Processing Words with Letters

It’s easy to get caught up in our own heads, in our own needs. That holds especially true, as I’ve discovered, for text editors and word processors.

We think that because we need and use many of the features, many of the functions, many of the bells and whistles of top-heavy applications that others are in the same boat as us. Yes, I’ve fallen into the trap of thinking like that more than once!

But that way of looking at things is not even remotely close to the truth. I was reminded of that in early 2025 when a friend asked for a recommendation for a lightweight word processor. Most of the word processors that they tried were too much for their needs; they just wanted something simple. I pointed them to one of two for the (proprietary) operating system they’re using, but the reasons behind the request stuck in my memory.

Recently, I stumbled across a minimalist word processor for GNOME called Letters. It falls into the category of what I call software for the masses and not the classes. And, as it turns out, it’s not a bad lightweight word processor.

Let’s take a look at it.

Getting Letters

You can do that by either using your distribution’s software centre or by installing Letters as a flatpak.

Letters installs quickly. You’ll be able to use it before you know it.

Using Letters

When you first fire up Letters, you get a blank canvas, like this:

You can either start typing or click the hamburger menu in the top right and select Open to open a file on your computer. Letters can open files in these formats:

• ODT (used by word processors like LibreOffice Writer).
• Microsoft Word DOCX.
• Markdown.
• HTML.
• Text.
• RTF.

Here’s a view of Letters in action:

Formatting

The formatting options, available on the formatting toolbar at the top of the application's window, are limited. You can add headings; convert a block of text to code or a quote; or apply bold, italics, underlining, strikethrough, or highlighting to text.

On the formatting toolbar, you click the + icon to insert an image, a list, or a link. You click the downward arrow to indent or outdent text or apply a strikethrough or highlighting.

You can only add bullet lists to a document. Letters doesn’t recognize numbered lists.

Something I found interesting was that when I opened a document that contains, say, superscripts those rendered properly in Letters. You just can’t apply that formatting when working on a document.

What I Didn’t Like About the Formatting Options

The problem I have with the formatting options isn’t the limited number of them, but the familiarity¹ (or lack thereof) of the formatting toolbar. Here’s what it looks like:

It’s easy to spot the basic character formatting options available on the toolbar. The other icons on the toolbar, though, take some getting used to. What they’re for isn’t immediately obvious.

Saving and Exporting Your Work

You can save your documents in any of the supported formats that I mentioned above. To do that, select Save or Save As from the hamburger menu and, in the case of the latter, select the file format and then click Save.

Saving as Markdown does a decent job, while saving as HTML only gives you the body of the document — it doesn’t include the HTML code the comes before or after the body. The results of saving as ODT and Word look fine, though a bit bland.

You can also export a document as a PDF file by selecting Export to PDF from the hamburger menu. The resulting PDF doesn’t look too bad, as you can see in this example:

What Letters is Missing

Letters is still a fairly young piece of software. At the moment, it lacks spelling and grammar checkers. Those are on the developer’s roadmap, as is word count. On top of that, you can't:

• Change the font. Letters uses the default document font specified in your window manager’s settings.
• Control pagination or change the page size or layout.
• Insert tables into a document. Again, this is something on the developer’s roadmap.

Final Thoughts

Admittedly, I don’t use a word processor all that often. I do all of my writing in a text editor, formatting it with Markdown. When I need to, I convert a document to a word processor format using a utility called pandoc (which is also what Letters uses when you select the Save As option).

If I did need a lightweight word processor, I’d most likely turn to Letters. I found Letters to be easy to use and its output perfectly serviceable. Letters is what I call simple software: software that does just what it needs to do, not software that tries to be everything to everyone. Once it gets a spelling checker and a word count feature, there’s a good chance Letters will be a regular on my desktop.

— Scott Nesbitt