A few days ago, mildly annoyed with the other tools I had been using for writing — especially since I have been doing a fair bit more of it via these Notes, I re-downloaded a trusty old standby: Byword. Although it has not been meaningfully updated in a few years, it remains a really solid plain text editor for drafting content like these notes.

It is such a well-behaved native Mac app that despite its not having been updated in years, it Just Works™ on modern macOS, including support for things like the new Apple Intelligence Writing Tools features. I could not possibly be less interested in those myself, but it is indicative of the care that went into making the app robust and well-integrated with the operating system.

As a simple, distraction-free writing environment on Mac, it is still one of the nicest tools for the job, all these years later.

Two things it does not do, that I wish it did:

• Understand ----delimited metadata sections. When Byword came out, the MultiMarkdown format was far more common. That simply used an empty line as the separator. Byword has never gained support for the newer and now far more common format.

• Support using a different — presumably monospace — typeface for code blocks (and inline code). Syntax highlighting would be a nice bonus on top of that, but honestly is not necessary for the way I use Byword today.