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Can You Stand Yet Another Free Mac Word Processor?
Word processors are like pantyhose. Everyone has a favorite brand. Bad analogy? Even men have a favorite brand of pantyhose, and probably a favorite word processor.
From Microsoft’s gargantuan Word monstrosity, to Apple’s anemic but well-priced TextEdit, there’s a word processor out there with your name on it. Provided your name is Bean.
Word processing is one of what used to be called killer apps for personal computer users. Then came email and web browsers, and suddenly every Mac came with a bare bones word processor. That’s what TextEdit in OS X is—basic.
Bean is different. It’s focused bare bones. Yes. Bean. You thought I was kidding about the name Bean?
I have a toddler with peanut butter covered hands all over my Mac’s keyboard, so do you think I’m a kidder? I hope it’s peanut butter. It doesn’t smell like peanut butter. In fact… I’ll be back.
Word processors have style, character, flavor and purpose. Bean is no different, but different. Bean is lean, uncluttered (some would call that a total lack of redeeming features; I call it focus).
Bean is also fast and very easy to use. If you bought Microsoft Word and tend to get lost trying to figure out how to format a document, then try Bean.
How can it hurt? It can’t. Bean is so lean it doesn’t even come with a price tag. It’s free.
I like a number of the basic features in Bean. There’s a live word count. As you type, the number of words changes while you watch. Even Word doesn’t do that. The Get Info panel shows even more statistics.
Do you like sliders? No, not the greasy spoon sliding mini-cheeseburgers from White Castle, but sliders on Mac software? Bean has sliders. That alone makes it better than Word which doesn’t have sliders. The Bean sliders let you change various settings.
Bean also does autosaving, comes with a page layout mode, and an alternate colors mode for those of you who learned your word processing back in the early Precambrian Word days. White text on blue background.
This is a word processor that the software developer calls lean, some would call bare bones, others would say, “hey, this works just fine for me; better than TextEdit, less filling than Word, and it tastes great.”
By the way, it wasn’t peanut butter. It started out as peanut butter, but it ended as what looked like peanut butter but definitely is not peanut butter any more. The fragrance should have been my first clue.
As a point of clarification, Bean can also be called a Rich Text Editor, if anything, to avoid any association with Microsoft’s Word, which is commonly considered the Word processor of choice among those who haven’t tried Bean.
Bean reads Rich Text format documents, exported by nearly any other word processor. It reads and writes .txt files, .webarchive format, .html files, and the terrifically under appreciated .bean format. Word can’t do that.
If reading, writing, importing and exporting various word processor file formats is what you yearn to do on Saturday evenings, then Bean will present a challenge. It reads Word documents in .doc format, .docx format. the .odt Open Document format, and the old 2003 Word XML format, .xml.
Unfortunately, the fun stops at just writing, and ends with other features you may find useful. There’s no footnotes, no columns, no pre-defined text styles.
Bean doesn’t do everything but it runs on Tiger and Leopard, and it runs fast on both those ancient and rapidly aging PowerPC Macs, as well as the svelt, fast, and lusty Intel inside Macs.
Did I mention that Bean is free?
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Excellent word processor. Exactly what I have been looking for. Every since I changed over to Mac from window I have been looking for a good writing program. I used Roughdraft on windows but had been unable to find anything like it until now. As soon as I opened it up and wrote a few pages I knew this was it. Love your program.
I showed Bean to a PC user, who thought that Word is the ultimate in WPs… I know; it was cruel of me, but just to see how his eyes opened wide and how he sighed with envy, was worth it!
Ah, WriteNow, the best, and fastest word processor I’ve ever seen. It started as a candidate for the first MacWrite, was taken by Steve Jobs when he was kicked out of Apple and was the first word processor for NeXT, then sold to T/Maker, who unfortunately sold it to WordStar which was then bought by SoftKey, which let it wither away untended and undefeated. It’s last update was in 1994, in the days of System 7, and yet it still runs beautifully on System 9. It remains my wife’s primary word processor (today,she just printed newly revised master pages for the newest printing of her book that she wrote in WriteNow in 1988!) and is still by far my personal favorite. In addition to the powerhouses (Word, Nisus, and WordPerfect) I’ve tried Mellon and Marinor Write and Nisus Express, among others, but none of them holds a candle to WriteNow. Would that someone would buy the rights and reprogram it for OS X. Oh, well, it works in Classic, too. Bean will have to be really, really good, to compare with WriteNow’s transparency and true ease of use.
In his story of how Bean came to be he mentions following guidelines that in turn were inspired by WriteNow which some—he says—have called the greatest program ever written.
WriteNow is my favorite word-processor of all time. It was written in 100% 680x0 assembler (unfortunately) and by version 4 had a lot of the things he unfortunately omits from Bean, notably hierarchical styles. If you’ve never used them then, sadly, you’ve not really used a word-processor (in my opinio).
Actually Word *does* have live wordcount, in the status bar at the bottom of the window. (I think it’s an optional setting, so you may just have it hidden—which leads us into a discussion of Word’s feature bloat and opacity….)
I actually like Bean a lot, but it suffers from the same problem that nearly all such editors suffer from: lack of track changes. Man, if there’s one thing that keeps me enslaved to Word it’s that I can trade documents back and forth with others. Sure, I could use Pages, but only if they have a copy. Sigh.
That, and, really, as I’ve had to learn LaTeX, I’ve gotten into using TeXShop, and coming from html markup, it wasn’t that hard. And my god, that’s some lovely output.
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