Mostly a great piece of software

I’ve gone back and forth between iA Writer and Byword for the past 4-5 years and while I mostly favoured Byword for the majority of that time, iA Writer 3 has firmly become my main text editor over the past few months and it’s an absolute pleasure to use. The UI is beautifully refined and finally the developers have found the right balance between simplicity and just the right amount of rich editing functionality. The preview mode makes so much sense and generally, I don’t have many complaints at all.

But I have one big one. Version 3 has introduced functionality where documents auto-save even before you’ve manually saved them the first time, which is contrary to how any other OS X software I’m familiar with operates. About 40% of the time, I use these types of text editors for temporary notes: rough ideas, briefly noting some sensitive information etc. and I, like I assume most users, don’t plan to save these files. iA Writer saves them automatically anyway, so you need to develop a habit of clearing the file and then deleting it from the Finder again. There is a workaround (Option + CMD + N), but you need to have iA Writer open already, meaning for some temporary files you need to open a blank file, THEN open another blank file that won’t be autosaved. I contacted the developer and they gave no compelling reason why the feature even makes sense. There really should be an option to disable this. I know it’s partly so the developer can push the Library feature (which I also don’t find useful), but it’s not a justification for risking users having a full folder full of sensitive data they didn’t realise was being saved...

unfunflyingdog about iA Writer, v3.1.4