The page

One column of monospaced text on an eggshell page, centred, and nothing around it. No sidebar, no preview pane, no toolbar, no word count unless you ask for it with ⇧⌘C.

Markdown is styled as you type, but the syntax characters stay where you put them — dimmed rather than hidden. A heading looks like a heading and still reads as ## Heading. Nothing reflows underneath you, and there is never a rendered copy of your document to keep in sync.

Outline Mode

⇧⌘O splits the window. Jot a rough outline on the left, and Gemini drafts it into prose on the right. A draft starts about a second and a half after you stop typing; ⌘↩ forces a fresh pass.

The outline is scratch space and is never written into your document. When a draft is worth keeping, "Insert into Document" appends it to the real file.

Select any passage and press ⌘K to hand it to Gemini with an instruction — tighten this, make it past tense, cut it in half. The replacement lands as a single edit you can undo.

Shortcuts

Install

Open the disk image and drag FocusWriter to your Applications folder. It is signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarized by Apple, so it opens with a double click — no security warnings, no right-click workaround.