The intentional minimalism of Byword’s interface is its main attraction, and this is paired with an equally minimal but well chosen set of accessory features. The only thing you see other than text on the screen is a small information bar at the bottom of the screen showing you what kind of document you are editing, a word count, and a character count.
In full screen mode, Byword truly is a minimalist app. I haven’t seen Byword on a retina display myself, but those who have say that it does look good. When I switched to full screen view, however, things just clicked into place and in my opinion looked quite sharp. When I started using Byword, I tried using it this way as well and it just didn’t feel right. On my 27 inch iMac, my usual mode of writing involved having TextWrangler and Safari open side by each. Where Byword really shines is in full screen mode. After a week or so of use I’m mostly managing to get used to it. Initially I found this a bit weird at first, because up to this point I was doing the majority of my text work in TextWrangler. Rather than highlighting Markdown to stand out from the rest of the text as a code editor would, Byword actually lowlights Markdown tags by making them only a few shades of grey different from the background. Byword renders both Gruber standard Markdown and Fletcher Penney’s MultiMarkdown in an interesting and appealing way. Unlike WriteRoom, however, Byword has been built very much with Markdown in mind. The biggest difference between Byword and WriteRoom is that Byword is much more locked down in terms of options - you get to pick: (a) your font, (b) light or dark colour scheme, and (c) one of three document widths - that’s pretty much it for options. Byword by Metaclassy is a full screen, distraction free text editor very much in the spirit of WriteRoom. Each one has its own features and shortcomings depending on what your particular usage of the application is. There is no shortage of text editors available for the Mac. Human readability and future-proofing are both good things. After my experiences with Word and LaTeX, I could see their point.
When I first transitioned from Windows (XP Pro 圆4 thank you very much) to Mac a couple of years ago, one of the first things I noticed was that there was a real movement singing the praises of plain text and Markdown. Eventually, I fell in love with LaTeX and the beautiful looking documents it produced, all without the horror of having your document repaginate itself and break an equation every time you changed a section header. Sometime in second year university though, around the time that I started writing real lab reports with somewhat complicated mathematical expressions, I finally got sick of the Equation Editor that came with Word and went off in search of a better way. The second thing to be installed was usually Microsoft Word.
When I was a Windows user, the first piece of software I would install after the quarterly nuke and pave of my system was WinAmp.