Mellel 6 has been released. It's been through a fairly long beta cycle and has been extremely solid for me.

Anyone looking at Mellel for the first time will likely get befuddled by Auto-titles.

I think they are cool, though. Instead of applying a heading style to get a heading in the table of contents, you apply an auto-title.

It works the same way, except the auto-title includes features to turn on chapter and section numbering and also bundles style settings for running headers and footers, cross references, and other uses of headings.

Global and local style set operations have been smoothed out in version 6.

It's also no longer available in the Apple App Store. The developer got tired of Apple's cut and Mellel mysteriously disappeared from Apple's writer apps list.

Since it's not Word, you probably need to know you want Mellel to be aware of it. Maybe being in the App store isn't necessary.

Mellel is by far my favorite writing tool. Your mileage may, of course, vary.

$49.95 upgrade. Seems steep, especially since very good free options exist.

Upgrade price is $44.99

I used version 2.x around 15 years ago, and was satisfied with its speed and features compared to Word, which I hated using. Mellel has always been an outstanding word processor for technical writing and dissertations. Paragraph styles are linked to a character style, but you can still tweak a character style to selected text without changing its registered paragraph style. Story elements can be tagged and color-coded, and Story View lets you add metadata to story elements.

From its inception it's had multilingual support and handled bi-directional text, which is why it's always been popular for writing in Arabic and Hebrew.

In the Mac space its competition has always been Nisus Writer Pro, whose sale and upgrade pricing is the same. (And they also sell a stripped-down version called NisusWriter Express, for $26.)

The market for word processors has collapsed with the explosion of text/Markdown processors, which are sufficient for most users, and by the dominance of MS Word (required for authors to share track-changes with publishers) and Apple's free Pages in app form and on the web. Word processors have become a niche product whose expected features (thanks to Word) tend to culminate in app bloat and a cluttered UI.

I don't think markdown editors have had much to do with the collapse of the market for word processors.
Some of it is the move to the web and digital and that most people - and even businesses - have a much reduced need for printing. And half the design of a word processor is based on printing.
Part of it is the rise of competent free word processors - Docs and Open/Libre Office.

And some part is due to the dominance of MS Word.
A part of that is the gradual improvements in Word from a writing point of view. I now do my formal writing in Word, which I have never done prior to this year. I don't know when it's features hit the point where I would have considered it adequate or preferred, but I spent years wondering why so many writers didn't use something better. I've also found that David Hewson (writer of books about Scrivener and Ulysses) has made the switch too - https://twitter.com/david_hewson/status/1529463722565058561 .
Other programs might - but usually don't - work as well and the ubiquity means that I can rely on any collaborators having access to it, and, since it is the format I have, there's never a point when I have to convert to meet the final stage requirement of having it in docx format.

I am sometimes forced to use MS Word, and everytime I do I think, "could they have made this any more user un-friendly?" I can usually figure out what I need to do, but navigating the ribbons and menus and dialog boxes is the stuff of nightmares. I don't use it enough for any of that to become second nature.

I work for a publisher, and wear many hats, that includes design and layout of the books. I'd much prefer getting the manuscripts in plain text. Word encourages authors to try to do their own layout, which I then undo when I pull the text into InDesign. It's a waste of their time and makes more work for me.

Sorry, this is a bit off the track of Mellel.

Steve

@Steve, I've only tested this with basic documents, but PanWriter, as a front end for Pandoc (both of which are cross-platform), seems to do a good job with importing Word documents and automatically converting them to Markdown.

(Overall, I have found that PanWriter/Pandoc have improved over the years and also gotten easier to install. I installed Pandoc on my Mac using Homebrew.)

Satis wrote

Upgrade price is $44.99

Interesting. In my instance of Mellel 5 the price is shown as $49.95 -- probably some A/B testing of price sensitivity. Doesn't matter. I like Mellel, and as others have noted it earnestly fills an RTL niche and others, but not, for me, at either quoted price.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

I am sometimes forced to use MS Word, and everytime I do I think, "could
they have made this any more user un-friendly?" I can usually figure out
what I need to do, but navigating the ribbons and menus and dialog boxes
is the stuff of nightmares. I don't use it enough for any of that to
become second nature.

I work for a publisher, and wear many hats, that includes design and
layout of the books. I'd much prefer getting the manuscripts in plain
text. Word encourages authors to try to do their own layout, which I
then undo when I pull the text into InDesign. It's a waste of their time
and makes more work for me.

