From Microsoft Word to the popular Markdown editor to Google Docs for collaboration, we’ve been exposed to a plethora of writing tools, and in a few cases you can find dozens of articles about them. They’re great writing tools, and they’re good writing tools, and they don’t do anything out of the ordinary.
Most of these tools are foreign products, in fact, there are many domestic editor products. There are WPS, graphite documents, a lot of MD products from independent developers, and a lot of weird looking products related to the wechat public account platform. Just like the customization of Android system by domestic phone manufacturers, there are always some small features that make you interested.
Here’s a look at some of the more specific features, mostly writing-related, not including administration and publishing.
White noise
Some people like to listen to music while writing, while others like to listen to the sound of wind and rain. Between the lines (the web version) offers the ability to play white noise, while MarkEditor comes directly with a built-in music player that plays native audio files.
Reading time
Word count is almost a mandatory feature of text editors, some of which distinguish word count from word count (such as TextNut). Bear goes one step further and can estimate reading time. Ulysses is the king of this function, and the word count can be divided into characters, no Spaces, words, sentences, paragraphs and pages. The reading time can be divided into four types: slow, average, fast and read aloud.
Reading time is a nice little feature for people who care about reading time or who have a boss. Imagine your boss asks you to write a five-minute speech. How many words is that?
Focus mode
This is one of my personal favorites. It might be called “Zen mode” or “typewriter mode.” The main function is to make what you are currently writing stand out and stay in the center of the screen, and most writing tools now support this. Ulysses is also the best, highlighting options for sentence, line, and paragraph, and scrolling options for up, middle, down, and variable. Feature-rich and easy to set up. TextNut, by contrast, is a bit confusing.
Reorder content
When we write articles, we often encounter the need to adjust the sequence of paragraphs, generally can only choose to cut and paste to complete. While many writing tools offer an outline view, Yu Writer can reorder content by dragging it around like in Word.
There are also writing tools that input content in accordance with the block input, then can adjust the order at will, such as computer core editor, Meiwen, Press.
The first line indentation
When we were at school, we were required to write essays with two Spaces at the beginning of each paragraph, which somehow went out of fashion on electronic screens. If you like the first line indented, consider Using MarkEditor or Ulysses, and of course Word.
Insert the picture
When Markdown first became popular, if you had an editor that supported dragging and pasting images directly, it was a big break from other editors. However, today there are still some anti-human guys who do not support this way of inserting pictures, and MarkEditor support directly from mobile phone illustrations to computers, and the editor plug-in of wechat public platform mentioned later also supports this function.
Photo editors
The Markdown syntax itself supports resizing images, and some editors have graphical interfaces for this purpose. Most traditional non-Markdown editors also support resizing images, and not surprisingly, our image editing needs go beyond that.
The popular way to mix text and text is to center a single image and separate it from the text, and most editors do the same. Sometimes it’s inconvenient, forcing us to combine multiple images into one. Minority website editor on the support of up to 3 pictures of the merged picture function, computer core network editor is to provide a multi-picture rotation of the picture library function.
It is also a common requirement to annotate inserted pictures. Press, a small software made in China, supports the simplest image annotation function.
Image library
Wechat public account platform is indeed a very good platform, but there are also a lot of people criticized, such as the need to have pictures to publish. The current atmosphere is also like this, even if it is not wechat public platform, you are embarrassed to publish an article without pictures.
So where do I find pictures? Minority has a number of related websites and apps, and the writing tool (for mobile) has a built-in image center from which you can select and insert articles.
Editor of wechat public account platform
The editor of wechat public account platform itself has nothing to say, but it is difficult to use! But because of the advantages of its platform, it has many ideas. Since they are basically only applicable to the wechat public account platform, we put these enhancement plug-ins and third-party editors together here.
Enhancements such as new media and Yipan have almost no difference in functions. They usually add some popular formatting Settings, such as indenting at both ends and text spacing, as well as convenient functions of mobile phone uploading and generating TWO-DIMENSIONAL code. Yipan also has the function of inserting codes to take care of engineers.
There is a rich list of styles to the left of the article input field that you can click to effect to implement some of the more complex styles. Of course, some styles are too fancy, depending on the user.
They also integrate image hubs, of course, with emojis, GIFs, and copyrighted images.
Once you have an image, you can edit it. These plug-ins have complete image processing and design functions. One partner will open a new web page for editing, while new media directly opens the popup supported by Maker Post, but only supports the making of the picture. If you see two similar pictures on your wechat account, chances are they are using the same plugin.
Both Onemate and New Media support cropping, resizing, rounded corners, adding borders and shadows. This is a nice feature, and it would be nice to add a border or shadow to an image in a post, especially for screenshots of any kind (which I didn’t do). Also check out this article about adding shadows to images to make screenshots look better on Windows.
Here is to remind you that some mobile phone screenshots actually have rounded corners. After you paste it into the article, you will find that the four corners of the picture are small dots of black or white. At this time, setting rounded corners on the picture can solve the problem.
New media supports one click to add shadows and rounded corners to all images, which is great.
Third party editors, such as Xiumi and 135 editors, are equally functional but terrible, so interested readers can try them out on their own. The bad reason is that these tools can be more of a typography tool than a writing tool. Good use, they can make your public writing experience a lot better.
When it comes to public account writing, I have used Typora to deal with the public account writing and typesetting experience to share. In addition, MarkEditor itself supports the output as wechat official account format (the picture needs to be placed on the chart bed).
conclusion
Most of the features described above are small and piecemeal, and for a well-informed and demanding minority of readers, these features may be an important reason to put similar software ahead of others.
As an aside, do you think some of these features are beyond the bounds of a text editor? Here, we can generically divide software into two categories: specialized and fine, large and complete, foreign countries are specialized and fine, domestic is large and complete. We tend to prefer small, beautiful, simple and elegant software, but do you wish it had more features over time?
As more and more of your favorite apps start to cross functions with updates, are you “just better off” or do you get annoyed? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.
Read more:
- Want to try another writing tool? 11 good Markdown editors to recommend
- Markdown is a complete primer