If one of your main activities in front of the computer has to do with writing, it is likely that you already have a favorite text editor, but that does not mean that you are not open to a better one.

Left is an excellent option for those looking for something simple, minimalist, beautiful, free of distractions, and with enough unique and useful features to choose it over others.

The application is free and open source, and is available for Windows, Linux and macOS. You can find the code on GitHub along with a list of instructions and keyboard shortcuts that you will need to learn.

Keyboard shortcuts, bookmarks, autocomplete words, quick reading

Shortcuts let you do things like open and save documents, increase or decrease the size of the text, autocomplete words, or jump between markers.

The markers are one of the interesting functions of Left, because you can create an index in the sidebar by which to navigate in your document if you write “#”, “##”, or “-” when starting a line.

Pressing TAB predicts the next word, CTRL + O opens a document, CTLR + S saves it. In the lower part you have a line, words and character counter.

Left counts with a quick reading system, if you select part of the text and then press CTRL + K, the editor will begin to show word by word in the lower part so you can read quickly.

By default the editor is black with light gray text, but you can change the appearance of the editor with multiple themes , you just have to look for the folder “themes” in which you downloaded with the program, then drag the editor any of the files with an extension .thm and change the appearance instantaneously.