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.... (excerpted).
6 Reader Comments
jobaron said:
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!
Gregory said:
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.
Tonio Loewald said:
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).
MiGrant said:
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….)
bim said:
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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Tim Crowder said:
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.