Quiet Write vs Bookhand

Quiet Write is a calm, local-first Markdown writing app for journals, drafts, essays, newsletters, and quiet daily notes. Create and edit drafts in a focused writing space with Markdown-friendly tools, preview, outline, focus mode, and typewriter mode. Keep your writing organized with archive, recently deleted, search, and version snapshots. Quiet Write is intentionally small: no custom account, no subscription, no publishing platform, and no AI writing pipeline. Your writing is stored locally first, with optional iCloud sync for continuity across your Apple devices. Features: • Write drafts, journals, essays, newsletters, and notes • Markdown-friendly editor with preview • Focus mode and typewriter mode • Outline view for longer writing • Archive, restore, and recently deleted • Version snapshots for writing changes • Search active and archived drafts • Import .md and .txt files • Export one draft as Markdown • Export all writing as Markdown or JSON backup • Optional iCloud sync • One-time lifetime unlock Quiet Write is designed for people who want a slower, clearer writing space without accounts, feeds, pressure, or noise.

Bookhand is a free app for writing little books: journals, notes, ideas, short stories, poetry, philosophical treatises or anything else you feel like writing. The idea is that your words live on something like actual paper. Your text is typeset onto real pages with proper margins and page numbers, the pages curl as you turn them, and every notebook gets its own paper size, typefaces, colors and a cover you design yourself. READING A notebook opens in Page Mode, laid out the way it would be set on printed paper, from pocket A6 up to A4. There's also a full-screen e-reader mode with the same page-turning, an outline for jumping to a chapter or section, in-book search, and a page grid for finding your place visually. WRITING Edit Mode is a full-screen, distraction-free editor for your award-winning novel, thrilling memoir or truly revolutionary shopping list, whichever the case may be. Paragraphs can be headings, body text or block quotes; add images and control how they sit on the page. A rearrange mode lets you move, copy and cut whole paragraphs at once. MAKE IT YOURS Choose from seventeen carefully picked typefaces, set your paper size and margins, pick paper and ink colors, style the page numbers, then design the cover: board color, patterns, foil stamping, frames, flourishes and your own lettering. YOUR WORDS ARE YOURS Notebooks are stored on your device. There are no accounts, no servers and no database, and your text goes nowhere unless you want it to. Export to PDF, EPUB, Markdown or plain text, or as a .bookhand file for handing a notebook to someone else (or storing a backup for yourself). Import works too: bring in Markdown, plain text or EPUB. Notebooks can also be locked or hidden behind a PIN. FREE, REALLY Bookhand is made by one person as a personal project, so it's free, with no ads, no in-app purchases, no subscriptions and no upsell pop-ups. I just wanted an app where it's fun to sit down and write little books. I imagine you do too, so here we are.