On iA Writer, one interesting feature - probably its only feature - is the “focus mode” which highlights the currently edited sentence and fades everything else into grey. The experience isn’t like using Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit(Mac) either. The overall effect is that your mind stays focused on paragraph structures, flow and generating interesting content. There are however numbered headings which is useful. There are no obscure Control/Alt/Esc commands to remember. There are no styles, hyperlinks, or colors or fonts. There is no way to underline or italicize text. Even compared to any of those, iA Writer is distraction free. But it turns out to be a different user experience after all. Initially I was skeptical and thought a minimalist tool was nothing new, just a modern version of Vi/Emacs or any of the LaTeX editors I’ve used. I have been revising a paper for a journal and when it began crashing every ten minutes, I realized I was totally distracted by having to restart my word processor and guessing what changes had actually been saved.

I was led to search for a new writing tool by Redmond’s Law of Large Numbers which states that a large and complex enough document will definitely crash Microsoft Word. They help you focus on actually writing rather than tinkering with fonts, layouts, hyperlinks, grammar checkers and other distractions. It is one of a slew of new programs that are “minimalist” writing tools including Omniwriter and Writeroom. I recently began using a new writing tool, iA writer.

Use ia writer fonts on ipad