For reasons unknown, I took about a year off from using iA Writer and recently rediscovered it.

They’ve made a lot of improvements. For example, you can import text into your document, and iA Writer will track that as imported text. This works well if you use a large language model (LLM) to help with your writing.

The ability to highlight structure and grammar is better than ever, and the library features are much improved. Historically, I felt that was the weakest point of this application. Another feature that caught me flat-footed was inter-document navigation. Just surround the document name with two square brackets and command-click to jump between them. Everything links these days.

I’ve always felt the iA Writer team has respected the application’s primary purpose: to give you a focused writing environment. However, the evolution of the application, with a few additional features, dramatically improves its utility without losing sight of that.