Word processing has become synonymous with Microsoft Word, not just on the PC, but due to cross-platform compatibility issues, on the Mac as well. To buy a copy of Office along with your Mac is something that even Apple professes with its Get a Mac ad campaign.
Of course, SA readers know better than to use Word (unless we’re forced to at work) and have settled for Apple’s iWork as the weapon of choice. However, there’s a lot more alternatives out there, some free, some cheap, some powerful and others simple. Here’s a roundup of good alternative word processors you can use on your Mac.
Bean: Simple free Word Processing
This was the first processor that came in my mind when I began writing this article. If you’re looking for a straightforward word processor for the Mac, Bean is as close as it gets.
The user interface is a standard word processor user interface we’ve come to know. There’s toolbar icons, zoom sliders at the bottom, and Rulers to guide you around. At a glance you also get Word Count and Character Count, which is something many people find missing in Apple’s TextEdit. Looking at the app you’re not visually wow’ed like if you see some of the newer modern Mac applications. The controls are standard Aqua, icons are picked out of a stock icon library, and preferences are placed according to what the developer and not the designer was thinking.
Bean can be used for most common word processing needs. It’s got rich text formatting, dropping in images, and the inspector allows you to set indents, paragraph spacing, and change a few other things. You can also use the standard OS X Font and Colour palettes to change those details of your document. Bean also has a full screen mode, and although it’s not nearly as elegant as Pages or WriteRoom, it’s very functional. You can customise the interface only a little bit, which I find stupid considering I hate the default blue background that comes along for the ride.
Bean can open up word documents, including Docx, and can even be made to save to those formats by default. It also saves in RTF, txt, and its own native Bean format. Performance wise Bean opens up in a flash. Maybe not as fast as TextEdit, but it’s a negligable amount considering there’s a whole lot more functionality in here.
As a free client, Bean can definitely supplement your need for a semi-advanced word processor. As the developers claim, it’s not meant to be an MS Word replacement, so if you need advanced functionality, keep looking.
Diamond: The next level of minimalism
If you thought TextEdit in its basic mode can be the simplest text editor available, you need to see Diamond. The document window is nothing but a rectangular shape drawn on your screen. Click inside, and start typing! There could never be a simpler word processor than Diamond. But, there’s more.
The thin grey strip on the top is a minimized window
Until you actually use Diamond, you won’t realise that Diamond is actually a rich text editor. For one, you get character counts and word count cleverly shown at the bottom of your window. If you want to change the look of your text, you can use the default OS X Font editor (Cmd+T) or and use the Color Picker (Cmd+Shift+C). You can even drag and drop images from Finder.
Diamond is not powerful and cannot be used to create documents for print however. The interface is guided by keeping everything down to the minimum. One of the neatest features, is if you click the top area, it will minimize the window into a thin strip. Click it again to show it. Great for when you’re researching something in Safari and want to get rid of the clutter. The preferences allow you to customize your window, including its background colour, transparency, and defaults for fonts.
One big flaw in the way it works, is even if you have a window open, clicking the dock icon springs open a new document. I’ve gone through the preferences, but couldn’t find anything to turn this bit off.
Diamond is a free application, and depending on what you’re looking for, it could be the perfect writer for you. Note that in its current form its a little buggy, so if you’re working on serious stuff, stay away from Diamond.
Mellel - Advanced Word Processing in a Crappy UI
This one’s a difficult app to review. For one, it’s an app stuck in time in terms of user interface. It would have for instance looked right at home next to iTunes 3.0. But we’re already getting past Leopard, so having brushed metal adorn every bit of UI is a little disturbing. But let’s put that aside for a bit and focus on what Mellel stands for.
I love how it mimicks the iTunes info; gives you an idea when this app was made
Mellel is very much appreciated by the technical and creative writing community. It’s got a lot of tools that streamline that kind of workflow. It’s got support for bibliographies, footnotes and endnotes, outlining, a very good styles manager (I was impressed!), auto table of contents. It’s all geared for someone consistently working on large projects, perhaps a massive work of non-fiction.
