can write so easily, title it and keep it on the Byword app. I think. My problem is that Byword is part of Pages and the ‘Cloud’ thing and I would like it as a separate icon on my side bar so that I can open it without going into Pages. Any idea if this can be done? I thought I could go through the other places and put all scattered writings into the Byword but not sure I can because I moved one but it moved out again and back into the Cloud, As a writer, I don’t spend too much time using by beloved Mac for other things but this is one thing I would like to get straightened out. Any help out there?

A few years back there was a big round of "focus on your writing" apps. Simple. No muss, no fuss. Very limited functionality. I tried Byword back then but picked something else.

Today, that something else leaves my machine because of other bugs and because today I want not only flat text (with word wrap) but I also want the ability to do markdown and simple formating like rtf. Enter Byword. Just what I'm looking for right now. One price. No subscription fee. No onerous "project management" layer that several other seem to have. My OS does that just fine for me AND allows me to keep documents from multiple apps together which the "project management" UI junk doesn't. Hooray for Byword!

And I just bought the iOS version while I was writing this.

I’m an engineer by profession but I do occasionally get paid to write technical articles for trade publications. That being the case I was looking for a simple writing tool that supported multi-markdown and after looking at several options I decided to give Byword a try. So far it is working very well for me. I had been writing in MS Word but was often distracted by having to deal with formatting and other issues that had nothing to do with the words I was trying to get down on the page. Now I can just write.

The export to MS doc file format is not all that great. The workaround is to export as HTML without the Byword theme and open the HTML file with Word then save as a doc file.

Byword is clean and intuitive (mostly). One thing I am confused: syncing with Dropbox. In the iOS version, Byword automatically creates and syncs a folder within a folder called “Apps” in my Dropbox. For the OSX version on Mac, I can only select Dropbox…I cannot save my files within that Apps folder. Therefore, syncing between devices is impossible without multiple steps. So far, I’ve had better luck with Ulysses when it comes to syncing.

I do like it U.I. But the Rich Text features don’t seem to be present when I turn it on. In the preview images in the App Store, it shows settings popping up when selecting text. No such features exist when I switch to Rich Text mode.

So like the title says Byword is nice and has potential. But I am not sure yet if it will be my home for drafting. It needs to make the syncing process more seamless.

Most important to me first: When I go to fullscreen (even on a 27" monitor), I can get work done! This is because of the "typewriter" mode, which keeps the actively edited line centered in the screen, scrolling the text around you as you work. Your eyes are thus always in a comfortable position on the screen, all the while nothing but you and your text is present.

Outside of that, most of the review covers the same things as all the other 5 star reviews, such as the option of using markdown, the simplicity and minimalism, and the support of both dark and light screens to your taste.

I write a lot of communications for clients, my own enterprise and just general journaling. Even when I have specific formats and locations to which these bits of my written effort get saved, having a single source where I create the typed output is very helpful.

Byword is very nice distration-free environment, that has all of what you need, and nothing that you do not.

Key features that I find relevant are support for exporting to various formats such as Microsoft Word, Rich Text Format, Text File and publishing to sources such as Wordpress, Tumbler and Evernote. Evernote is a key part of my workflow, so this kind of sealed the deal.

I have tried a lot of text editors over the years and ByWord continues to outshine them all. It's interface is inviting, almost serene. It works great on both the Mac and iOS platforms (including TextExpander support on iOS). It handles Markdown beautifully.

Years ago I switched to doing the bulk of my logging and creative writing in text files because .txt is the only file format that is likely to prevail in perpetuity. Enter Markdown, which allows you to write with a modicum of formatting while still maintaining a pure text file.

While using Markdown in ByWord it formats the items as you might expect in a rich text editor. For example, bulleted lists automatically create a new bullet when you create a new line, bold and italics display as bold and italics (while the Markdown codes fade into the background).

ByWord is a beautiful interface with just the right number of features to make it a powerful editor. I use it every day.

I love writing in markdown, and realistically I would be willing to use any tool to do so.
Byword, howver, is the most beautiful markdown editor out there _by far_.
My only wish is that they would allow you to set up a custom stylesheet in the app that would allow you to customize the appearance of your previews.
It would also be very cool if there was a keyboard command to export a pdf and a print-layout for previews as well. (I’d like to be able to tell how many pages long my printouts will be without leaving Byword; I use it at work to distribute 1-pagers to my team.