Features
Minimal Writer gives you the structure and control you need, then gets quietly out of the way.
Never lift your hands off the keyboard. Write in plain Markdown, or in a more visual view where the same shortcuts still work.
Markdown mode swaps the page for its own source, so you can edit the raw text directly and switch back with the caret still where you left it. In the visual view the same syntax works as you type: ## for a heading, - for a list, > for a quote. Headings, lists, checklists, tables, images and emphasis all survive the trip in both directions.
Write with the whole document lit, or narrow the page to one paragraph — or one sentence — at a time.
Three modes on one scale: Document keeps the whole page lit, Paragraph dims everything but the paragraph you are in, and Sentence narrows to the sentence under the caret. The last two hold the line you are writing in the middle of the screen, so your eyes stay still while the text moves. The mode belongs to the document — reopen a draft and it comes back the way you were writing it.
A journal is a year of dated entries in one document, with a calendar in place of an outline. Lock it with a passkey and nobody can read it but you — not on our server, not us.
Journals sit on a shelf of their own, one document per year. Every entry carries the day it was written as part of the block rather than as text you can mistype, and the calendar panel shows the whole year: click a day that has an entry to jump to it, or one that does not to start it. Locking is yours to turn on. Your browser makes the key and never sends it to us; you unlock with the passkey on your device — Touch ID, Face ID or Windows Hello — and a recovery code is shown once, for the day that device is gone. After that a journal is encrypted before it leaves your machine, so what our database holds is a blob, to our tools and to us. That cuts both ways: lose the passkey and the code and nobody can open it, us included. Markdown export takes the year with it, dates and all.
Your documents are saved to your browser's own storage first, then synced when there is a network. A plane, a tunnel or a dead router changes nothing.
Every change is written to this device first and pushed to the cloud second, so a lost connection is never a lost paragraph — the footer tells you which of the two holds your latest words, and the queue drains by itself when you are back. If the same document changed on another machine while you were away, both versions are kept rather than one quietly overwriting the other.
Your work downloads as Markdown (.md) or Rich Text (.rtf) on any plan.
Markdown export is never locked — not on a free plan, not on an expired one. Getting your words out is a promise, not a feature. Rich Text (.rtf) comes with every plan too, and Pro adds the two formats you hand to somebody else last: Word (.docx) and PDF. Import runs the same way round, reading .md, .txt, .rtf and .docx files back in.
An outline of the document by its headings. Drag a section to move it, click one to jump there.
The panel lists every heading in the document. Drag one and the whole section travels with it, sub-headings and all; click one and the page jumps there. For longer projects a chapter can be its own document nested inside a master, and the master still exports as a single file.
Not sure which version of a sentence is the right one? Keep both. A paragraph or a heading can hold several takes, and you move between them without losing the ones you set aside.
A take belongs to a single block — a paragraph or a heading — and is one line long, which is what makes two of them worth reading side by side. Switching takes changes what the document says without touching the ones underneath, and nothing is deleted until you say so. A Markdown export carries every take with it; the formats you hand to someone else take only the line left showing.
Snapshots are taken as you work. If a draft went somewhere you don't want, open an earlier one.
Snapshots are taken as you write, with no save button to remember. Every one from the last two days is kept, then one a day for 30 days. Restoring puts the older version back on the page and snapshots the current one first, so rolling back is itself undoable.