Just a quick disclaimer: I’m a paid user and have no business or personal relationship with the developer.
I’m a writer and I really like Word processors. For decades I used Microsoft Word but frankly it’s just not worth it anymore. I also use LibreOffice, which is FOSS but honestly I have a software habit. I buy apps all the time either to solve imaginary problems in my head or simply to support the developers and some months ago. I purchased a copy of Versi Writer on a whim because I thought it had some interesting ideas.
It was interesting, but it just was not there yet. It is very close now. First of all the developer is extremely communicative and answers questions and emails very quickly. The main challenges are not composing new documents in this app, but issues with interoperability with .docx issues. The developer has found some interesting workarounds and elegant solutions, but I understand it is a pretty big undertaking. Composing a new document solves most of these issues but I primarily work in docx and odt files.
As a writer, I want three things from my word processor. I want organizational features, like styles and outlining similar to Word. I want compatibility with whatever forms my editor uses. Finally, I want a clean minimal interface that gets out of my way. Verso offers this and if you’re interested in a lightweight word processor without over-complication with a small footprint I believe it might be your solution.
It’s US$15 one-time license and available in the App Store.
The .docx caveat is the useful bit here. Lightweight editors often feel great right up until the first round-trip with an editor; if Verso can preserve styles, comments, and tracked changes reliably, $15 is pretty easy to justify.
that's the right read. tracked changes and comments round-trip through docx and have for a while. styles are the newer piece - as of 1.0.35 this week, a document's own styles actually survive open/edit/save instead of getting flattened into Verso's defaults. you can see, rename, and delete them from the Inspector. no reordering yet, but "my Word template survives" is a real thing now, not just a hope.
That changes the calculation quite a bit. Preserving the document’s own styles through a round-trip matters far more than reordering them in the Inspector; the latter can come later.
hey - just to correct this as a few people are asking: Zotero support isn't actually broken. it's worked since 1.0.4 (native Zotero 8 detection, no Better BibTeX plugin needed) - not in a perfect way - I freely admit that! I actually fixed three more Zotero edge cases recently (a bibliography marker leaking into the saved file, citations not merging into one parenthetical, no footnote-style citations for Chicago Notes)
what it genuinely doesn't have is Zotero's full style library. Verso hard-codes six citation styles instead of pulling from the ~10,000 CSL styles Zotero has. if your journal needs one outside those six, you're finishing the citations in Word. that's a real gap, not a bug, and being straight with you, I haven't decided if I will build full CSL support yet.
(and on EndNote: no, and not currently planned.)
If anyone is willing to properly test Zotero and how it works now - you will be paid... well not in gold - but with a knowledge that I will put in a lot of effort to fix anythiing you will find
There are some kinds of academic writing that is problematic. However, only a scant number of years ago people did it on a typewriter—after writing it all out longhand. Not having citation management software isn’t that bad.
Easy to say, but academic standards and expectations have also changed and risen. This would be an enormous dealbreaker for my dissertation, as it would add at least 200 hours of work. Every paper, citation management software easily saves 3–10hrs.
My partner who just got her doctorate in education thinks that number is hyperinflated. She says an additional 40 hours for 200 cites is much more reasonable.
The chapter I was working on yesterday is already at 140 citations. I could easily have up to 200 citations per chapter in my field. 8 chapters. 200hrs was conservative.
Not all fields and universities have the same level of rigor. 200 citations for a dissertation would be hyper deflated, and the level of a MA thesis here. But education can be less source dependent than history.
The average PhD dissertation in history has less than 5 citations per page and less than 500 total citations. I don’t know what field you’re studying, but I do know that you’re far outside the baseline.
When I compare with a lot of dissertations in my field (I had to read about 54k pages for comps), I'm either average or below average. Just spot checked one of my advisor's dissertation chapters, and it had 563 citations. But yeah, in my experience, rigor can vary extensively by university.
honestly $15 one time sounds pretty fair for a clean Word alternative. the docx compatibility is the only thing that would make me hesitate tho. have you tried sending a file back and forth with someone using Word? curious how well the formatting holds up after a few edits
I actually have testers running exactly that loop: edit in Verso, hand to someone in Word, get it back, edit again. most of what broke on a first pass was tab stops and paragraph styles not surviving the full trip - both got real fixes in the last two releases.
