I’ll make a proper year-end blog post sometime soon. Writing about products or software or stuff in the real world isn’t really something I do often.
But as a longtime words guy, finding the right editor and device combo for my current work and project(s) is something of an ongoing lifelong battle. Great things (say, Daedalus for iOS) come and then go, or fall out of date, or get orphaned and I end up having to switch again.
What’s the best writer’s editor for Chrome OS? It’s WaveMaker.
I tried Scrivener for a while but it’s so damned heavy. Evernote and DevonThink are too “notepad” for me, not really writing tools. I’ve been using Ulysses but it comes with the drawback of requiring a Mac, which again, makes it really heavy.
I’ve picked up a couple Chromebooks over the years which seemed like ideal lightweight rapid-access writing tools, only to find that there was no real software to use with them. Everyone’s top suggestion? Google Docs. Or, setting up some unwieldy hack to try to use the Linux version of Scrivener under Chrome OS with a bunch of broken features as a result. Sorry, no.
Why isn’t WaveMaker in any of the “top editors for Chrome OS” lists that Google indexes? I have no idea. It’s every bit as fit for purpose as Scrivener or Ulysses, but wins in some spectacular ways:
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It’s incredibly lightweight.
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It’s fast as lightning.
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It can run on any platform in a browser window, and on Chrome OS can also thus be made to run as a “native” application.
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It saves everything in your local browser storage in open standards formats, with import, export, and backup capability.
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It’s very, very good looking and has a great UI.
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Since it’s all written in web standard tools, you can also customize your local code or styles to your heart’s content if you’re a hacker sort like me.
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It’s absolutely free to use and is actively maintained by one lone guy in the UK.
I can’t for the life of me figure out why nobody uses it and nobody talks about it. It’s a travesty. What’s even worse is that when I took a look on Patreon, he’s currently supported only to the tune of 30ish supporters and $80ish dollars a month. Which is a joke. Ulysses charges $40/year or $6/month for fewer features and requires a $2k Macbook to be useful. WaveMaker does more, more quickly, on $100 Chromebooks and the guy can’t even afford daily coffee with the income he’s generating for all his hard work.
So, if you’re in the market for a writing tool for serious writing, I declare the best combo right now to be Chrome OS + WaveMaker installed as a local app. The best, as in—on the market in the world, for any platform. And if you try it and like it, for God’s sake join Patreon and send this guy some money so that he keeps maintaining and updating it.