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Growly Write is a minimalist Mac app featuring simple but highly efficient word editing tools, packed in a clean and organized environment. Perhaps the word processor you’ve been using has 100 times more features than you need. Or it won’t work the way you want it to — too many views or too few, and nothing makes any sense. Or it looks as if it were designed back when computers displayed text in green letters on a black screen. Growly Write is something else entirely: fresh, capable, and simple. But not too simple.

The range of documents you can create in Write is staggering: multiple columns, chapters with different layouts, pictures that flow with the text or pictures that text wraps around, drop caps, tables, lists, links within a document or to web pages, borders simple and complex, and a complete toolkit of text formats. But everything is easy to find.

The section on the right of the screenshot above is the format panel. It lets you change the appearance of everything in the document, without ever getting in your way. No obscure commands, complex and ugly modal windows, tiny indecipherable icons, or hunting through menus. If you want to format something, this is the place to go.

The tabs at the top let you choose what to modify: text, paragraphs, tables, lists, pictures, what have you. They reconfigure automatically to match whatever you’ve selected. Within each tab the properties are broken down into small, easy-to-understand groups. If you don’t use styles, for example, just close the style group and you’ll never have to see it again. But when you do need a certain format, you’ll never have to wonder where it is.

Draft view has several advantages: it’s faster, less cluttered, and it lets you see things that don’t print. Page view focuses on the final appearance, so it hides some things that have to do with document structure.

In the screen shot above, the blue info buttons to the left of the text show that something interesting is on that line, in this case links or pictures. Lists, bookmarks, and many other things also cause the blue info button to appear. Click the button to see what the special item is, and a menu appears that allows you to modify it. These options are also available in page view, on the context menu for the item.

The panel on the left of this example shows document elements, in this case the chapters; to reorder the chapters, just drag them. You can also see bookmarks, frames, lists, notes, and tables. To jump to one of these elements, just click the list entry. As with the format panel, if you don’t use the elements list, you can close it.

Notice the tabs just above the document content: they’re like the tabs in most web browsers. You can open a tab on any part of the document and view them in different ways. Headers and hidden notes always open in new tabs. You can jump from one area of the document to another just by clicking on the tab. Now if you actually want to merge separate documents into one window, Write also supports the window tabs introduced in Mac OS 10.12 Sierra.