To write fiction and other non-technical prose like blog post drafts, I’ve tried
Vellum, which I used for Glitches and Cripto. It’s a really good, polished product, without feature bloat. It’s one of the best options if you intend to publish and sell ebooks, thanks to its EPUB generation tool fine-tuned for Apple Books, Kindle, Kobo, etc.
VS Code, which I used for The Ninth Berth and a couple of unpublished stories, all written in Markdown. I used a minimal setup with only a couple of extensions for Markdown preview and Vim bindings, plus a non-monospace font.
vim, my beloved text editor that I’ve used for 20+ years to write code, scientific papers, HTML pages, and many other things.
But none of those is the perfect editor to me. I wanted something minimal, with few options, no distractive visual cues, and that discourages multi-tasking—so no tabs or multi-file editing.
That’s why I created Plaintext, a simple text editor for macOS that I love but that isn’t for everyone:
Defaults to fullscreen mode.
No text formatting, centering, resizing, coloring, or syntax highlighting.
A choice of 6 fixed fonts, 3 serif and 3 sans-serif. You can’t add more.
A choice of 6 themes, 3 light and 3 dark, mostly monochromatic. Again you can't create your own.
Fixed text geometry: line length, word spacing, line spacing, etc.
Autosave, undo/redo.
Optional typewriter-like key sound.
Optional word count display.
It took me a couple hours of iterating with GPT-5.6 Sol to create a first usable version. You can download it from the Releases section of its GitHub repository, where the source code is open-sourced.
To be honest, I’m not interested in feedback, as I’m doing this mostly for myself. But feel free to adopt it if you like it.