Verso Writer 1.0.37

Verso Writer

A native Mac word processor that opens the .docx someone emailed you, lets you edit it, and saves it back to the same file instead of converting it into another format.

That is the gap it aims at: heavier than TextEdit, lighter than Microsoft 365, and without an account or a cloud folder. You write locally. There is no sign-in. The developer (Tomasz Smieja / Teze Ltd) states the app collects no data. Files stay on disk as .docx, Markdown, RTF, or plain text; PDF is an export. Features Verso does not implement are left in the file rather than stripped, so a round trip to Word is meant to keep styles, tables, footnotes, headers, comments, and numbering intact.

Writing on the Mac

The toolbar fades while you type. Focus Mode hides chrome and dims surrounding paragraphs so the current sentence stays readable; Esc restores the rest. Page colours include light, off-white, sepia, dark, and Auto. Track changes write insertions, deletions, and comments the way Word expects, with accept and reject in a Changes panel. Markdown can open as rich text and save back with structure; Mermaid diagrams and LaTeX math render in the document. Citations import from BibTeX and can format as APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, or Vancouver. Outline, tables, images, columns, watermarks, regex find and replace, and a customisable toolbar cover most long-document chores.

Price and limits

The Mac App Store listing is free with a 14-day full trial, then a $14.99 one-time unlock; after the trial the app becomes read-only rather than locking files. No subscription. It requires macOS 14 or later, runs on Apple silicon and Intel, and is about 9 MB. The UI is localised in sixteen languages. It is still a solo Mac-only app: no Windows client, no iCloud sync, and the author says it does not yet do everything a full word processor would. Version 1.0.37 is the current App Store release.