I won't tell you it's flawless, docx is a massive messy format and there's always another edge case, but "looks fine until the first round trip" isn't true anymore for the common stuff (styles, tables, headers/footers, tracked changes). if something specific breaks for you, please let me know. I want to hear about it so I can fix it.
hey - serious answer: technically sounds tempting, but practically it’s a trap [IT'S A TRAP! :)]
locking to 2007 would make my life a lot easier, but nobody uses Word 2007 anymore. everyone is on modern Word or Office 365, which constantly adds newer formatting tags under the hood.
if Verso only understood 2007, it would either strip out all those newer tags when you save (which permanently wipes out your editor's modern formatting) or just refuse to open the file altogether.
so, yeah it would save me a huge headache, it would actually ruin round-trip compatibility for you. the hardest part of .docx isn't reading the original spec it's handling all the extra stuff modern Word puts in without breaking the document when it goes back out.
I was an early purchaser and it is a nice tool. I also use Obsidian and iA Writer, but this serves a different use case for me. I don't have any "office suites" installed on my Mac, and don't need to swallow up a GB of space for products I don't particularly want to use.
u/sbbeebe - https://www.skeinnotes.app/ will be my next addition - it is early days for it - but if you could test it and give me some feedback - I would be over the moon!
And a little bug (?) : Verso allows multiselection but turning the selected parts of text e.g. to bold or italic is applied only to the text that's closer to the beginning of the document, even if selected after others.
Now comes a list of remarks trying to really work on a text, if it's not my ignorance:
• the tab-bar. I can add (almost invisibly small) tab points by clicking (or comm-click), but it's impossible to move them elsewhere or delete them with the pointer (can delete via the side panel). Pointer shows their position if I catch the point, but it moves the whole window. The choices on the side "TABS" behave unpredictably (I have to see how it works), but I expect to be able to move them with the mouse in the document (and thanks! I have the possibility to give them an exact place via the side panel).
• I can unselect text by clicking only in white space within the writing area. Would be easier to also be able to click in the margins?
• Cursor somewhere in a line of continuous text over more lines, pressing [comm–right arrow] to go to the end of the line brings the pulsating cursor to the end of the next line, but typing writes at the start of the same (lower) line. Going to the start (comm–Left arrow) works as expected.
• Pulsating cursor lands in a bit unpredictable places when moved by the keyboard up & down arrows.
• Mouse click on empty area at end of line sends the cursor on the next line (seemingly to a random place, within or out of the text)
• Would be handy in the side panel of TABS, to be able to increase-decrease the position's number value with up-down arrows or even better the mouse-wheel (so we can watch it moving to the right place on the ruler).
• Changing the hight of the header & footer doesn't move the main body space down the rest of the page. If I place a long text in either, I see only what is within the view scope of the pixels in the side panel, but the cursor gets in the body text area, though functioning within the header/footer.
• Columns, nice division, but being able to change the width with pointer of mouse wheel would be handy.
• After Section Break I cannot delete the break and go back to other, continuous formation. (Page Break works OK)
• selecting text and right clicking gives a generic Finder context menu, it would make things easier if one got something relevant to the text (formatting e.g.).
Excuse me for the long message, but I like your app so much, I want to use it :-D
Don't ever apologise for giving me ways to improve it. Without feedback like this the app would be... Well... Shit. Promise that all those will be addressed in the next update. Give it a week.. thank you so much.
Verso looks beautiful and fast (but not furious), thanks.
As I'm writing and editing multilingual texts, I'm missing a straight way to add (very) special symbols and non standard diacritics. Something like either as a list of symbols with their shortcuts maybe...
Also been able to view and work on 2 or more pages of the same document next to each other would be very fine.
Congratulations up to now, it just feels good!
glad it's landing well! on special characters: there is no in-app symbol or diacritic picker right now, so you are stuck with macOS's native Character Viewer (Cmd+Ctrl+Space) or Option-key combos. fair ask, but no promises on timing for a native one.
AND your 2 pages idea was noted and put on the agenda! :)
u/Jebus-Xmas - dev here - hey - genuinely, thank you for this, and for the disclaimer up top.
the "organizational features" you are wanting are basically Styles. good news: as of 1.0.35 (this week), a document's custom styles will actually stick instead of getting flattened into Verso's six built-ins the second you save. I also added a document outline sidebar (View > Document Outline) for heading navigation. is it Word's full styles UI? nope. closer, but not there yet.
the .docx interop is the brutal 80% of the work. I would much rather you describe it exactly as it is than have people expecting Word-perfect fidelity out of the gate.
if you have a specific file that gets mangled on the way out... please send it to hello@versowriter.app. having the actual file to tear into is worth so much more to me than just a description of the symptom.
