CudaText review by editorialdog (May 20, 2017)
I'm a screenwriter, essayist and poet and I've been looking for an editor that would allow me to write in all of these forms. I prefer markup languages over WYSIWYG simply because I don't want to be distracted what WYSISYG GUI editors offer. (The bloat and kitchen sink philosophy of MS Word makes gives me night-horrors. Not to mention, who hasn't fought tooth and knife with a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor because it sounded more like a threat than a promise? No, I don't want that word italicized you _useless waste of a handful of sand_--the emphasis stops **here**.) I've used LaTeX for years for prose but it is not ideal for screenwriting or poetry. Both are too fiddly if you're formatting while writing (and don't have an assistant to code your formatting for you later). Fountain is the best markup language screenwriting and works well for poetry and prose. Presently the Highland app is buggy and not ideal (also going up in price). For these reasons, I've been exploring different text editing solutions over the last few months. I waded into the Emacs and Spacemacs ecosystem because I was told there was a large community. There is. But they are also a huge distraction for a writer who just wants to write. The vanilla versions of those programmes are also pretty unusable. And kludgey. I suspect that part of the reason people don't shut up about their Emacs configurations is what economists call the _sunk cost fallacy_. "I've put years into my .emacs file and just another year or two and it'll be perfect!" From there, I found Sublime Text, which is pretty snappy but expensive. And the best plugin for Fountain is basically abandon-ware, glitchy and incomplete. Finally, I have found CudaText and I've been very impressed. It is simple and gets the job done. The developer is very responsive to issues and working hard to improve the programme. That alone is gold. So many app developers (Ulysses, iA Writer, Byword) say they'll keep something in mind for a future upgrade but then their upgrades are slow and for silly cosmetic things. The CudaText developer gets new versions out in short time cycles. (For example, the developer is working on Pandoc integration so you can convert your documents to and from different formats.) If you're looking for a modern text editor that offers distraction-free writing and you don't want to be distracted setting up the editor, this is one of the best editors I've come across. Give it another 15 minutes and it may well be the best. After a lot of comparison, _it's what I use_,. 'Nuff said.