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Bean: Open Source & Lightweight OSX Word Processor

bean-osx.com — Bean is lean, fast, and uncluttered. If you get depressed at the thought of firing up MS Word or OpenOffice, try Bean. If you use Text Edit but have to jump through hoops just to get a word count or change the margins, try Bean. If you desire a simple, low-pressure writing environment, try Bean.

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RiCO.M 1 year 54 days ago, made popular 1 year 53 days ago

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Baconn, on 10/11/2007, -12/+1810.4 only.
- strikezero, on 10/11/2007, -36/+2Where Open Office Mac when you need it?
- Bartboy919, on 10/11/2007, -9/+41Open Office is great, but X11 is lame. NeoOffice is where its at.
  
  http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php
- Scyth3, on 10/11/2007, -9/+43If I hear "try bean" one more time...
- SocialPoison, on 11/14/2007, -5/+74Try bean
- allancorbett, on 10/11/2007, -1/+23I quite like using Pages for most things but every once in a while I crack out Office and painstakingly use it... Admittedly I only really use Word and Powerpoint so iWork is fine for me.
- weneedsound, on 10/11/2007, -0/+10I've tried bean, office and NeoOffice. For word processing I now use Pages. Once you get used to the text-style system.. it becomes a really slick way to author documents. I wish a 3rd party company would come out with a 1001 Pages template cd though.
- dbr_onix, on 10/11/2007, -0/+8"Open Office is great, but X11 is lame. NeoOffice is where its at."
  On a G5 iMac, NeoOffice takes at least 3 minutes to open (I've not timed it, but it takes far far to long to start, considering what it's for - Even opening a 20MB Final Cut project file is faster than NeoOffice displaying a blank document..) - Considering most people don't use 90% of the stuff in NeoOffice (Stuff like the Macros, advanced layout stuff etc etc), Bean does pretty much everything I'd ever need it too, and loads within a second.
- dbr_onix, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5Does anyone know of a similar "lightweight" application, but for creating spreadsheets?
  I don't like web applications for such tasks, and I don't want to download the ~100MB OpenOffice just for the Calc application - a "Bean-sized" OO-Calc/MS-Excel-like application would be great.
  
  I can't understand why a spreadsheet application should be large - Since it's basically a grid (few kb of code), the abilty to use formula like =sum(a1:a5) (A few more kb of code), display graphs of the values (a few more kb, and possible some small graphic files, another 10kb or so), and some UI elements (buttons and such, no more than 200kb should be necessary with vector images and such)
  That comes to.. ~250KB, an installer, help files and misc' graphics should bring it to under 1MB..
- Robotsu, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4This is great. It's exactly what I was looking for. My sister just got a MacBook for college and she needs something for word processing. We don't want to spend the price on MS Office; OpenOffice, while nice, really sucks to have to be running X11 and is fairly clunky. Something lightweight right in the middle of a text editor and Open Office was the ideal solution, and this seems to be it.
- canon66, on 10/11/2007, -0/+11"On a G5 iMac, NeoOffice takes at least 3 minutes to open"
  
  There's something seriously wrong with your system, on my mother's G4 mini it takes about 35-40 seconds. On my MacBook it's about 15 seconds from launch to a blank document. Yeah, 15 seconds is damn long to wait but it's free and once it's open it's reasonably quick, and how many times a day do you quit and relaunch it? If you really want something to complain about, it's the keyboard maneuvering, the normal functions of the command and option with the arrow keys don't work as they do in most Mac applications which is jarring when you're moving back and forth between apps.
  
  Someone else said it but I'll repeat, Abiword is also nice if you just need a quick word processor.
  
  And back on topic, Bean looks rather nifty, I'll have to give it a shot.
- ricksite, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5@dbr_onix I agree. I would love to see a fast, clean, lightweight spreadsheet. The Omni Group (OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, etc...) should make one. Their software is a pleasure to use.
- hackmyballs, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4Looks like a really really great idea to me.
  Remember the Mozilla Suite turned into Firefox.
  
  Home users need a lightweight but complete, reliable and beautiful word processor.
  Not a full blown office suite.
  
