Cleartext is a free, open-source writing app for macOS that enforces plain-language discipline by restricting you to the 1,000 most common words in the English language.
What is Cleartext?
Cleartext is a minimalist Mac text editor built around a single constraint: every word you type must belong to the thousand most frequently used words in English. Anything outside that vocabulary gets highlighted in red the moment you finish typing it, nudging you to find a simpler substitute. Think of it as a writing coach that refuses to let you hide behind jargon.
The concept draws inspiration from Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer and the Up-Goer Five project — the idea being that if you can explain something in everyday language, you probably understand it better than you think.
What does Cleartext do best?
Cleartext excels at stripping pretension from your prose. Whether you are drafting a product announcement, writing onboarding copy, or preparing a talk abstract, the constraint forces you to think in concrete nouns and active verbs rather than reaching for industry shorthand.
I started using it before writing user-facing error messages for a side project, and the results were striking. Phrases like "authentication failure" became "we couldn't confirm who you are" — immediately friendlier and clearer. The red highlights are not punishing; they are clarifying. You quickly internalize which of your pet words are actually doing real work and which are just vocabulary filler.
- Instant vocabulary feedback — violations highlight live as you type, not after a spell-check pass
- Distraction-free canvas — no toolbars, no formatting panels, no sidebar clutter
- Clipboard-friendly — write constrained prose here, paste it wherever your real editor lives
- Lightweight and native — launches instantly, uses almost no RAM, no Electron overhead
Is Cleartext free?
Yes — Cleartext is completely free and its source code is publicly available on GitHub under an open-source licence. There is no paid tier, no subscription, no nag screen.
Because it lives on GitHub rather than the Mac App Store, you install it by downloading the release zip directly from the repository or via Homebrew Cask. The trade-off is that you bypass Apple's notarization pipeline, so macOS Gatekeeper may prompt you on first launch — right-click and choose Open to proceed.
Who should use Cleartext?
Cleartext is ideal for anyone whose audience is not a domain expert. UX writers polishing microcopy, founders drafting landing-page headlines, developer-advocates writing tutorials for newcomers, and technical PMs translating roadmap items for non-technical stakeholders will all get immediate value from it.
It is less suited to academic or legal writing where precise terminology is mandatory, or to fiction where vocabulary range is a virtue rather than a vice. Poets, stay away.
Power users of richer writing environments — iA Writer, Ulysses, or Obsidian — will find Cleartext most useful as a complementary scratchpad rather than a primary editor. It does one thing and does it sharply.
How does Cleartext compare to iA Writer?
iA Writer is a full-featured Markdown editor with syntax highlighting, focus mode, library management, and cross-device iCloud sync. Cleartext has none of that, and deliberately so. Where iA Writer helps you produce polished long-form work, Cleartext helps you think through your word choices before you write that long-form piece.
The smarter workflow is to use them together: draft in Cleartext when you want to pressure-test clarity, then graduate the polished copy to iA Writer or whichever environment you publish from. Comparing them as competitors misses the point — Cleartext is closer to a constraint-writing exercise than an editor in the traditional sense.
What are the best Cleartext alternatives?
If the vocabulary-limit concept appeals but you need more flexibility, the Hemingway Editor (hemingwayapp.com, also available as a paid Mac app) targets readability grade levels rather than a fixed word list — a softer constraint that still pushes you toward shorter sentences and active voice. It also flags adverbs, passive constructions, and complex phrases explicitly, which Cleartext does not.
For pure focus-mode writing without vocabulary restrictions, iA Writer and Typora are the Mac power-user standards. If you want to stay in your code editor, the Markdown Preview extensions in VS Code cover much of the drafting workflow without switching apps at all.
