Bean For Mac

Bean is a lightweight and smooth-running macOS text editor created to provide you with a balanced set of tools and features for effortlessly and efficiently load, preview, edit and write text documents on your Mac.

In essence, the Bean app offers impressive start-up times, an intuitive interface and support for most popular text file formats, thus making it as quick and as easy as possible to get started writing in the shortest conceivable time.

That being so, from Bean’s main window you can easily open, edit, save and print documents, as well as insert pictures and view the number of characters, pages and words.

For detailed information about the currently opened document, you can rapidly access the Statistics slide sheet using the ⌥⌘G hotkey. What’s more, by accessing the Inspector window, you can choose the font and style along with the size and color of your text.

When needed, you can also quickly highlight sections of the text and adjust the kerning and the line spacing, with just a few mouse clicks.

As an added advantage, besides the basic editing and font tools, Bean also features a handy spelling and grammar check tool and integration for OS X’s text-to-speech engine.

On top of that, Bean comes with a powerful Find and Replace tool that can help you to instantaneously find and replace words, symbols and text fragments within your documents.

Moreover, while in Full Screen mode, Bean provides you with a clean and distraction-free environment designed to help you focus on your writing and avoid diversions.

Bean enables you to effortlessly export your documents to the cross-platform HTML and PDF file formats via the file menu, for easy sharing with your friends and colleagues that use other operating systems and platforms.

Unfortunately, although Bean can be used as an alternative to Apple's TextEdit, it cannot replace more complex word processors such as Pages, MS Word or Open Office, mainly because it has been designed from the get-go to provide a limited set of features capable of providing the right amount of tools to make you more productive while, at the same time, avoiding to clutter your writing environment with unnecessary instruments.

Also on the bad side, in spite of the fact that Bean comes with a vast assortment of features and tools that other similar apps lack, it does not allow you to insert or edit footnotes and to use style-sheets.

To sum it all up, although it’s not an all-encompassing word processing solution for the Mac, Bean manages to deliver the right amount of features and tools in a combination designed to boost your writing productivity with the help of an intuitive and simple to use interface.