  Well, unless Apple gives Pages for free, then everybody would be dead.
- Nahor, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4@dbr_onix
  
  Tables - it's not free, but it's exactly what you are asking for. I use it all the time, and I dig it. Well worth the small fee, and integrates enough with excel to do most stuff (anything I need to do anyway):
  
  http://www.x-tables.eu/more/overview.html
- ricksite, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Tables looks pretty cool. It opened almost instantly.
- regeya, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4dbr_onix:
  
  I know it's lame, but try changing your NeoOffice memory settings. I'm not sitting in front of an OS X machine right now (I just use OS X at work, sorry) but in OpenOffice 2.x it's under the Tools -> Options... menu. In the Options dialog box the setting you want is under OpenOffice.org (or maybe NeoOffice? I don't remember) -> Memory. Change Undo -> Number of steps to something more like 10 or 15, graphics cache to something like 16 MB, 4 MB for Memory fo Object, Remove from memory after 5 minutes, and the cache for inserted objects down to 10.
  
  If you've got a G5, I'm betting you have Classic mode installed. If it's running, that'll slow things down significantly; Classic is a MAJOR CPU hog, and in my personal experience RARELY "goes to sleep" as it should. If you don't need it, turn it off before starting NeoOffice.
- gmprunner, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1@weneedsound
  
  " I wish a 3rd party company would come out with a 1001 Pages template cd though"
  
  Try this, these guys have some templates (not nearly 1001, but better than nothing): http://www.jumsoft.com/pages/
- cleverboy, on 10/11/2007, -4/+1@Baconn
  No *****, right! WTF! Why on God's green Earth does this need to REQUIRE Tiger. It's like you're there using Windows 98, and someone comes out with a clean basic notepad software, and it requires Vista. W... T... F. I've been running into this a lot, and its pissing me off.
  
  I have a 400 mHz PPC G4, that I plan on upgrading maybe by the end of the year... but a new MACHINE, I'm not going to upgrade from Panther to Tiger, because its too damn slow to keep up with all the hoopla and I don't have enough extra HD space for all the Spotlight indexing. Why are the Mac software makers punishing Panther users. I mean, I know Jaguar was crap. But, Panther? Where's the love??? I guess I'll have to stay with TexEdit Pro, eh?
- bpapa, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3quick! Let's all bitch about this FREE software!
- cleverboy, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1If all "free" software required version 1.02 of your OS and not 1.01... well, yeah... let's bitch. At least give me an real answer. OS X Panther was released Fall 2003. It's not even 4 years later, and people (a good number) are writing Mac software that for little reason requires a $100+ system upgrade. Not really "free" for me then, is it?
  
  I just need to know what's up with that? My machine played Quicktime movies just fine before iTunes/Quicktime got updated to play 640x480 videos. Now, it can't even play 320x240 videos without choking. Apple regularly upgrades Quicktime, making my $30 pro purchase wortheless. I don't think I'm paranoid in noticing that MacOS users regularly get squeezed for not paying for upgrades constantly.
  
  It's not too cool.
pevensen, on 10/11/2007, -18/+710.4 ONLY!?!?! I was hoping to run it on my old PowerBook in 10.3.9. Bummer
- dvflameartist, on 10/11/2007, -3/+15I'd say its time for an upgrade :-)
- theonlyvlad, on 10/11/2007, -18/+9Upgrade? For a freeware word processor? You're kidding right? Is this the kind of treatment that mac users are accustomed to? Being frivolously locked out of application support of recent but not brand new OS revision?
  
  I'm not a mac developer. Can someone tell me what technical features in 10.4 this program uses that are not avaliable in the previous versions?
- djSyndrome, on 10/11/2007, -6/+13"I'd say its time for an upgrade :-)"
  
  Or, they could wait a few months for 10.5 and get that upgrade instead. Not everyone jumps through Steve's $129 hoop every time it's thrown their way.
- kethraal, on 10/11/2007, -0/+9"Can someone tell me what technical features in 10.4 this program uses that are not avaliable in the previous versions?"
  
