Three days into using my new Macbook and one thing not built in to my liking is a word processor. TextEdit is nice, but just seems lacking and not robust enough, not that I’m a super user of word processing, but it just felt lacking. Microsoft Office is an option, but I didn’t want to pig up the hard drive space with bloated software, even though Word is what I am very used to on Windows based systems.

OpenOffice.org is really interesting, I’ve used it on Ubuntu and a few times on Windows, it is a really polished system, but for Mac they only really offer the Alpha software called Aqua, which comes with a nice big warning message

Even with that big warning, I downloaded and installed the program last night and wrote Dig a big hole for a little rock article, works really well even if it is in alpha. I don’t really have any complaints about it, but it just didn’t feel like it was giving me enough.

Today, as I sit here using the WiFi at a local Panera Bread, I installed the open source word processor AbiWord. It is super clean and aesthetically resembles Word a lot. Writing this article is my first time using it, but there are some minor issues that I’m not fond of. Mainly, the spacing. Viewing the page at 100% in 12pt Times New Roman font on this monitor, running at 1280×800 is a bit small. Zooming to page width or 200% (no 150%) is much easier on the eyes, however the spacing is way off for the letters. By this I mean the space between letters and words is off. See the screen capture below.

Outside of that, I really like the program. Common things I use like word count are readily available, however other things like spell check use different shortcut keys. In most programs, F7 will do spell checking, for Mac, FN + F7 usually does it. For AbiWord, Command + Shift + : does it. Not a bad thing, just different. It will take a bit more writing to choose, I may install MS Word just to see what it’s like in OSX, but open source stuff tends to be a bit smaller and faster.

Anyone have suggestions on any other word processors I should be looking into?