Nearly a week into making the switch to my new Macbook, I think I’ve found a decent word processor, one other than Microsoft Word. I’ve previously tried AbiWord and OpenOffice, each have their own characteristics to them that I liked, however the negatives to each were far greater. OpenOffice was pretty much a diaster, not user friendly at all and as much as I wanted to like AbiWord, the spacing of words on anything other than 100% was terrible. Most of the time when I write articles, I prefer to do so at 120-150%, just my preferance. Sure I could just increase the font size but that causes problems when I want to print, since 12pt looks just fine on printed paper.

On the suggestion of Randomn3ss commenter Joe, I downloaded and installed Bean. Bean is one of the first programs I saw on several sites listing open source software for Macs but I overlooked it, I’ve had success with OpenOffice on Windows and figured it would be very similar on Mac so that was my first choice. Upon first launching the processor, I knew that a coder didn’t write this program, it’s aesthetically beautiful to look at, well as nice as a word processor could be.

As a blogger, it has two of the most important things that I need and use,

  • Easily zoom in and out
  • Word / character counting

The zooming is done live via a left to right slide bar in the bottom left of the application, this is a slick idea, one I’ve never seen done before.

The word / character count is also live and in the middle bottom of the application, as you type, it updates. This is particulary handy for me because when an article that I’m writing starts to get close to the 1,000 word point, I consider splitting it up into two parts. For school students who need to meet a minimum word count, this feature alone is a time saver.

I’ve written the last few articles in Bean and now this one, I’m rather fond of it. Each time I use it there are a few more features and functions that show to be more useable. This definitely isn’t a piece of software that you need to read a book to use, finding answers to what you want to do is really intuitive.

The only down side to Bean and the two other word processors I’ve used is that they don’t do grammar checking, only spelling, which is built into the Mac anyway. If there was a grammar plugin for Bean, it would be everything I need from a word processor. I’m leaving AbiWord and OpenOffice installed for a few more days, just to make sure there isn’t anything from that that I may need from them, but Bean is the clearly the break away word processor from the pack.

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