Technical Writing

I spent a long time researching, trying and tweaking text editors. As a cross-platform developer and technical writer (mostly writer these days) I work with different programming languages, document formats and want an editor with particular features, but that is also easy on the eye. Ideally I wanted all the functionality I was looking for in one application, not split between 5.

When you've spent a lot of time working on the latest great project, library, service or platform you generally would like people to use it. Whether people find out about you from a presentation, the media, internet search or word of mouth, what's the first aspect of your project that people usually encounter?

I recently created a package for the Atom text editor that exports your markdown files to Medium. Find out how I wrote it and how you can help me improve it.

Are you a technical writer or dev who needs to create documentation around your project? Check out these extensions you can integrate into VS Code that can help.

Are you using the Sublime Text editor? If so, you may want to rethink this. One man gives his opinion on Sublime and gives several other options you can choose from.

If you've wanted a spell checker or autocorrect that simply does more, check out how this tool is bein used to check for tense and syle as well.

JetBrains is known for its variety of developer-focused IDEs, all based around its IntelliJ core. In recent years, they developed their own writer-focussed plugin, Grazie, for handling grammar and style guidance, Writerside for a wide variety of tech writing tasks, and more recently, an AI assistant for writers. The company has also helped with community-maintained plugins such as those for markdown and asciidoc. But then, a year or so ago, JetBrains announced that Writerside would become a fully-fledged tech writing IDE. I've been using it on and off for some time, and in this post, I take a look at some of its features, recent updates, and related plugins.

There aren't many desktop tools for technical writing that are native to macOS and iPadOS. adoc Studio is one of the few, built specifically around AsciiDoc. I covered it before, and the team has been busy since. Here's what's new in versions 4 and 5, including export options, accessibility tools, multilingual support, and AI features.