A text editor for creative writers

Prose could be viewed as something as simple as a plain text editor. If you want you could just use it to open up a plain text file and edit away. But it can do more. Much more.

Prose is for people who write. There are quite a few editors aimed at creative writing, with great organisatorial features, like outlines and corkboards. These project handling features does however come at the expense of feature bloat and messy interfaces. While they are great for larger writing projects, such as books or scientific papers, all the panes for excerpts, notes and file browsers make little sense when you want to write a short letter or a blog post. Most of us would then open up a conventional editor, usually aimed at programmers.

What if your text editor could adapt to the task at hand? What if it could be a regular document centred editor at one time and a project manager at others? Prose can do this.

Adaptive writing environment

While other editors need a full screen mode to hide their complexity, Prose looks clean even in normal mode. It never shows more information than needed. It can open and edit any plain text file and make it into a project with the click of a button. If needed it lets you add metadata, like a title, synopsis and a status in an unobtrusive manner. Prose accomplishes this with a unique one-window interface.

Structured writing

Prose is a plain text editor, who knows nothing of RTF. It works in the tradition of XHTML and LaTeX, by letting you structure your document with tags. The advantage if obvious – don’t worry about the formatting when you’re writing. It’s possibly even someone else’s job.

Syntax colouring

Prose uses a user definable tagging system, with syntax colouring – much like the one you’re used to see in programmers’ editors. This makes your tags easy to spot and edit.

Full screen mode

Because no writing app should ever be without one.

Outliner

If you decide to make a project you use the outliner to structure, view and rearrange your individual documents. There is no need for a separate document browser.