Jared Newman: This distraction-free editor is the best writing tool you aren’t using

Another vote for Typora from me. This sub-genre of “minimalist” text editors is tricky to get right – they all promise a “distraction free” writing environment, but what I need is a balance of features and simplicity.

Typora exports to HTML, PDF and docx, is styleable with CSS and renders all the markdown I throw at it beautifully, even YAML. The way it switches between raw markdown and styled text when I edit links, blockquotes etc. is elegant. I can understand why ‘purists’ prefer their editors to retain Markdown’s formatting characters, but Typora makes this unnecessary, which means you don’t need an HTML preview panel.

On the other hand, I don’t need or want inbuilt icloud or Dropbox sharing but, because it just generates text files, I can use it with any synching service.

It’s the best editor I’ve found for writing blog posts or any longform text that doesn’t require complex formatting.