Sorry, this is a bit off the track of Mellel.

Steve

Not sure why you're forced to use Word. Presumably you have a docx file which you could open with any Mac-friendly WP like Mellel. idk why a writer would be mucking about with layout directly rather than using styles which would be a one click change; I assume they are at least using headings and one of the outline modes. And Word is happy to save as .txt if you only want the text.

Personally I spend very little time in ribbons or menus, but like most things - including plaintext editors - it can be complex if you are unfamiliar with it. The difference with most (all?) plaintext editors is that any feature you are looking for is almost certainly available and it's just a question of knowing how to activate it. Certainly it's not an easy program for occasional dabbling unless you are trying to implement a common standard workflow.

Well, anyone working with corporate clients more or less automatically has to use Word. Over the years, I’ve tried replacing Word with other soi-disant Word-compatible apps (StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, SoftMaker Office...), but have inevitably come across issues with all of them (although I’m in the process of taking another look at the latest version of SoftMaker Office).

And yes, Word is infuriating. As it continues to evolve, new bugs continue to crop up. I’m currently having problems with one of the most basic functions, Search, which is ridiculous. And you can’t comment on headers or footers, or on footnotes. Which is also ridiculous. It also has a nasty way of suddenly crashing out completely, which is actually quite impressive – very few apps crash out as thoroughly as Word, but Microsoft does at least follow up with a rather appealing little “Sorry about that” message.

But at the end of the day, it’s the industry standard. It shouldn’t be, just as VHS shouldn’t have been the standard for video cassettes back in the day. But here we are.

Ah, when I look back at the joys of using WordPerfect 5.2 on MS-DOS – I remember writing an entire manual for some Atari music composition software on that, complete with multiple columns, box-outs, headers, footers, table of contents, index, and all sorts. Oh, and the computer I used was a Toshiba laptop (TS1000, I believe) with a battery life in excess of one hour. No Internet back then, of course; we all used CompuServe or (if we were very cutting-edge) Yahoo. I was a bit of a WordPerfect demon. Goodness, how time flies!

Dormouse wrote:

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
I am sometimes forced to use MS Word, and everytime I do I think, "could
>they have made this any more user un-friendly?" I can usually figure
out
>what I need to do, but navigating the ribbons and menus and dialog
boxes
>is the stuff of nightmares. I don't use it enough for any of that to
>become second nature.
>
>I work for a publisher, and wear many hats, that includes design and
>layout of the books. I'd much prefer getting the manuscripts in plain
>text. Word encourages authors to try to do their own layout, which I
>then undo when I pull the text into InDesign. It's a waste of their
time
>and makes more work for me.
>
>Sorry, this is a bit off the track of Mellel.
>
>Steve

Not sure why you're forced to use Word. Presumably you have a docx file
which you could open with any Mac-friendly WP like Mellel. idk why a
writer would be mucking about with layout directly rather than using
styles which would be a one click change; I assume they are at least
using headings and one of the outline modes. And Word is happy to save
as .txt if you only want the text.

Personally I spend very little time in ribbons or menus, but like most
things - including plaintext editors - it can be complex if you are
unfamiliar with it. The difference with most (all?) plaintext editors is
that any feature you are looking for is almost certainly available and
it's just a question of knowing how to activate it. Certainly it's not
an easy program for occasional dabbling unless you are trying to
implement a common standard workflow.

I hear you, but there is still a reason writers turn to Scrivener, Ulysses, Markdown editors, and other text handling tools like pandoc.

The goal is to write. The tool should be a background item. For my uses, Mellel does what I need and I like the way a Keyboard Maestro macro can make it a single click to pare the UI down to nothing but a box to write in. it's like a single click swap between a simple text editor and a word processor with a lot of features.

Like Mellel's own advertising used to say, it's not for everyone. For me it's awesome, but I sense my mileage varies.



MadaboutDana wrote:

Well, anyone working with corporate clients more or less automatically
has to use Word.

