Everything it does

Every feature in Verso

A native Mac word processor that opens your Word files, keeps their formatting, and saves them back to themselves. Here is the whole of it, in the order a document is made.

Track changes, the way Word writes them

Insertions, deletions and comments, attributed by author and timestamped. The Changes panel lists every edit in the document and lets you accept or reject them one at a time or all at once.

They are written into the .docx in the form Word expects, so the person you send it to sees your edits as edits — not as coloured text someone typed to look like edits.³

Verso with a chapter open, the Changes panel showing a tracked deletion and insertion, and the inspector on the right. — The Changes panel, mid-edit. · click to enlarge

Focus mode

One shortcut takes the application away. The toolbar goes, the sidebar goes, and the paragraphs either side of the one you are writing dim until they stop competing for attention.

What is left is a page, a cursor, and an esc to exit in the corner.

Light, dark, and five page colours

Verso follows the system appearance, and the page itself is a separate setting from the interface around it — so you can write on white in a dark room, or on sepia in a bright one.

Cycle them with ⌘⌥⇧A, without opening a settings panel. Custom is whatever colour you pick; the swatch shows its default.

Light

Grey

Sepia

Dark

Custom

What it opens and saves

.docx: Open, edit and save. The file you opened is the file you save.
.doc: Opens. Saves as .docx.
.dotx: Word templates open as ordinary documents.
.odt: OpenDocument. Formatting, images and tables survive.
.rtf: Rich text, with footnotes.
.md: Full round-trip, including tables and code blocks.
.txt: Plain text.
.html: Opens as rich text. Saves as .docx or Markdown.
.pdf: Export only.

Verso warns you before a save loses anything, and says exactly what. Formats that carry less than .docx are marked when you choose them, not afterwards.

Writing

Markdown round-trip: Open a .md, edit it as rich text, save it back as Markdown with headings, lists, tables, code blocks and inline formatting intact.
Mermaid diagrams: Flowcharts, sequence and Gantt diagrams in Markdown files render live rather than sitting there as source.
LaTeX maths: Paste an equation from ChatGPT or Gemini. Inline $…$ and display $$…$$ both typeset.
Syntax highlighting: Source files open with coloured keywords and strings: Swift, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, C, C++, C#, Go, Rust, Ruby, PHP, Shell, SQL, YAML, JSON, XML, HTML, CSS, R and Kotlin.
Smart paste: Tables pasted from a browser or a chatbot land as real grids. Code arrives highlighted.
Markdown shortcuts: Type # for a heading, - for a bullet, ** for bold. The shortcut applies and the syntax disappears.
Fade while typing: Everything but the line you are on dims slightly as you write, and comes back when you stop.
Typewriter scrolling: Keeps the insertion point at the centre of the window instead of letting it drift to the bottom.
Focus highlight: Focus mode dims by sentence or by paragraph, whichever suits what you are doing.

Typography

Small caps: Real small capitals from the font, not shrunken capitals faked by the app.
Oldstyle numerals: Figures with ascenders and descenders, for numbers set in running prose.
Proportional numerals: Figures spaced by their own width rather than lined up in columns.
Discretionary ligatures: The optional ones a typeface offers beyond fi and fl.
Stylistic alternates: Alternate letterforms where the typeface provides them.
Font, size, colour: The usual controls, plus highlighting, in the inspector rather than a floating panel.

OpenType features depend on the typeface. Verso greys out the ones the current font does not offer rather than letting you switch on something that will do nothing.

Structure

Table of contents: Generated from your headings, with page numbers, and correct after a close and reopen.
Footnotes and endnotes: Edited in a popover rather than by scrolling to the foot of the page.
Citations: Inserted inline and saved into the document as proper text.
Headers and footers: Page numbers, custom text, layout guides.
Document outline: A sidebar of every heading, for moving through something long.
Styles: Reformat one paragraph, then apply it to every paragraph in that style.
First page and odd/even: Different headers and footers for the first page, and for left and right pages.
Sections: Orientation, columns and header height set per section rather than per document.
Tab stops: Set on the ruler, with dot leaders — the thing tables of contents are actually made of.
Borders and shading: Per paragraph: all sides, top and bottom, or a single rule beneath.
Horizontal rules: With a thickness and a colour, rather than a row of underscores.
Spacing and indents: Line spacing, space before and after, left, right and first-line indents.
List numbering: Including which number a list starts at, for lists that continue across a break.