  Looking at the screenshots, the first thing I notice is that it seems to use the unified layout -- which is 10.4 only.
  
  My other guess is that it probably also uses spinners, and other widgets that are 10.4 only. 10.4 added a lot of small, useful widgets to the UI toolbox -- it's quite possible that those are the only things that are dependent on Tiger. I know that Lostify used to be 10.4 only until a single progress wheel was changed -- so just because it's Tiger-only doesn't mean that it couldn't be made compatible with Panther.
  
  That said, writing software that requires a three-year-old OS isn't exactly the worst thing a dev can do.....
- mozzep, on 10/11/2007, -0/+10The programmers of Bean can get away with 10.4 only because, quite frankly, it's not a very important program. Not only are there many other applications that purport to do the same thing, but those are more prominent as well. If this program was both the only one that did this and was prominent, then it wouldn't be acceptable.
- ninetimes, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2"Can someone tell me what technical features in 10.4 this program uses that are not avaliable in the previous versions?"
  
  I'm not sure since I can't remember what was in 10.3, but this application seems to rely almost entirely on stuff that's built into the OS. Run TextEdit from 10.4 and Bean side-by-side and you'll see that they have almost all the same features. That's because the features are coming from the OS and not the application.
  
  I don't remember what was new to TextEdit in 10.4. Spell-check? Word compatibility? The dictionary? Figure that out and you'll have at least part of your answer.
- dpdesign, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1@theonlyvlad:
  
  In addition to what others have said about various UI elements and widgets, Apple also extends their Cocoa API with each successive release of the OS. For instance, one of the applications I developed used NSArray's -objectsAtIndexes: method, which I did not realize until running the program on a 10.3 machine was 10.4 only.
  
  See:
  - http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSArray_Class/Reference/Reference.html#//apple_ref/occ/instm/NSArray/objectsAtIndexes:
  
  Since Bean is a Cocoa application, I would not be surprised at all if the developers made full utilization of a handy-dandy Cocoa API feature that became available in 10.4.
- dpdesign, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2@ myself:
  
  Poking around, they used Accessibility stuff all over the interface, which is 10.4 only.
- LeVito82, on 10/11/2007, -1/+0Try iText Express:
  http://members.aol.com/iText/iTextExpress/TryiTxtExp.html
  Beware - ugly website!
  
  I don't know if the recent version 2.5 runs on 10.3.9 too. The website is Japanese only.
  http://homepage1.nifty.com/lightway/
  
  It's fast and freeware. Something like an extended TextEdit. I like it a lot!
- stmiller, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4It's open source. You could grab the source, open in Xcode and compile a 10.3 version.
chrisgeleven, on 10/11/2007, -0/+20Only Word 97 support? No support for newer Word formats or even the OpenOffice formats?

Something to watch, but it doesn't seem functional enough to use as an everyday word processor, especially if you receive files in lots of formats.
- zeejay, on 10/11/2007, -1/+17Maybe, but for those of us who are actually *doing the writing*, and usually start with a blank page, a light and fast word processor is a godsend, especially with the slow, buggy, and horribly designed piece of ***** that is MS Word on the Mac.
  
  Also, for those of us whose work practically always ends up in InDesign or HTML (and there's a lot of us), 95% of Word's features are pointless bloat. Word count, spell check, basic formatting, and save to RTF, and my needs are covered.
  
  Obviously, this product isn't for everyone. But there's a place for it.
- GMorgan, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7The earlier word formats aren't necessarily important though. What it needs is to focus on ODF and OXML. Not that right now these are the important standards but by the time Bean gets to a useful stage these will be the prevalent standards. Other than that the OSS community needs to look at generic tools (meaning a library) that can convert all the binary junk MSO standards into OXML or ODF. Then it would be rather simple to support inporting of old documents.
- rabidstrike, on 10/11/2007, -6/+3Yeah.. No ODF = lame+bury
- wastern, on 10/11/2007, -3/+3it supports the new Word 2003 xml format
- blackjack75, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2To me it's perfect for most of my uses. The only thing I didn't like in TextEdit is that you couldn't see the aspect of the final page in real time very clearly. This does it. Basic footer and headers wouldn't hurt I guess but I am not sure RTF supports this and you'd have to go for either another proprietary format or OpenDocument (not that easy to implement if people expect to exchange files in both directions).
leontes, on 10/11/2007, -6/+8This is just worth one damn bean.