MadaboutDana wrote:

Well, anyone working with corporate clients more or less automatically
has to use Word.

only If you're an employee, else you can do anything you want

Over the years, I’ve tried replacing Word with
other soi-disant Word-compatible apps (StarOffice, OpenOffice,
LibreOffice, SoftMaker Office...), but have inevitably come across
issues with all of them

So, effectively, ALL the alternatives are worse

And yes, Word is infuriating. As it continues to evolve, new bugs
continue to crop up. I'm currently having problems with one of the
most basic functions, Search, which is ridiculous. And you can't
comment on headers or footers, or on footnotes. Which is also
ridiculous. It also has a nasty way of suddenly crashing out completely,

I very rarely have a crash from Word. Less often in fact than I had from Obsidian in the past (don't often use it now). And the backups work smoothly. I've never tried to stick a comment on headers, footers or footnotes; that's an end stage publish process - none of my markets want such things, and if I'm publishing a document myself for some reason I don't need a comment. Many of my editing comments to myself are in the form of colours or emojis, and those do work.

I have noticed more consistent antipathy from Mac users and comments that the Mac version is worse than Windows, and certainly less native. idk how different they really are. I use it mostly for writing. And always found it better than the alternatives for general WP functions and markdown doesn't even begin to compete.

Ah, when I look back at the joys of using WordPerfect 5.2 on MS-DOS
... I was a bit of a WordPerfect demon. Goodness, how time flies!

And, of course, WP still exists, is actively developed and maintained and still particularly successful with law firms.

I think MS have done very well with evolving Word, retaining its old markets. If these WPs didn't exist in such a complete form already, no-one would set out to develop one. They were designed to meet the needs of a point in time, and then twisted and tweaked to meet the needs of further points in time. With technology always changing rapidly. I never imagined I would ever use it to write, but do think it's become very usable for that over the last decade.
Though that may be because I prefer writing within a single file. I don't think it has the management features for working with multiple small files smoothly - though I have never looked.

My separation with Word in my personal life came long ago. I tried to use master documents. Back then, it was extremely easy to entangle subdocuments. The wise Word enthusiast, at least back then, pretended master document mode didn't exist because it was deadly easy to mangle documents.

I think I'd still look at alternatives to master documents. DocxManager, for example.

Word has come a long way and is the tool of choice for many productive writers.

In the end, little-w words mean much more than Word, my beloved Mellel, vim, or anything else. Use what works for you. If conditions are hostile to preference, use export to docx and don't tell what you really used. ;-)

Amontillado wrote:

I think I'd still look at alternatives to master documents. DocxManager,
for example.

DocxManager has no dark mode, and I've seen references to total data loss (maybe even in this forum).
But even if it works, it doesn't as stable and effective as many of the writing programs - Ulysses, Scrivener, Inspire Writer etc.

Back then, it was extremely easy to entangle
subdocuments. The wise Word enthusiast, at least back then, pretended
master document mode didn't exist because it was deadly easy to mangle
documents.

Master documents & subdocuments still work easily, but the vied switching doesn't work as well as with the writing programs.

My dislike of the Scrivener et al system of building from the cards/scenes, is maybe a quirk of my own that I have realised over the years. It feels as if it puts the emphasis on the components and takes it away from the whole. I have a better grasp working from the whole document. Word now has good outline views (much better than the other WPs I have tried), and I prefer to work within that. Plus doing development work in Mindomo and exporting/copying into the docx.

In the end, little-w words mean much more than Word, my beloved Mellel,
vim, or anything else. Use what works for you. If conditions are hostile
to preference, use export to docx and don't tell what you really used.
;-)

Agree completely

I like Scrivener in principle. At one time I was an enthusiastic user. The company behind Scrivener is truly an independent writer's friend, something that can also said of the company behind Ulysses (Soulmen?).

However, a note taking application alongside a nice word processor with an outline based navigation panel is more to my liking. The note taking app, for me, is like Scrivener's research folder. The word processor's navigation panel is like Scrivener's Draft Binder - and I realize the Binder does a whole lot more.

"Compiling" by switching style sets has been all I've really needed.

That's sad about data loss in DocxManager. The developer is a nice guy and I've always hoped things worked out for him.


Dormouse wrote:

Amontillado wrote:
>I think I'd still look at alternatives to master documents.
DocxManager,
>for example.

DocxManager has no dark mode, and I've seen references to total data
loss (maybe even in this forum).
But even if it works, it doesn't as stable and effective as many of the
writing programs - Ulysses, Scrivener, Inspire Writer etc.


>Back then, it was extremely easy to entangle
>subdocuments. The wise Word enthusiast, at least back then, pretended
>master document mode didn't exist because it was deadly easy to mangle
>documents.

