iA Writer for Windows is Getting Authorship Capabilities

iA Writer for Windows will soon offer the same authorship capabilities as the Mac, iPad, and iPhone versions of the app.

“Common writing software treats all text as if it poured from one source,” the iA Writer team explains. “But words can be pasted from notes, revised from an older draft, added by a collaborator, quoted, spellchecked, or generated by AI.”

iA Writer is a minimalist Markdown editor that originated on the Mac and has since come to Windows in a less refined version. There was a big push with iA Writer 2.0 to close that gap, though I still feel it falls short. But with this change, now in beta, iA can close it further.

iA Writer’s Authorship functionality tracks authorship–meaning the source of each bit of text–and changes as they’re made, and it makes visible who (or, with AI, what) wrote what. Or, as the team writes, “it marks the difference between what you wrote, what came from somewhere else, and what changed along the way.”

“There were always editors, friends and sources involved,” iA adds. “And now that our tools are built for faster, more complex collaboration, text editors should reflect the sources. In times of Large Language Models, we need tools that put an honest light on authorship more than ever.”

Authorship is currently available in the iA Writer 2.1 Beta, which you can download if you’re a paying customer with an iA Writer license. It will ship publicly in iA Writer 2.1 soon.