Yesterday I discovered the regretably named Texts, a WYSIWYG text editor that saves to plain text files in the Markdown formatting syntax, which is also used by innumerable sites including Github and StackOverflow.

I once used Microsoft Word for anything that wasn't program code, but as time went on I found myself on machines without Word installed. Buying Word was never worth it to me, yet alternatives such as OpenOffice felt too clumsy to be enjoyable. At some point I decided I'd be able to live using plain text files alone, particularly after I discovered Restructured Text, the primary format syntax used by Python's standard documentation tools. The cool thing about RST files was that they stayed simple text files which could be editted easily in Sublime Text and could live comfortably next to my code and in Github repositories.

However, something always felt off about using Sublime Text to write scripts or stories, probably thanks to the monospaced fonts used for viewing code. While I spent the first five years of my computer enabled life writing stories in Word Perfect and other old school word processors which had nothing but monospaced fonts, at some point using them for creative writing began to feel unnatural. My theory is that as years went by and variable width fonts became more prevelant, my brain began to recognize monospaced fonts as used for reading and writing code only, which caused them to stifle the writing process. While it's possible to use variable width fonts for Sublime Text I couldn't find an easy way to change it on a per file extension basis, meaning I'd have to change it globally and thus ruin the tool's ability to edit code.

The Texts editor on the other hand allows me to write documents with formatting options such as headers and bold text visible, which makes the experience almost as enjoyable as it was on Word. It has the added advantage of saving the files to a format that's friendly to all the programmer tools I already use, such as Git, DiffMerge or Sublime Text. It even supports saving documents in multiple types of Markdown, such as the flavor used by Github.

The only real disadvantage is it supports Markdown instead of Restructured Text- there's a lot of Python documentation that would've been really nice to edit with Texts. Markdown also is a less standardized format than its chief rival. Additionally, Texts is currently a bit rough around the edges- I can't find figure out how to activate the spell checker or exit from full screen mode. However, as its the only real tool I've ever found to scratch this particular itch I still recommend it to anyone who wants the nicities of a WYSIWYG editor but is loathe to give up the independence offered by plain text files.