Master documents & subdocuments still work easily, but the vied
switching doesn't work as well as with the writing programs.

My dislike of the Scrivener et al system of building from the
cards/scenes, is maybe a quirk of my own that I have realised over the
years. It feels as if it puts the emphasis on the components and takes
it away from the whole. I have a better grasp working from the whole
document. Word now has good outline views (much better than the other
WPs I have tried), and I prefer to work within that. Plus doing
development work in Mindomo and exporting/copying into the docx.

>In the end, little-w words mean much more than Word, my beloved Mellel,
>vim, or anything else. Use what works for you. If conditions are
hostile
>to preference, use export to docx and don't tell what you really used.
>;-)

Agree completely

Amontillado wrote:

However, a note taking application alongside a nice word processor with
an outline based navigation panel is more to my liking. The note taking
app, for me, is like Scrivener's research folder. The word processor's
navigation panel is like Scrivener's Draft Binder - and I realize the
Binder does a whole lot more.

Word's navigation pane has an outline mode. The main body of the document has header folding (marginally better than most markdown editors because there are nine levels; significantly poorer than WriteMonkey 3 with its ability to fold anything on the fly); easy to work with any chosen level. Linked notes connect to a OneNote section or page in a right-hand panel. There's a range of specialist add-ins for all types of writers (only ones I always have installed are Paperpile, Zotero, PWA and Writage).

It's not perfect, but ticks enough boxes to make it the best option for me. Main deficiency is the lack of good visual mode - but Mindomo exports perfectly to docx and it's easy to set up links in both directions.

Just to pick up on a couple of points made by @Dormouse:

Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that the alternatives to Word are all worse – just that they’re not all totally, 100% compatible with Word. And because Word is what my clients use, I have to use it for their work, ensuring that what I produce is 100% compatible with what they want.

For my own personal writing purposes, I don’t use Word. In fact, it is refreshing not to have to go anywhere near it. While I acknowledge that it’s a hugely powerful piece of software, it is also (as you effectively remark) an aggregate – a conglomeration of features piled one on top of another. This is true of all MS apps, in fact, which is why they’re all so enormous (ca. 1GB each). This has obvious implications in terms of efficiency, and probably explains peculiarities like the impossibility of adding comments to e.g. headers, footers, text boxes etc.

For what it’s worth, I’ve only ever had a couple of crashes with Obsidian, and that’s with about 34 plugins enabled ;-) But I’m a comparatively recent convert, and from what I’ve seen, it’s being improved all the time.

In my experience, Word on Mac isn’t that much different (in its current form) from Word on Windows (yes, I do use both, the Windows version in a Parallels virtual machine). The Windows version does have a couple more features (especially with regard to VBA scripts, which is the only reason I run it in a VM), but otherwise displays many of the same infuriating characteristics as the Mac version. Neither of them is particularly prone to crashing, but when they do, oh boy do you know it.

I will say this: Microsoft’s XML file format is vastly more efficient than the various Apple formats used in Pages, Numbers etc. The files from these iWork apps are always enormous, whereas even a large Word document takes up very little space (depending on the graphical content, obviously), largely because it’s massively compressed. Other apps like SoftMaker Office – which I like very much – also produce highly compressed XML files; if I was 100% confident in their reproducibility in Word, I would swap over to SoftMaker Office like a shot. LibreOffice is quite impressive, but suffers somewhat from a similar aggregative approach to Word.

I’ve tried Mellel and other excellent writing apps (Papyrus Writer, for example), but don’t have sufficient reason to use them for my own personal writing work, which is mainly done in Obsidian or Scrivener or increasingly, Lattics (which, despite some annoying traits, is peculiarly satisfying to use). I can see situations in which I would definitely use Mellel, not least because of its awesome indexing capability. But I haven’t produced my own Definitive Work yet, and I don’t need that kind of power to produce articles, blog posts etc.

I’d forgotten WordPerfect was still a thing. Might have to check it out as well...

Absolutely agree on the suitability of XML. That's what Mellel uses, too.

XML also makes for what probably amounts to an open format, or at least it should.

SoftMaker's word processor is said to be very faithful to Word. I've never owned the product, so I'll have to defer to others.

There is now a free version of SoftMaker at www.freeoffice.com. I might have to give that a try on my Linux box.