The page

Page setup: A4, Letter, Legal or custom. Portrait or landscape. Your own margins.
Columns: Multi-column layouts, preserved through a save to .docx.
Page colours: Five, including the sepia the letter on the homepage is set on.
Watermarks: Text watermarks for drafts and confidential documents.
No-Paper Mode: Drop the page edges and write on an uninterrupted surface.
Zoom: Trackpad pinch, or the usual shortcuts.
Text width: Narrow, medium, wide, or a measure set in characters — independent of the page size.
Layout guides: Show the margins and text frame while you are setting a page up.
Ruler: Draggable indent markers and tab stops, with the measurement as you drag, a guide line down the page while you drag, and snapping to the indents of the paragraphs around you. Drag a stop off the strip to delete it.
Column guides: See where the columns fall without printing to check, and drag a divider to resize the columns either side of it.

Counting

Words and characters: For the document, and for the selection when you have one.
Pages: The real count, from the paginated layout rather than an estimate.
Reading time: Alongside the counts, in the inspector.

The dozen you will actually use

Focus Mode⌘⇧F

Toggle tracking⌘⇧T

Accept change⌘⇧A

Reject change⌘⇧D

Changes panel⌘⌥H

Comments panel⌘⌥M

Insert footnote⌘⌥F

Insert table⌘⌥T

Insert link⌘K

Toggle inspector⌘⌥I

Cycle page appearance⌘⌥⇧A

Export as PDF⌘⌥⇧E

All forty-seven are in Help.

Everything else

Index

Full formatting: Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, superscript, subscript, colour, highlighting
Tables: Insert, resize, cell backgrounds, borders, row and column management
Page layout: A4, Letter, Legal. Portrait or landscape. Custom margins. Multi-column
Footnotes and TOC: Popover editing, auto-generated contents with page numbers
Headers and footers: Page numbers, custom text, and layout guides
Lists: Bullets, numbers, letters, Roman numerals. Five bullet styles
Find and Replace: Case-sensitive, whole-word, regex. Match counter
LaTeX math: Paste equations from ChatGPT or Gemini. Inline and display math
Customisable toolbar: Drag to reorder, toggle groups on or off. Your layout persists
Pinch to zoom: Trackpad pinch to zoom in and out of the document
Document outline: A sidebar of every heading, for moving through long documents
Mermaid diagrams: Flowcharts and sequence diagrams render live in Markdown documents
Style redefinition: Reformat a paragraph, then apply it to every paragraph in that style
Export to PDF: Print-ready PDF from any document
Watermarks: Text watermarks for drafts and confidential documents
Sixteen languages: Full UI localisation: English, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic, Polish, Chinese, French, Korean and more

Sixteen languages

The whole interface, not just the menus: English, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic, Polish, Chinese, French, Korean, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Turkish, Hindi and Ukrainian.

Right-to-left support is partial, and honestly so: Arabic reads correctly, but paragraph direction and mixed-direction editing still need work. It is on the roadmap, where the unfinished things live.

Try all of it free for 14 days.

Then $14.99, once. If something on this page does not work the way it reads, that is worth an email more than a refund.

Get Verso on the App Store Tell me what is missing

Notes

1.Download sizes as listed on the Mac App Store, August 2026. Verso 8.4 MB (v1.0.39); Microsoft Word 1,324 MB. Sizes vary by device and by macOS version, which is why both figures are quoted from the same source on the same day. ↩
2.Microsoft 365 Personal, $99.99 a year, billed annually, as listed August 2026. Word is also sold as a one-time purchase; the subscription is the route most people arrive by, and the one the comparison is about. ↩
3.Verso reads and writes .docx directly: the file you open is the file you save. Styles, tables, footnotes, headers, footers, numbering and comments survive the round trip. Features Verso does not implement are preserved untouched rather than dropped, so a document that passes through Verso comes back to Word intact. ↩
4.34 releases to date. The count is computed from the release notes rather than from the version number, because the history skips several versions and a number derived from v1.0.39 would overstate it. ↩
5.Fourteen day trial, then one payment. When a trial ends Verso becomes read-only: your documents still open, still scroll and still print. Nothing is held hostage. ↩
6.The headline at the top of this page is a real tracked change, struck text and all. It is the only marketing copy here that has been through an editorial process, and it lost. ↩