As part of my challenge to find my ideal writing app, I turned to Werdsmith to see if it could handle my writing needs.
Werdsmith piqued my interest with claims about it being your “personal, portable writers studio”, it’s multiple themes, and “formats for every writer”. Initially, it seemed like it would be an app only for people like screenwriters, but I thought I’d give it a go anyway.
Sadly I was at least partially correct, it does indeed feel that Werdsmith is designed for a certain type of writer, and one that doesn’t seem to include myself.
Organising Your Writing
The first part of Werdsmith that made me think that the app wasn’t for me was the very simple document organisation.
There are two sections, ideas and projects. Writing starts as an idea, and then you can convert it to a project later on. This rather simple organisation makes me think that the app is best used with a minimal amount of projects. So not one that can be used with a large collection of well-organised documents.
Writing
The writing experience in Werdsmith is certainly distraction-free, the interface is quite minimal, and leaves you with just your writing.
However, the Markdown support is pretty lacking, and so are the formatting options in general. You have two headers, bold, italics, and quotes. So not exactly many options to choose from. Not even lists or images.
In addition to the formatting options, you have the option to set an overall format for the document. There are four to choose from, which I think shows the designed purposes of the app. The formats are text, novel, screenplay, or poem. I assume the text format was meant to be the one for general-purpose writing, but I honestly think it may as well not be there.
Export Options
There are export options, so it’s possible to use that to either move documents around or use it to trigger various automations. It’s rather simple, as it just exports the title and text contents of a document, but at least it’s there.
Final Thoughts
This review isn’t as detailed as it would have been if I had tried it out for a longer period, but that essentially shows how far I got with the app.
I’m not a novel or screenplay writer, so I can’t comment on how well it performs for what seems to be the target user, but I can say that it’s not the app for me. The document organisation, writing experience, and markdown support are all things that disappointed me. So while I may have liked other parts of Werdsmith, the fundamentals just didn’t click with me.
So it looks like I’ll be checking out another writing app, which I think will be 1Writer.