Writing with Typora

Disclaimer: I was not sponsored by the developers of Typora to write this post, although that would have been great.

So far, my default multi-purpose text editor has been Jupyter Notebook. Because many of my posts involve mathematical expressions written in $\LaTeX$ commands as well as code snippets, Jupyter Notebook was a choice that made sense. However, lately I have realized that for posts that do not require code executions or visualizations, there are far superior options out there, one of which is the editor I am using right now to write this post: Typora.

I have always been a fervent supporter of minimalism. My odd penchant for minimalism bleeds into many areas of my life, big and small, significant and frivolous. For instance, I always keep my computer’s desktop clean and empty. I have seen many people who are completely oblivious to the looks of their desktop—a matter of personal preference that I fully respect and understand—but for some inexplicable reason, I cannot stand looking at a desktop with files scattered about here and there. At the minimum, I use the sort function to make sure that the dekstop’s aesthetics is passable by my standards. (Yes, I might have minor obsessive-compulsive disorder, although I highly doubt it given that my actual physical desktop is in a state of chaos most of the time. And by most, I mean always.)

Typora is a wondeful text editor that suits my minimalistic taste. It’s UI is clean and simple, making the editor extremely intuitive and easy to use. Upon installation, the user is sent to a refreshingly blank slate, with only a single cursor blinking at the user as if welcoming them to write and get creative. The minimalilstic looks of the editor makes it distraction-free, allowing the user to concentrate on writing and writing only, which is precisely what a text editor is designed for. This is not to say that Typora is lacking in functionality: it comes with full support for $\LaTeX$ and code snippet support, with real-time rendering of course, my favorite part.

I know that there are other popular editors and note-taking applications out there, such as Bear and Notion, which I might try out in the future. However, not all such applications are free (Typora is free on macOS as of now). Also, many of them come with a wealth of additional features that I will perhaps never use. To me, the simplicity and powerfulness of Typora seems to strike just the right balance. For now, my writing scheme will be splilt between Jupyter Notebooks for posts involving code execution, and Typora for casual and math-exclusive articles. I might also consider learning the syntax of R markdown, in which case R Studio might become a third option, but that’s only a possibility at this point, and at any rate a story for a later time.

Thanks for reading. See you in the next post!