Compare 1Writer vs. Notula

1Writer seamlessly merges essential text editing capabilities with a comprehensive suite of advanced tools to meet all your writing needs. This app allows you to efficiently compose, research, edit, and disseminate your thoughts without distraction, providing a focused writing space. You can handle both plain text and Markdown files with ease, taking advantage of features such as inline Markdown previews, word counts, dark mode, TextExpander support, image insertion, and an additional keyboard row among others. As you write, you can view formatted results in real-time through the inline Markdown feature and enjoy a complete rich-text preview upon completion. You have the flexibility to select specific Dropbox or WebDAV folders for synchronization, or opt to sync all your files at once. You can work offline, with changes automatically syncing once you're back online. Furthermore, it integrates with iCloud Drive, allowing you to start a document on your Mac and continue working on it in 1Writer, or vice versa, ensuring a seamless writing experience. Additionally, 1Writer allows you to send text directly from Safari or other applications using the Share extension or its unique URL scheme, enhancing its versatility and usability.

Notula is a complimentary WYSIWYG Markdown editor designed for documentation as code, seamlessly integrating with your existing git repository. It presents the repository as a structured tree of documents, allowing users to edit without any visible syntax—no hashes, asterisks, or table pipes distracting them, even on the line where the cursor is located. Beyond basic editing, it introduces a review feature that traditional code editors lack, enabling users to comment on text passages, reply to comments, mention collaborators, suggest modifications, and mark discussions as resolved, with each mention generating a notification that appears in an inbox. In this system, threads are maintained alongside the documents as plain files, ensuring that nothing is directly altered within the Markdown itself, which preserves the integrity of minor edits, such as a single-word change, as simple diffs. Tables can be manipulated directly as tables, while Mermaid diagrams are rendered as visual representations. The application utilizes the existing git on the user's machine, maintaining a non-intrusive approach by never rewriting history, staging the entire worktree, or changing branches. It is entirely free, requires no user account, and operates independently of any server, supporting both macOS and Windows, though a version for Linux is still in development. While the source code remains proprietary and the builds are not yet code-signed, users should be prepared for an additional step during the initial launch to ensure a smooth experience.