MadaboutDana wrote:

Just to pick up on a couple of points made by @Dormouse:

Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that the alternatives to Word are
all worse – just that they’re not all totally, 100%
compatible with Word. And because Word is what my clients use, I have to
use it for their work, ensuring that what I produce is 100% compatible
with what they want.

For my own personal writing purposes, I don’t use Word. In fact,
it is refreshing not to have to go anywhere near it. While I acknowledge
that it’s a hugely powerful piece of software, it is also (as you
effectively remark) an aggregate – a conglomeration of features
piled one on top of another. This is true of all MS apps, in fact, which
is why they’re all so enormous (ca. 1GB each). This has obvious
implications in terms of efficiency, and probably explains peculiarities
like the impossibility of adding comments to e.g. headers, footers, text
boxes etc.

For what it’s worth, I’ve only ever had a couple of crashes
with Obsidian, and that’s with about 34 plugins enabled ;-) But
I’m a comparatively recent convert, and from what I’ve seen,
it’s being improved all the time.

In my experience, Word on Mac isn’t that much different (in its
current form) from Word on Windows (yes, I do use both, the Windows
version in a Parallels virtual machine). The Windows version does have a
couple more features (especially with regard to VBA scripts, which is
the only reason I run it in a VM), but otherwise displays many of the
same infuriating characteristics as the Mac version. Neither of them is
particularly prone to crashing, but when they do, oh boy do you know it.

I will say this: Microsoft’s XML file format is vastly more
efficient than the various Apple formats used in Pages, Numbers etc. The
files from these iWork apps are always enormous, whereas even a large
Word document takes up very little space (depending on the graphical
content, obviously), largely because it’s massively compressed.
Other apps like SoftMaker Office – which I like very much
– also produce highly compressed XML files; if I was 100%
confident in their reproducibility in Word, I would swap over to
SoftMaker Office like a shot. LibreOffice is quite impressive, but
suffers somewhat from a similar aggregative approach to Word.

I’ve tried Mellel and other excellent writing apps (Papyrus
Writer, for example), but don’t have sufficient reason to use them
for my own personal writing work, which is mainly done in Obsidian or
Scrivener or increasingly, Lattics (which, despite some annoying traits,
is peculiarly satisfying to use). I can see situations in which I would
definitely use Mellel, not least because of its awesome indexing
capability. But I haven’t produced my own Definitive Work yet, and
I don’t need that kind of power to produce articles, blog posts
etc.

I’d forgotten WordPerfect was still a thing. Might have to check
it out as well...

Re: Softmaker Office. I've been writing in Textmaker (the word processor) for years. I prefer it to Word because it's stable, fast, is easier to handle (for me) and has Duden Korrektor (a superior German spell and grammar checker). The only thing I am missing compared to Word is Word's fine outliner. Textmaker does have an outline feature but that is by far inferior to the one in Word.

And copying formatted Textmaker docs into a Wordpress page adds loads of unnecessary HTML code to the page. Which does not happen when you copy unformatted text.

MadaboutDana wrote:

I don't need that kind of power to produce articles, blog posts etc.

Yeah
If my writing wasn't longform,
and
If my writing didn't have to end in a docx at some point,
I doubt if I would use Word either.
It's very rare for me to use it as a traditional WP.
Though I might agree with this comment from the Obsidian Forum - "The context menu in MS Word is very beautiful and elegant." Most of my interaction with the program is through shortcuts or the context menu.

Franz Grieser wrote:

Re: Softmaker Office ..The only thing I am missing compared to Word is Word's fine outliner.

It is (to me) amazing how they turned that round.
iirc DocxManager/Writing Outliner (both still exist) was set up purely because there was a gap in the market because of Word's lack of a good outlining function.

I'd concur with the comments on Softmaker and Textmaker. I never had a compatibility issue with it either - but my use probably didn't stress it much.

Off-topic
I've been interested to observe my use of OneNote increase steadily. I've always had a love-love-HATE! relationship with it. Lured back in by its convenience as a Word sidekick. Gradually extending a little further. No hate yet, and I feel I won't get any - not because it's improved or because the irritating quirks and limitations have disappeared, but because my serious notetaking is now in Tangent and so OneNote limitations don't affect me much any more.

Mellel is now for sale at 25% off at Winterfest:

https://www.artisanalsoftwarefestival.com/#Mellel