Apart from the turn off ‘look’ of the UI however, Mellel does come with a fairly functional user interface. It’s got the main window, and a toolbox much like Microsoft Word. These can be flipped open, closed, and even torn away to show multiple boxes. It’s not an easy UI to understand however. I had Mellel installed for the most time, yet I know so little about it.
One thing about Mellel that I liked, is that it’s rock solid stable. At no point did I see a spinning beachball, or did the application crash. A quick search reveals that most people think alike. It’s also fast when working with a huge document. On my iMac Core Duo, it zipped through a massive document without the delay you would associate with Word or Pages. Apart from this Mellel also sports two backup methods ‘auto-save’ and ‘auto-backup’ so your document is always saved.
When it comes to compatibility, Mellel has its own format, but can save in Word or RTF. It couldn’t open any of my RTFD or Word documents however. This is disappointing to know and shows that the software isn’t compatible with what’s out there.
From an average user’s point of view, I’d say Mellel is best avoided. However, if you’re looking to do a lot of specialised work, then Mellel might be something you could consider. At $50 a license, it doesn’t come cheap.
OpenOffice and NeoOffice: Powerful Word Processing
The open source community’s contribution to desktop word processing can be seen in OpenOffice.org. A SUN Microsystems venture, OpenOffice.org is a full fledged cross platform office suite for Linux, Windows and even the Mac. The newer 3.0 version is also native to the Mac.
However, we’re going to talk about NeoOffice instead. This is a project by two guys, who have made OpenOffice usable on the Mac. NeoOffice 3.0 features all that OpenOffice has, and a little more that we’re used to on the Mac. You get the iLife media browser, trackpad guestures support, and a whole lot more under the hood changes.
As a word processor, Neo Office is much like Word 2003. It’s straightforward, with a functional toolbar, and a whole array of tools for your word processing needs. From a performance point of view, NeoOffice is faster than OpenOffice.org as well as Microsoft Word. It’s also very stable.
If a free word processor is what you need, NeoOffice is definitely the best you can get.
WriteRoom: Designed for Full Screen
If distraction-free writing is your kind of thing, WriteRoom from Hog Bay Software is the way to go. Unlike the full screen view of other apps, WriteRoom is designed for distraction free writing. It does one thing, and does it well.
I didn’t know how to grab a screenshot of WriteRoom. There is no UI!
When Pages ‘09 sported the slick full screen view, many predicted the end of WriteRoom. At first glance, Pages looks like the better way to go. It’s got formatting and the full screen view. However, WriteRoom is faster (launch time wise), has less user interface clutter, and can be highly customised to your liking. There are many Pages users who still use WriteRoom to write documents. Read up on our WriteRoom review to see what this tool is capable of.
At $25, you might find it a little expensive. That’s why there’s a trial version to judge for yourself.
TextEdit: Power in simplicity
To ignore TextEdit as being a ‘basic text editor’ would be a crime of immense proportions! It is one application I cannot live without; it’s that basic, simple nature of this app that makes it so powerful, user friendly, and ultimately, useful.
It’s always there for you! If you have something in your head you want to put down into words, it takes less than a second to be up and running. If you want to save something from the web, simply select the text and drop it into TextEdit’s icon to create a new document. There’s no document style to choose, neither is there a welcome splash screen. Once you begin to hit those keys, all that matter is the words that show up on your screen. No amount of sophisticated document controls in Pages, Word, OpenOffice, or the many other word processors can compete with the sheer speed at which you can produce words in TextEdit. Add to that you get access to the built in spelling and grammar checker, a the built in dictionary, as well as automatically insert smart ‘curly’ quotes where needed.
Free and always at hand with Mac OS X, you can’t ignore TextEdit. Read the writeup on how to exploit TextEdit to the fullest.
It’s about how you work
At the end of the day, word processing is a subjective task. Some prefer to have all the tools at hand, while others just want to hit those keys as fast as they can. While I admit that the Mac word processing market is not as thriving as say the twitter clients, it’s still sufficient enough to do what you do best.
What’s your take on word processors? What do you use regularly? I hope I didn’t miss out on any.
