Say Bye Bye To Ugly Text Editors with Byword for OS X

I love TextMate. It's a powerful text editor. The bundles available for TM let you do all sorts of things you never thought possible with it. It has great Markdown support, which is a complete necessity as far as I'm concerned , and the blogging bundle lets me post to my Wordpress blogs without leaving the text editor. It's not the most full-featured blogging set-up available, but it's pretty darn good. What I don't like about TextMate is how it feels when I'm writing longer stuff. The only way I can put it is: TextMate has no soul . It's going to sound a tad silly, I know, but TextMate, while it's very awesome, is better suited for coding and editing short snippets of text. I don't know why I think this way. For a long time I used Hog Bay Software's Writeroom for all my writing. It may seem hard to believe if you started following me from Kernel Panic, but a few years ago, I was a software review-writing machine for Smoking Apples . The desire to constantly write about software kind of went away, and was replaced by the far easier outlet that podcasting is. I find it much easier to talk about tech topics than write about them. At a certain point, the non-stop chatter about if a UI is pretty gets tiresome. Back to the reason I'm writing this here piece though. I wanted to write about Byword for OS X. Byword is a streamlined Writeroom. It's main draws are its aesthetics and simplicity. It's all black and white. No color, whatsoever. It's got a light theme and a dark theme. It's got a couple preset font choices ( you can edit the font if you want to though ). It does plain text and rich text. You can get a Markdown preview as well, thanks to the latest update. It's a little bit of a problem that you can't choose any extensions other than .txt and .rtf though. I had gotten into the habit of naming all my Markdown files .mdown or .md, but it's not a deal-breaker. It also has a separate option for "New Document" and "New Markdown Document". I'm not entirely sure what the difference is. The Markdown preview can be used no matter which you've chosen. The last little cool thing that Byword can do is "focus" on text. Like iA's Writer for iPad, Byword can focus on one to nine lines of text or on entire paragraphs. Anything above or below the "focus" area is still visible, just grayed out. If you wanna buy Byword and help out the site at the same time, buy the app from the Mac App Store for $9.99.

You can listen to Say Bye Bye To Ugly Text Editors with Byword for OS X online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Say Bye Bye To Ugly Text Editors with Byword for OS X is an episode from Kernel Panic.

The episode duration depends on the source podcast feed and may not always be available.

This episode was published on May 26, 2011.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Kernel Panic when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.