Writing that stays a file you can open anywhere
Markdown and plain-text editors, where the format outlives the app — and where the extra width goes into the draft and what surrounds it rather than into chrome.
Plain text is a bet about time. An app can be discontinued, a subscription can lapse, a sync service can be shut down, and a folder of Markdown files is still a folder of Markdown files. Everything on this list takes that bet to some degree, and the ones that take it hardest keep your writing as files on a disk rather than rows in somebody's database.
That has an interface consequence that matters here. An app built on files tends to have something alongside the text — a file list, a library, an outline, a preview — because files need browsing. Folded, that something is a screen you leave the draft to visit.
The order runs from apps where the surrounding structure is the point to apps where the text is deliberately alone.
- 1
Obsidian - Connected Notes
Dynalist Inc.
Markdown files in a local folder, linked to each other, with a graph view over the whole vault and plugins for everything else. The app's argument is that the structure between notes is as valuable as the notes, and structure is the thing a one-column screen is worst at showing.
- 2
Scrivener
Literature & Latte Ltd
A long manuscript written out of order in pieces, with the binder holding the pieces and the editor showing one. It is the most structural writing app here and the one where seeing the structure and the sentence together changes how the drafting goes.
- 3
Ulysses: Writing App
Ulysses GmbH & Co. KG
A markup-based editor with a library down the side, built on the idea that formatting is a later problem than writing. Deferring formatting works when the text in front of you is unambiguous; a wider column makes a markup document read more like the document it will become.
- 4
Bear Markdown Notes & Journal
Writing · Shiny Frog Ltd.
Markdown notes with tags instead of folders, which is a structure you navigate by searching and filtering rather than by remembering a path. Filtering is a two-pane activity — the tag list and the results — and the reward for the extra width is that the filter stays visible while you read what it found.
- 5
iA Writer: Get Focused
Information Architects AG
An editor that treats typography as the feature and takes almost everything else away. It is the one on the list that wants the space for the opposite reason: not to show you more, but to give the single column of text room to be the right measure rather than the only measure that fits.
- 6
Drafts
Agile Tortoise
Opens to an empty page with the keyboard up, then sends the text somewhere else — the capture end of writing rather than the drafting end. The draft list and the action list are both things you choose from, and choosing from a list while the text is still on screen is the unfolded version of the same gesture.
The selection and the order are ours. Each entry is written from that app’s own App Store listing, linked beside it, and this page from Apple's iPhone Duo product page. Drafted with AI assistance and checked back against those sources before publishing; the disclosure page explains how. The iPhone Duo has been on sale since 23 October 2026 and nothing here has been seen running on one, so what each entry says about the fold is an argument rather than a test.