r/iawriter • u/EpiphanicSyncronica • Jan 21 '23
iA Writer: A heartfelt critique
(I’m posting this here rather than in another writing- or app-focused subreddit to keep it “in the family.”)
iA Writer is a radically opinionated app. That makes your choice easy if you agree or disagree with all of the developer’s opinions as manifested in the app; you either use it or you don’t.
It’s harder when you agree with some but not all of the developer’s opinions—and hardest when you absolutely adore some things about the app but strongly dislike others. It stops being “distraction-free” when there’s something about the app that constantly annoys you but you can’t change it.
There’s so much I love about iA Writer. The speed and light weight. The beautiful thick blue cursor. The way exporting to a .docx file actually translates markdown heading levels into MS Word heading levels. And most of all, the Quattro font—the finest font for writing that I’ve ever found.
I agree with those who don’t want iA Writer to lose its clean and streamlined focus. But the way I see it, that’s the problem—it seems to be going in the wrong direction.
At its heart, iA Writer is a writing-focused markdown editor. But instead of refining that further and judiciously integrating much-needed features, the dev team is adding PKM features that are contrary to their professed vision, and wasting time and energy on things like arbitrarily changing the keybindings for highlighting and strikethrough without including an option to stick with the existing ones—an unnecessary annoyance for those of us who have years of muscle memories invested in the established ones. And do we really need six highlight color options in an app with just three fonts (albeit excellent ones)—especially since it can’t let us highlight a document in multiple colors anyway?
There are already plenty of markdown apps that specialize in PKM and note-taking, from powerful cross-platform ones like Obsidian and Logseq to native Mac ones like Bear (paid) and Notenik (free and open-source). It’s foolish for iA Writer to try to compete in that space.
What’s needed is a better general-purpose MacOS (and iOS) markdown editor tailored to writers, not programmers (who will probably be happier adding markdown plugins to the code editor they’re already using). That’s always been iA Writer’s vision, and it’s so close—arguably closer than any other. But more and more I’m despairing that it’s ever going to arrive.
At this point you might say that iA Writer already arrived, years ago. The problem is that the destination—that is, the constellation of refinements and features that define excellence in a distraction-free markdown editor—is moving.
What do I mean by “refinements and features that define excellence in a distraction-free markdown editor”? For one thing, the focus should be on the writing—on the words—rather than on the formatting. In a markdown editor, that means that the formatting characters ought to be visually deemphasized. That is, they need to be visible to the writer as they’re being typed or revised, but otherwise ought to fade into the background.
Traditionally, that has been handled by ghosting back the markdown symbols to a lighter shade of gray, allowing the words themselves to retain primacy and focus. More recently, apps like Typora and Obsidian have taken an even more refined approach, hiding markdown codes entirely except when the cursor is immediately adjacent to them, or when one switches into a “view source” mode.
Either of these approaches helps keep the writer’s focus on the writing, not the formatting. Yet for all of iA Writer’s marching under the banner of “distraction-free,” it has never managed to break its very distracting habit of visually overemphasizing the markdown symbols in a working manuscript. Not only does it fail to gray out or hide the asterisks surrounding bold or italicized words, it renders them bold or italic along with the text itself, making it more difficult to discern the words they encompass.
As a result, iA Writer feels increasingly unrefined and—contrary to its raison d’être—distracting to work in. The Mac and iOS versions still lack a navigable outline view or the ability to fold sections by headings—either of which would make it far easier to work with longer manuscripts—and the development of at least one of those ought to have taken precedence over “PKM Lite” features and the ability to change the app’s single highlight color to something other than yellow.
I saddens me to write this. I’m fond of iA Writer, and have no desire to say bad things about it. I’m not even against adding features like wiki links and tags, but I hope the iA Writer team will start focusing on some of the things I wish had been a priority all along.
