Compare Byword vs. Notula

Create your next blog post, narrative, or academic paper seamlessly from any location by utilizing Markdown for easy text formatting, keyboard shortcuts, and real-time word counting features. With the convenience of iCloud and Dropbox, you can effortlessly craft documents in Byword on your Mac, then access and edit them on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, and the reverse holds true as well. This flexibility allows for document editing on any device you choose, whether at home or on the go. Byword boasts comprehensive support for Markdown, enabling you to preview your work within the app and export it to various formats like HTML, PDF, and rich text. You can even publish directly to platforms such as Medium, WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and Evernote with ease. While the current absence of rich text support is attributed to technical challenges and limited development capabilities, we are assessing the potential investment in rich text functionality for iOS. In the meantime, we highly advocate for using plain text and Markdown formats for your writing needs, as highlighted in a compelling article by Macworld that discusses the advantages of choosing plain text today. Embracing this approach not only enhances compatibility across devices but also simplifies the writing process.

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.