Next thing you know you'll be able to use this to march the word "ender" around your screen.
skaface69, on 10/11/2007, -13/+31"If you desire a simple, low-pressure writing environment, try Bean."

Because using ms word or open office is very stressful
- ricksite, on 10/11/2007, -6/+26I can't speak for Bean but I know I am not the only one that gets annoyed when Word tries to take over my document (e.g. "Are you creating a list?").
- VeritasAequitas, on 10/11/2007, -2/+6You obviously haven't worked in tech support, or if you have you're lucky to have not run into users that don't even know how to spell check. I have worked in tech support for years now, mostly for school dist. and believe me this app looks promising, I'm looking into using it for our younger students for the simple fact that M$ Word is kind of overwhelming for them and allows WAY to many options that they don't need. Some people e.g. Digg users look at apps for their many abilities, other people such as young students or teachers close to retirement that don't know much about computers may look at this as an app that and feel that it is simple enough for them to use, and not overwhelming.
Rubuntu, on 10/28/2007, -5/+15The audacity of them to use Open Source and the community and then release a product which does not support a file format advocated by the community "Opendocument Format"
- hungarianhc, on 10/11/2007, -2/+12This is the first comment I agree 100% with! I'd love to support this project, but why doesn't the OPEN SOURCE project support the OPEN FILE FORMAT? I'd prefer to not have a bunch of files saved as *.bean...
- ninetimes, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3@hungarianhc:
  It does allow you to save as RTF, TXT, HTML, ".bean" files look like they're pretty much RTF files, but you can call them .bean if you want to differentiate them. So, it's really not that weird.
  
  Anyway, it's just a simple little word-processor, which is enough for things like writing a little letter or something. Not a lot of features, but not a lot of bloat, either. Just a guess, but they probably don't support lots of formats because:
  A) it would take work, and they don't seem to be a very big project
  -and-
  B) the word processor they're making wouldn't support many of those file-formats' features anyhow.
  
  AFAICT, it looks like it's mostly using the same capabilities as Apple's built-in TextEdit, but with a different UI and a couple extra features added on. But hey, it's released under GPL and it's a start. People can add features from there and maybe make something more feature-rich.
- ilgaz, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1I wonder if Openoffice folks made their format easily adapted for other platform projects.
Errik, on 10/11/2007, -10/+5Google Docs anyone?
- dbr_onix, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4A webpage is not a desktop application, no matter how much fancy JavaScript you put in it - Yes, Google Docs and such have their uses, but it's not a replacement for a decent local word processing application
- ricksite, on 10/11/2007, -2/+2errik is not claiming Googles Docs is a "desktop application". From the description, "If you desire a simple, low-pressure writing environment, try Bean." I think Google Docs could be described as "a simple, low-pressure writing environment". I don't think they are apples and orangles. Bean and Google Docs are two different kinds of apples.
peagle, on 10/11/2007, -8/+5What will it have instead of Clippy? Beany? "It looks like you're making a burrito..."
Rethcir, on 10/11/2007, -2/+15I'd rather have Ender.
taintedzodiac, on 10/11/2007, -7/+3If you enjoy sleeping on the couch, try beans!

Oh, wait. Wrong bean. Sorry!
- se1zure, on 10/11/2007, -6/+1taintedzodiac said: "If you enjoy sleeping on the couch, try beans!
  
  Oh, wait. Wrong bean. Sorry!"
  
