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Style Check
Style Check for Mac is like having a personal editor-in-chief on your device, carefully reviewing your text for redundancies, clichés, and filler words as you type.
Important points about this feature:
- only you see words being crossed out (the strikethrough mark won’t appear in Preview or Export)
- no deletions occur unless you choose to do them
- your text stays private and on your device (not sent to an internet service for review)
- there is no AI and it doesn’t steal your texts
Style Check is currently available for English, French, Spanish and German. It will cross out:
- Fillers (
basically,pretty much,sort of) - Redundancies (
basicfundamentals, combinetogether, falldown) - Clichés (
against all odds,brass tacks,long and short of it)
For more details about Style Check, you can read our introduction blog post The Power of Style Check or check our quick tour on YouTube:
Enable Style Check
You can enable/ disable Style Check from:
- the Menu Bar Focus → Enable/ Disable Style Check
- the shortcut ⌥⇧⌘D
- the Focus dropdown in the Editor’s title bar
You can fully enable Style Check (including fillers, redundancies, clichés, and custom patterns) or just some of them:
We spent a lot of time developing this feature and we are still improving it regularly.
However, our users might feel the need to customize Style Check regarding their writing style. This is where Custom Patterns shines.
Custom Patterns
Custom patterns allow you to create exceptions or new rules to Style Check, to better fit your style.
To create a custom pattern, go to Settings → Editor and click Custom Patterns… in the Style check row.
Below is an example of adding an exception that allows the filler “as well as”:
Custom Patterns Syntax
For your information, here is the syntax for customizing Style Check with Custom Patterns. You won’t need to remember it as you can find all of these in the Help Section of iA Writer.
Add a Rule
filler
custom ~~filler~~
Provide an Exception
Exceptions affect both custom and built-in patterns.
-filler
-custom ~~filler~~ exception
Regular Expressions
You can use regular expressions by enclosing a pattern in slashes:
/custom ~~filler~~ reg(exp?|ular expression)/
-/reg(exp?|ular expression) exception/
| Feature | Notes |
|---|---|
Character classes [a-c0-9] |
Supported, limited to ASCII |
Repeated character classes [a-z]+ |
Does not repeat if the character class contains more than 10 characters |
Negated [^a] |
Ignored |
Optional a? |
Supported |
Escaped \. |
Supported |
a* b+ c{2,} d{3,15} |
Limited to 10 repetitions |
| Lazy matches | Undefined behavior |
| Greedy matches | Undefined behavior |
Alternation | |
Supported |
Octal characters \0ooo |
Supported |
Any character . |
Ignored |
Word character \w |
Undefined behavior |
Non-word character \W |
Undefined behavior |
Anchors ^ $ \b \B \A \Z \z \G |
Supported |
Capturing parentheses (…) |
Supported |
Backreferences \1 |
Supported |
Named capture groups (?<name>…) |
Supported |
Named backreferences \k<name> |
Supported |
Non-capturing parentheses (?:…) |
Supported |
Comments (?#…) |
Supported |
Lookahead (?=…) |
Ignored |
Negative lookahead (?!…) |
Ignored |
Lookbehind (?<=…) |
Ignored |
Negative lookbehind (?<!…) |
Ignored |
Atomic match (?>…) |
Non-capturing parentheses |
Expression modifiers (?id-id:…) |
Ignored |
Mode modifiers (?id-id) |
Ignored |
Modifiers /…/id-id |
Supported |
| Modifiers | Notes |
|---|---|
Case insensitive matching i |
On by default |
Diacritic insensitive matching d |
Off by default |
Note that only a subset of regular expression features is supported to avoid slowing down editing.
Editor
Authorship
Highlight the text you craft yourself and keep track of your sources, artificial or natural.
Focus Mode
Shut down distractions. Focus on the sentence or paragraph you're currently working on.
Syntax Highlight
A more structured view of your document will help you improve your writing style.
Stats
From word count to estimated reading time, document stats help you stay on top of things.
Metadata
A simple key-value format for storing additional information about a document, only visible in the Editor.
Smart Automation
Auto text completion and transformation: focus on your writing, without getting bogged down by minor details.
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