Most writing apps fill the screen with things that aren't your writing — toolbars, word counts, a blinking cursor in a menu somewhere. I wanted the opposite: open the app, start typing, and have everything else disappear. That's what Cozy's distraction-free writing mode does.
The whole interface falls away
Press ⌘⇧F and the sidebar, the calendar, the buttons — all of it goes. What's left is the text, centered on the page, and nothing else. It's the closest I could get to writing on a blank sheet of paper without leaving the computer.
Sound you choose, silence you keep
- Ambient soundscapes. Rain, forest, café, or fireplace, playing quietly behind your writing if you want something to sink into.
- Typewriter keystrokes. Optional mechanical key sounds, for when the clack helps you keep going.
- No notifications. Cozy never interrupts you to say you've missed a day. If you want to write, you open it. If you don't, it stays quiet.
Markdown that stays out of the way
Cozy uses live-reveal Markdown. The formatting symbols — the asterisks around bold, the hash marks on a heading — only show up on the line your cursor is sitting on. Every other line renders clean, so the page reads like finished writing while you're still in the middle of it. There's an optional serif editor font too, if that's the mood you write in.
No AI, on purpose
A lot of writing tools now put a suggestion box between you and the sentence you were about to write. Cozy has none of that, and won't. There is no AI in the app. The words on the page are yours, and the app's only job is to not get in their way.
Your writing is just files
Every entry is a plain Markdown file in a folder on your computer. No account to sign into, no cloud syncing in the background, nothing to lock you in. You can read and edit your writing in any text editor, and it'll still be there in ten years whether or not Cozy is.
If you came here from Reddit
If you found this after asking for a "distraction-free writing app" in a thread somewhere, one honest caveat: Cozy is a journaling app, meant for personal writing, not a word processor for manuscripts. If that's what you're after — a quiet place to write for yourself — it's what I'd point you to, because it's what I built when I couldn't find one that stayed out of my way.
Related reading: a journaling app for plain text files, a private journaling app, and an offline journaling app.