  ...
mshanly, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3Actually. Think about it this way, Bean has a lot of potential since it is open source. A good developer could come along and make it feature full and pretty, basically a Microsoft Word clone, but actually looking nice. Open Office isn't as good as everyone says it is, the graphics are very out of date and it doesn't look very appealing really. Sure it has all the functionality but it isn't perfect, so, combine the functionality of Open Office, with good Aqua style graphics and Beans source code and you could just have the best damn OSX Word Processor on the market, for free! :)
- deathtoartists, on 10/11/2007, -2/+4have you tried neo office? its a native aqua port of open office, it works and looks great.
- hypercrypt, on 10/11/2007, -3/+2I have a 2GHz CD MacBook with 2GB of RAM, and NeoOffice is SLOW! I used it for a while, but it was just too slow to use for any amount of time. OpenOffice uses X11, so that is not really usable... Pages is very nice, though at a cost. Word is PPC, thus that can't be used on the Intel processors...
  
  Pages wins every time.
- ricksite, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3"Word is PPC, thus that can't be used on the Intel processors"
  
  Nonsense! PPC Word works fine on Intel Macs. It is a little slower but it is faster than NeoOffice on my MacBook.
- cthcth, on 10/11/2007, -1/+0I'm surprised nobody has mentioned TextWrangler as a possible word processor on os x
  
  http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/
brightscreamer, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1Can someone explain to me why they use an older version of OSX considering the updates are free? I see this happen quite often and I'm not sure why.
- enicholas, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4If you're referring to the folks complaining that it requires 10.4, they are fully justified. Upgrading from 10.3 to 10.4 costs money (typically $129). Only the micro version number (10.4.xx) is upgradable for free.
  
  10.4 is certainly a major upgrade, but I can't imagine why a word processor would require it. It's analogous to a Notepad clone that requires Windows Vista... not to say that Vista isn't a major upgrade from XP, but what Vista-specific feature would a notepad app actually care about? DirectX 10?
- krewenki, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Only minor revision upgrades are free. That means it's free to go from 10.3.1 to 10.3.9. However, you have to purchase the upgrade from 10.3.x to 10.4.x. You'll understand in a few months when Leopard rolls.
mbthompson, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1If you are trying to type a part, try bean, if you are trying to pipe a fart, try beans.
deathtoartists, on 10/11/2007, -2/+4no .odt support!
XiozTzu, on 10/11/2007, -11/+6Try Bean, Apply directly to the forehead.
Try Bean, Apply directly to the forehead.
Try Bean, Apply directly to the forehead.
Amoeba16, on 10/11/2007, -11/+6Intel only, Tiger only, no compelling features beyond word count???

It must suck to suck.
- skellener, on 10/11/2007, -2/+6Who said Intel only? It's a Universal app.
zackz, on 10/11/2007, -0/+10Jokes aside, I think this is a nice product, light weight and fast. Dugg
jpt62089, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4Cool beans!
mad0214, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2tried bean last night and liked it. one thing i like that google docs does'nt have is page breaks. I've tried Mori, Yojimbo, Scrivener, Journler, JournalX and a few others for basic writing. Bean is minimalistic, but it works for me.
dinergy, on 10/11/2007, -2/+2use vi.
- dbr_onix, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1vi and Bean are intended for two totally different tasks - vim doesn't have any ("easy") support for formating and layout, no direct support for printing, and lots of other things a GUI word processor does far easier than in vi..
  That said, I've just written a CV in TextMate, which has no formatting options - But, I did use Bean to apply formating, check it fitted on a single A4 page, and create a .rtf file to email. Bean is perfect for such things, software like NeoOffice and Word have a lot of features, and are both extremely slow (particularly when starting up), for quickly copying text into, changing font face/sizes and such, it does what it should without lots of unnecessary menus everywhere
mozzep, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1nice find
thopunk, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1i like how fast it starts up... especially compared to Neo Office! but it doesnt look like it supports images!
- crazybrit, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1It has an image right in the screenshot, you fool!
llbbl, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2wait so people who use this program are beaners?
Lassan, on 10/11/2007, -6/+2thank you but I'm fine with XP and Word 2007. It is oh-so-awesome!

no kidding. I love it.
DaleoftheUK, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1If your hungry, try bean.

