Bean: A Free Clean & Simple Word Processor

Posted by Ben Miller on 11/21/07 in Office, Productivity, Utilities

One thing that most Mac users pride themselves on is the incredible amount of quality software to quickly and easily get a task done. Some of the best Mac software out there is single-purpose driven.

It makes the most sense, and it has been Apple’s philosophy for years. All this being said, however, there is something missing when it comes to word processing on the Mac.

The thought of opening Microsoft Office to write a paper just depresses me. It’s slow, bloated, and one of the most “un-Mac-like” apps you can find; and until OpenOffice can be a real Mac app (Cocoa), it’s not worth the trouble most of the time either. Pages is making strong strides, but you have to purchase the iWork suite, which can be a problem for some people as well.

Bean Screenshot

You may remember Bean when we mentioned it briefly while it was in beta. Things have changed dramatically since then and I encourage everyone to give it another look. Bean is a light-weight simple word processor that can take care of almost all of a casual user’s needs. It has everything most users look for, including a live word count, spell checking, word completion, floating windows, auto-saving, and much more.

It even has the ability to import Word documents, though it has a few limitations. The only problem I have had when using Word documents, is the inability for Bean to understand footnotes. This may be a problem for some, but it wasn’t for myself.

This word processor is built on Mac OS X’s Cocoa framework, so it’s actually similar to TextEdit. Some call it TextEdit on steroids. But best of all, it’s free and open-source. We totally recommend it, if you’re on a tight budget (if you need a full fledged office suite, considering investing in iWork ‘08 or OpenOffice), or have simple word processing needs. If you’re a code monkey, the Objective-C source code is available for you to tweak and customize, so you can add new features if you wish.

Download Bean and try it today. What word processor do you use/recommend?

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7 Comment(s)

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Jason Mosley said on

November 21st, 2007 at 11:51 am

The only think I didnt like about it was that it didnt have spell check. Dose it have it now?

Superdotman said on

November 21st, 2007 at 12:26 pm

@Jason Mosley:
I would have thought it would have had spell checking in the beginning, since it uses the Cocoa API so extensively. In any case, it’s there now; go to Edit > Spelling… if it’s not working.

Jason Mosley said on

November 21st, 2007 at 1:01 pm

Ok thanks. I remember downloading this before and the spell check didn’t work.

I am going to give it a try to day when I get home. I have open office now but all I really need is Wordpressing with spell check.

Bean sounds like it should be a good choice.

Sleepy said on

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:09 pm

You say that if you need a full office suite to try OpenOffice. What about NeoOffice, http://www.neooffice.org. It is based on OpenOffice but has integrated dozens of native Mac features. Give it a try if you need a full office suite.

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Jeff said on

December 6th, 2007 at 11:05 am

I agree with Sleepy, use NeoOffice. OO sucks (IMO). The interface is as ugly as you can get. NeoOffice has Mac features and styling, and allows you to open or create most Office docs.

Walter Mitty said on

February 7th, 2008 at 3:31 am

I’m a user of Bean, and mainly to replace TextEdit; I now do most of my word-processing on Bean, and copy-paste the text to Word 2004 when I need to format it. It’s fast, stable and isn’t weighed down by hundreds of features which I never use. (I’m a political science major at college.) At the moment it’s still being updated regularly, and since it’s open-source it’s probably going to stay free for the forseeable future. Highly recommended.