iA Writer

The developers have promised to bring the outline function to the apple versions for years. Go look online and you will find them promising it to come soon—years ago. I even received an email telling me the feature will come soon. This is a basic feature that’s already on their windows version.

All in all a great writing app with a flexible UI that you customise to be as minimalist as you like. The app is let down by woeful files integration. It only works with iCloud, Cannot use third party file storage locations - this is a deal breaker. Please fix this so it can open, edit and save to any cloud storage location within Files app.

It’s always open. For all my notes and writing across iOS and macOS . It’s my machine home. Fast as my fingers, well crafted visually, built with the right tools for the target environment (that’s so rare to see). I have nothing but praise for the developers of this app.

The best praise I can give this app is that I’ve been able to use it consistently for years at this point. A longer streak than I’ve managed with dozens of other writing tools. The design is great, the sync works really well across devices and (for me) the balance of features is just right.

I love iA Writer. It’s probably my most-used app across iOS and Mac, and I use it for all my knowledge management and note-taking. The team is constantly pushing out updates, the app is polished and reliable, and best of all its all based on portable Markdown files requiring no export step. The one reason I haven’t given this app 5 stars is that there are still a few points of friction and quirks. - It’s difficult to add media (you need to hit a command, and rename files, and it will only display images). This will throw off people used to the flexibility of other editors (e.g. Bear, Ulysses, Apple Notes). - There’s no support for sketching on iPad. - Wikilinks between files don’t work if you rename a file. Ideally these references should auto-adjust (e.g. Obsidian). - Sorting is global, and affects folders too. Meaning if you want to use this for notes and set it to sort by recent, all your folders will sort by recent instead of alphabetically (Apple Notes does this, for example).

Love this app and have used it a lot over the years. Beautifully designed and a pleasure to work with. A request - it would be fantastic if Dark Mode supported pure black instead of dark grey for the background in the editor - or at least an option to toggle this in settings.

(2021 iPad Air with iOS 15) Debated a long time over getting this. Compared feature sets with other apps, typing experiences, etc. Settled on this one, and it’s exactly the simple, focused typing experience I was after. Just one issue though: the battery usage is abysmal! Over the past 10 days iA Writer used 43% of battery power while Youtube used 32%, and YT was onscreen for longer! Sorry but if battery usage is higher for a simple text-editing app than for a video streaming service, there’s something funky going on. I don’t even have it set up to sync to anything, why is this happening? I can’t recommend this app to anyone with such a glaring flaw.

Very limited formatting for exporting from Ipad. You will have to create your own using editor on Ipad. Not sure what editors are available for this task on ipad. This takes more time than necessary. Edit: the templates offered for free is also VERY limited. This is not usable when writing in Markdown because the markdown itself does not allow formatting. Ulysses has lot more templates but even that's not enough. There's no professional writing app available for Ipad users at this time for these reasons. It's possible to use Microsoft or Google apps for free for basic use and essay writing.

Saved searches don’t match special characters. # Bug Saved search for matched text ignores special characters. # Reproduce Create a new saved search “@journal”. # Expected output Matches all documents matching “@journal”. # Actual output Matches all documents matching “journal”.

Highly recommend!