Hmm I might actually "try bean".
Sethwm2, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1 This looks like an app Apple would make... I guess because it is fully Cocoa. This does look like it is more lightweight that Open Office with it's dumb ass requirements for X11 and Neo Office. Most likely I would use this to quickly edit something on but definitely not write a whole report on. It seems to be lacking is some areas. Maybe use it as oppose to the Apple text editor? Any of these are better than paying for Micro$oft's stuff. Although I do have to say Microsoft does a pretty damn good job with office for the Mac
gafasiesornivek, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1If your options are limited and you like the thought of Steve Jobs in briefs, try Bean.
basye, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1@hypercript1:
Pages is slow as ***** as a word processor (using a MBP C2D 2.33 ghz and 2 gigs of RAM). I use it every week to layout my projects, but not until using Appleworks or TextEdit to type the text and edit. Hopefully Apple will fix this flaw in the next edition of iWork.
rossendryv, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1@ilgaz
>I wonder if Openoffice folks made their format easily adapted for other platform projects.

http://odftoolkit.openoffice.org/
puggy, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Features: "an Inspector panel with lots of sliders"
<downloads Bean>
mattsfolio, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2The creator of bean is a genius, I have been looking for a substitute for MS Word for ages. Thanks a bunch.
abandonedhero, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1Bean - apply directly to the forehead x3
frem001, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Just in time for my dissertation!
- ricksite, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3Your dissertation is about lightweight, open source word processors for the Mac?
- gafasiesornivek, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1Sure sounds like it doesn't it einstein?
vanden9, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Google docs and this are great to use in combo. When your on all major os and dont like Open office google docs is a dream but when on osx i think i just use bean. Shame it not open code other wise i might just port this to windows and linux.
- crazybrit, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Open code as in open source? Uh... RTFT.
- NoNamesLeft, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1"Google docs and this are great to use in combo. When your on all major os and dont like Open office google docs is a dream but when on osx i think i just use bean. Shame it not open code other wise i might just port this to windows and linux."
  
  'open code'? For someone who doesn't even know what the terminology is you seem to have a lot of confidence about being able to port it over. Guess what, it is 'open source' and you can download and port it now. You would have figured that by actually going to the site. You've annoyed me now Vanden. You have annoyed everyone on Digg. Now you have to prove yourself. You need to port it over Vanden, you said you could, now do it. And we want it on Digg's desk by tomorrow.
  
  Maybe your mum can get you a cup of 'cocoa' while you work.
krustytroll, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0i use NeoOffice and it's great but how do i change the margins to those similar with ms office margins?
jpn1003, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1I need something that will perfectly save .doc files, and that will absolutely seamlessly import and modify word files, that is as simple and lightweight as Bean. Any suggestions?
Narkinbarf, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3I love this software. I just downloaded it and gave it a test drive. It was only 1.6MB. Very easy to use. The slider bars for indent and stuff is really great. I hate MS word.
Mac2492, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1This has its uses. It opens up as fast as text edit, which is like half a bounce for me. That's really useful when I restart often or have many applications running.
lopla, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1I have an Amazing Bean Hack documented with a HDR photo, it's Breathtaking -anyone interested?

digg me for using "amazing, hack, hdr photo & breathtaking" you know you can't help it..
- NoNamesLeft, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1"digg me for using "amazing, hack, hdr photo & breathtaking" you know you can't help it.."
  
  Though rare, you just had what is technically known as 'a brain attack'.
  
  Now get out more.
jrocklin, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1They forgot to mention one other option - LaTeX. Admittedly, there can be some troubles getting used to it to start with, but once you have some basic templates to work with, it's great to use. I pretty much have all my document editing needs met by TeXShop.
- NoNamesLeft, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1To quote from LaTeX official documentation:
  
  "An author writes a LaTeX input file in a text editor and then compiles this using LaTeX. An input file contains text and commands for processing the text. There are some conceptual similarities to a markup language such as HTML. "
  
  Um, any text editor which require compliling is not a good alternative to 'Bean', 'Textedit', 'Word' or even 'Pages'. This is a text editor for people who want their lives to be difficult, a challenge that they have to summount AKA a nightmare. Some of use just want to hit an icon, wait for a second, type. something, hit save/print, then exit.
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Bean: Open Source & Lightweight OSX Word Processor

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