Distraction-free minimalist text editor for Mac with great features for writers.
Clean Writer Pro is a powerful fullscreen-capable text editor that liberates your inspiration by providing just the essential features, when you need them. By removing clutter and hiding complex options from sight it eliminates distraction and boosts your creativity and inspiration. Designed for real writers and creative people who need a simple powerful tool that won’t overwhelm them with countless options. There is no individual font change, custom alignment or advanced formatting. Extra options are hidden from sight, leaving you alone with your words.
Based on the popular minimalist OSX editor Clean Writer, it adds extra stability, improved performance and cool new features at the perfect combination of minimalism, efficiency, flexibility and user-customizable settings.
Clean Writer Pro is not a swiss-knife, but a sharp single-purpose tool, small memory, quick to launch, easy to use, fast and effective. It is also powerful and flexible enough to help you in 90% of your writing needs.
OSX Lion only! - We got rid of the past and aim for the future. By removing Snow Leopard compatibility we achieved better performance and stability.
In addition to plain text editing, Clean Writer Pro allows reading and writing of several document formats, but take note that some formatting will be lost or ignored. Plain Text mode disables formatting and only saves plain text files. Rich Text mode brings you basic formatting and possibility to save your work to different formats/extensions: markdown(.md) plain text, RTF or HTML files and more.
All commands have clear shortcuts and menu items in the Edit menu(also accessible in fullscreen mode). Use the Preferences panel (click on cog icon, use the menu Clean Writer Pro->Preferences or the keyboard shortcut) to:
We switched the app to sandboxed model which might cause a crash after app updating. To fix it, you’ll need to remove the folder ~/Library/Containers/com.cognitivebits.cleanwriter
.
You can do it in Finder (Library is hidden by default), or by pasting this to your Terminal.app (then press Enter to run it):
rm -rf ~/Library/Containers/com.cognitivebits.cleanwriter
Default settings and preferences not enough? We have goodies in store for you: with just a bit of Terminal magic, you are ready cu further customize Clean Writer to your liking. All you need is to open up Terminal app and type a few lines:
If you are an advanced Mac user, know your way around the Terminal.app and you want to invoke Clean Writer from the command line, here’s a tip:
pico ~/.bash_profile
function cwp() { touch $@; open -a "/Applications/CleanWriterPro.app" $@; }
That’s it. Close the Terminal tab, open a new one. You can now edit a file in the current folder from within Terminal, by typing cwp my_file.txt
; if you only type cwp
there will be a warning but Clean Writer will still open up
set a different foreground or background color:
defaults write com.cognitivebits.cleanwriter CurrentTheme 5
(to enable custom theme mode) defaults write com.cognitivebits.cleanwriter ForegroundColor FF0000
(web-format hex string RRGGBB; FF0000 is red, FFFFFF is white, etc) defaults write com.cognitivebits.cleanwriter BackgroundColor DDDDDD
(web-format hex string RRGGBB; 00FF00 is green, 000000 is black, etc)defaults write com.cognitivebits.cleanwriter UnfocusedParagraphsFade 0.1
defaults read com.cognitivebits.cleanwriter
will list existing settings. Use defaults write
command to change those settings. For instance:
defaults write com.cognitivebits.cleanwriter FirstLineHeadingIndent 3
defaults write com.cognitivebits.cleanwriter CurrentTheme 1
defaults write com.cognitivebits.cleanwriter HideCounters 1
defaults write com.cognitivebits.cleanwriter HideHelpButton 1
defaults write com.cognitivebits.cleanwriter HideScrollbar 1
An advanced hack for which you’ll need the system’s Administrator account.