Focused is a distraction-free Markdown writing environment for macOS, crafted by indie developer 71squared to strip everything that stands between you and the blank page.
What is Focused?
Focused is a native Mac Markdown editor built around one uncompromising idea: the best writing software is the software you stop noticing. Where other apps pile on panel toggles, plugin menus, and cloud sync dashboards, Focused presents a clean canvas — your text, and nothing else competing for your attention.
The app sits squarely in the tradition of serious Mac writing tools. It renders Markdown syntax in a subtly styled view, supports a typewriter-scroll mode that keeps your cursor centred on screen, and offers a full-screen environment that lets the rest of macOS fade gracefully away. It is the kind of app that makes you want to close Slack and actually write something.
What does Focused do best?
Focused excels at creating a psychological bubble around your writing session. The moment you open a document, everything pulls back: the interface simplifies, chrome recedes, and your prose fills the screen. After a week of daily use — I speak from experience — opening Focused becomes a near-Pavlovian trigger to produce words rather than shuffle tabs.
Markdown support is first-class. Headings, bold, italic, links, code blocks, and block quotes all receive tasteful in-editor styling — enough visual hierarchy to aid reading without making you feel like you are wrestling a WYSIWYG editor. Your text stays plain text throughout; Focused simply makes it pleasant to look at while you write.
- Typewriter mode — keeps your active line centred so you never write hunched at the screen's bottom edge
- Full-screen focus environment — lets the macOS desktop and menubar recede for genuine heads-down sessions
- Live Markdown styling — visual hierarchy that aids readability without obscuring the raw syntax
- Native macOS performance — no Electron overhead, no web-view lag, no unnecessary RAM draw
Who should use Focused?
Focused is the right tool for anyone who writes in Markdown regularly and finds most editors too visually busy. That covers a surprisingly wide range: bloggers who draft before pushing to a CMS, developers writing README files and internal documentation, novelists who have adopted Markdown for its long-term portability, and students who want a clean environment for thinking on the page. If your typical session is "open the app, write for an hour, copy or export the result", Focused was built for exactly that loop.
It is probably not the right choice if you need a full project-management layer sitting on top of your writing — chapter outlines, cross-document research panels, sync to task managers. For that kind of depth, Ulysses or Obsidian will serve you far better. Focused is a writing app, not a writing system, and it makes no apology for it.
How much does Focused cost?
Focused is a paid app available directly from 71squared's website. It follows a one-time purchase model rather than a subscription — an increasingly rare stance and one that earns immediate goodwill from writers tired of recurring billing statements from their tools. Check 71squared.com for the current price, since major version releases occasionally adjust it.
There is no crippled free tier with locked exports, and no in-app purchase required to unlock the focus mode. You pay once and receive the complete experience. That pricing philosophy matches the app's overall aesthetic: nothing hidden, nothing dangled in front of you as an upsell.
What are the best Focused alternatives?
The strongest competition lives in the same distraction-free Markdown niche. iA Writer is the natural gold-standard comparison: it offers a larger feature surface — style checker, focus-sentence mode, wikilinks, content blocks — plus a polished iOS companion, but it costs more and nudges some users toward a subscription for cross-device sync. Typora hides Markdown syntax entirely behind rendered output, which writers who want pure prose flow often love, though it can feel opaque when you are debugging a malformed table. Bear is worth a look if you want notes and writing unified under one roof with seamless iCloud sync across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Ulysses is the power option for anyone managing dozens of long-form documents — its project-management depth outpaces Focused significantly, though its subscription model remains polarising. Obsidian is free and infinitely extensible via community plugins, but calling it distraction-free would require a very generous definition of the phrase.
Focused sits between iA Writer's feature breadth and Typora's pure-output mode in terms of complexity and opinions. If those two bracket your expectations, Focused deserves a serious look before you commit.
