Parchment

When it comes to the writing process, many applications tend to stray away from the original experience provided by typewriters, free of distractions or customization features that may end up confusing certain users, rather than helping them. However, one of the offerings that stand out from the pack is Tauri Notepad, a minimalist word processor that keeps the same familiar design across its platforms for an immersive user experience.

Once installed, double-clicking the program’s automatically generated desktop shortcut greets users to a straightforward layout that does away with the quintessential icons employed by many developers for use as visual cues meant to take up less space and fill the command ribbon with as many shortcuts as possible. As such, each function is clearly labeled to avoid the possibility of posing a steep learning curve to users trying to get accustomed to the app’s structure, while also contributing to the clean design language.

Creating, opening and saving items is done straight from the title bar, while the tabbed menu underneath allows you to switch between a light and dark mode for late night writing sessions independently of your operating system’s overall theme, for an added flexibility bonus. Those with ultra-wide monitor setups may prefer to run multiple windows side-by-side, and the included text wrap option lets you avoid the need to scroll horizontally when reading long sentences.

While the program works relatively well in its current form, certain improvements can be made to augment the user experience, starting with a bug that changes an already opened document’s title in the upper right corner into the default “Untitled” template once its contents are altered, which can cause confusion with many users trying to keep in mind what file they were initially working on. Finally, an option to increase the font size through a combination between the Control key and scrolling up or down would be a good addition for those with lower visual acuity.

If Windows’ latest iteration of the Fluent Design language does not suit your taste, and you wish to try out a simple text editor with a clean layout, then Tauri Notepad may be the right tool for you, given its accessible interface and dark theme support.