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(Full disclosure, one of the links in that Tedium article points to my post, “Standard” Markdown Controversy on this blog, which is how I found it.) I always feel like my words deserve a better vessel, something that will allow me to write them faster, more efficiently, and with as little friction as possible. Every one of my articles starts out in this app (or at least in John Gruber’s neglected gift to the world), and yet, I always find myself looking for another option, periodically launching into a Google deep dive that rarely leads to a better solution. I’m writing these opening lines in Markdown, using a Mac app called Focused, one of many attempts to rethink the word processor as a minimalist exercise. In short, Bear looks like a thoughtful notebook-style writing app, but it doesn’t really fit with how I work today.Īnd in part by “Bare-Metal Writing: What Our Word Processors Are Missing”: It doesn’t sync with Dropbox and makes some styling choices (like hiding the content of Markdown links) that I don’t really appreciate. I can configure it to be a usable text editor, but it really wants me to use its internal tagging and linking system, and that’s not how I want to work. Though people have raved to me about Bear, I don’t think it’s for me. Prompted in part by Jason Snell’s article, “My iOS writing app of the moment is Editorial”: