![]() It bears noting, however, that moving things to and from iCloud on the desktop is a needlessly fiddly process, requiring you to save a file locally before moving it to iCloud storage, and reopening being done via a rather shy and counter-intuitive little submenu hanging off File. Writer on iOS supports both iCloud and Dropbox simultaneously - that comes in pretty handy, especially considering that you can access the entirety of your Dropbox simply and without fuss. Overall, though, iA Writer doesn’t seem to be updated frequently and its feature set is perchance too minimalist - even though its desktop version got some love mid-September, the iOS version still doesn’t have the minimal (but very pleasing) visual hinting for Markdown syntax that makes it eminently useful on the desktop, and any of the others listed here has more features. I was a bit annoyed at the lack of updates of its iOS version for a while, but it’s since gone universal and now runs on the iPhone as well as the iPad. ![]() ![]() This one was a bit of a trendsetter for minimalism and is still quite popular for a number of reasons, among which its availability on the desktop as well. So all of the above have Dropbox support of some kind (which rules out fairly obvious contenders like, say, Pages for iOS) and a degree of Markdown support.Īnd yes, I happen to have vim installed on my iPad, and if it ever gets Dropbox support (keep an eye on this ticket) all of this will probably become redundant, but alas…Īs a side note, most of them also have TextExpander support (even though I’ve since switched to the native iOS abbreviations system), and most of them have some form of live word count. My reference output is fairly short bits of text (1000 or so words) that I then annotate with links and references in Markdown format and move to the Dropbox folder where my site resides, thereby publishing them. My main use for plain text editors is in writing blog posts and short stories, although I’ve been known to use them for drafting fairly extensive work documents. And, of course, this entire text was typed and repeatedly revised across them all, with the requisite round-trips between my MacBook, my iPad, and other devices. There is a seemingly endless variety of iPad editors out there (as this insanely detailed comparison table of iOS text editors readily attests) but I’ve been using four that I think are worth singling out and comparing - some for over a year now, but all of them have already found (and, in at least one case, lost) their place in my writing habits.Īll of these were used, at one point or another, to write complete posts. There seem to be a whole lot of people out there writing on an iPad, and nary a week goes by without someone gushing about some editor or other that they happen to use. Writing has a fine edge, regardless of whether you’re doing prose or code.Īnd people who write a lot (or, like me, who wish they had more time and opportunity to do so) tend to be constantly on the lookout for ways to sharpen that edge - hence the seemingly endless search for the perfect text editor, the perfect writing device, even the perfect physical location for doing so.įor coding, things are pretty straightforward - I spend a tremendous amount of time inside vim, fire up Xcode whenever there’s some hardcore stuff to be done, and hop into TextMate to deal with most stuff in between.īut for everything else - and everywhere else but at the office - things are different, and the iPad has changed that game in as yet unfathomable ways.
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