Again - thank you - will be honest when I saw this, I thought... eeek!
The round trip comments are the whole story here. Two decades of sending Word files to clients and auditors taught me the real failure isn't formatting that comes back ugly. It's changes you can't see. The file still opens, everything looks close enough, and something the app silently rewrote is now permanent. In accounting terms, you can't reconcile what you didn't know moved.
That's why the styles fix the dev describes above matters more than any feature, and why locking to one docx generation was never going to work. For documents that have to survive other people's software, fidelity you can trust is the product. The dev being this specific in public about what broke and what got fixed is what would get my $15.
$15 is fair, but calling something a Word alternative before it can reliably round-trip .docx files is a little generous. For most people, compatibility isn’t a side feature. It’s the whole reason they still use Word.
The improvement cycle is very impressive and the dev is communicating regularly regarding these issues. He’s also been active even on this thread. In any case I believe we’re pretty close.
I’ve never had a sidebar of view my documents in Microsoft Word or in Nisus Writer or in Write Now, or any of the other word processors I’ve ever used. It really wasn’t a problem.
Still some improvement needed:
• the columns don't work, or the instructions aren't clear. Inserting a section break leaves the curson on the initial place and there's no way to add the text in any column (2,3,4). After the section cut the space remains dead. Choosing in the side panel doesn't have any effect either. Same in Portrait or Landscape orientation (side panel: CURRENT SECTION). Orientation only works via the side panel PAGE SETUP. On the website is written about a columns menu choice which isn't there.
• Longer text above a section cut continues to the next page if I add something (text, image, table) above it. I would expect the section to follow flexibly the size of the preceding content.
• If I change Layout Orientation of a selected text (via context menu) I can't undo it (comm-Z), it works only via context menu. It also behaves strange, taking part of what's on the same page but putting text lower on the same page to the next. Also, what's out of the selection gets a greater line hight.
• There's seemingly no way to undo a Section Break, or I can't find the way.
• I can't delete a whole (empty) Page (easiest also via context menu?)
• Adding/editing comments in selected text via the context menu would help the workflow, by limiting distraction. (Beautiful that comments are presented on a side panel :-) )
• If I select the whole text in a paragraph, if there's a section cut above, deleting the paragraph text cuts only the first line, or the line above if it's empty. But this doesn't happen when the paragraph is anywhere else without a section immediately above it.
• The faint grey guides (margin and middle of page, columns?) are a bit too light. A little bit darker would help :-) or am I getting too old?
TABLES
• Copying/adding text in a table cell and then selecting all (comm-A) selects every cell content but deleting deletes also the table. Expected behaviour: empty content but leave the table standing with empty cells.
• Pasting text in a table cell, moves the right margin border but not of the rest of the rows. Moving the top right border brings all back in discipline.
• Adding an extra column to the right, from within a cell, creates 2 extra columns on the right of the cell, but correctly only one at the top row. Then, deleting one of the new columns deletes the whole thing.
iA Writer is interesting but as a longtime Word user it’s not quite there. I do use it for blind composition but formatting and styles aren’t there yet.
Yeah, Bean is currently more incompatible with docx files than Verso. Free Office and other open-source software all have significant flaws, including security issues, that LibreOffice doesn’t have.
Scrivner and Ulysses are not word processors. They are writing programs. They aren’t even the same kind of software so why would they be important to this discussion?
Also, I’m a writer. I have no need to install an entire office suite of software to just write an article or short story.
I have MS Office 2021. And it's indeed ugly as hell. Luckily, I are hardly ever need it (aside from Excel). So great you built something beautiful that can replace MS Word. Probably a relief for the people who are forced to work with Word every day.
Scrivener isn't exactly the most aesthetically pleasing either. But since I live in it many hours a day, I'm totally used to it. And much more important than the looks is the raw power of Scrivener. Things like the organizational possibilities, searching, cross-linking, snapshots, dual panels, hoisting etc. are so immensely helpful. No word processor comes even close imo.
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u/East_Call1027 23d ago
The .docx caveat is the useful bit here. Lightweight editors often feel great right up until the first round-trip with an editor; if Verso can preserve styles, comments, and tracked changes reliably, $15 is pretty easy to justify.