Matthew Lang

A focused Markdown writing app (Mac, iOS, Android, Windows) built around removing distraction and formatting decisions while you draft.

Core modes

• Focus Mode — dims everything except the current sentence (or paragraph, configurable). Toggle: Cmd+Shift+F.
• Syntax Control — highlights parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions) in different colors, useful for spotting filler words and overused adverbs. Toggle: Cmd+Shift+A (then choose which category to highlight).
• Preview — renders the Markdown as formatted output without leaving the app: Cmd+P.
• Night/Day themes — auto-switches with system appearance by default.

Markdown support

Standard Markdown, plus:

• Tables — pipe syntax, rendered live.
• Footnotes — [^1] reference, [^1]: note text definition.
• Content Blocks — drag in an image, PDF, or other file and it embeds as a block rather than a raw path; code blocks get syntax highlighting inline.
• Front matter — YAML between --- fences at the top of a document, used by templates and preserved on export.

Library

iA Writer’s file browser (Cmd+1) rather than a proprietary database — it’s just a folder of plain .md files and attachments, so it works cleanly with iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or a local folder synced by anything else (including git, if you want version history). Nothing is locked into a format only iA Writer can read.

Templates

A template is a .md file with YAML front matter defining placeholders, used for recurring document shapes (meeting notes, blog post drafts, etc.):

---
title: "<title>"
date: "<date>"
---

# <title>

## Agenda

## Notes

Tab through placeholders when creating a new document from the template, similar to a snippet expansion.

Export

Cmd+Shift+E (or File → Export) to PDF, Word (.docx), HTML, ePub, or plain Markdown. Export styles are themeable — control heading fonts, margins, and print layout without touching the source document.

Useful shortcuts

Word count & reading time

Status bar (bottom) shows live word/character count and estimated reading time; select text to see counts for just the selection instead of the whole document.