iOS: If you're doing a lot of writing on your iPhone or iPad, you know that formatting text is a serious chore. TextTool 2 helps with that, providing a ton of ways to transform, format and clean up text.

Mac: Last year, XKCD's Randall Monroe released Simple Writer, a web app that restricted your writing to the top 1000 most commons words in the English language. If web apps aren't your thing, Cleartext is a free Mac app that does the same thing.

Mac: Write!, a good-looking writing tool (previously Windows-only), now has a Mac version that brings all of its best features over, including auto-saving, cloud-synced documents, offline editing, day and night editing themes and unlimited undo.

Windows: Finding a good text editor can be tough. Some lack basic features, like spell checking, and others are so heavy they may as well be word processors. Write! is a new application, currently in beta, that rides the sweet spot and delivers the features you'd actually find useful without the cruft (or system bloat) you don't want.

The humble text editor is an indispensable tool for many developers, web designers, writers, and people simply looking for a quick way to jot down notes. But there are much better options than notepad.exe; one of our favourites is Notepad++.

Windows: We've all done it: in the middle of writing you get a notification that looks a lot more interesting, then another and another. Suddenly, you're distracted and procrastinating. FORCEdraft is a writing tool that stays open and blocks everything else on your computer until you hit the writing goal you set in the beginning.

Downloading advanced development software is the best option for professional and enthusiast developers. However, beginners and hobbyist developers might prefer SourceLair. There's no installation required, multiple languages are supported, and it integrates with GitHub.

Modern text editors allow you to use pre-defined snippets of code to improve your workflow. Emmet is a plugin for text and code editors that lets you quickly type CSS-like abbreviations and automatically expand them into a full block of code, saving you a lot of time and hassle.

Windows/Mac/Linux: Adobe just launched Brackets 1.0, a text editor for web developers. It's free and has inline editing, live preview and preprocessor support features.

Android: You might not think about coding from your phone, but that could just be because you haven't yet found the right app. Turbo Editor is a free file editor for Android that includes syntax highlighting for a number of languages.

Windows: Atom, the free text editor from the folks at Github (and one of our favourite text editors), now has an official Windows version. It's an alpha release, but it brings all of Atom's features to Windows, including support for the packages that make the tool so extendable.

iOS: Editorial is one of our favourite text editors on iOS, because it's incredibly powerful, has lots of customisation options, and allows you to create complex automation schemes. Now, it's on the iPhone too, and it comes with a slew of other improvements.

Mac (Windows/Linux coming soon): Atom, the text editor from the folks at GitHub and one of your favourites, is now open source and free to download and use. The team is still working on Windows and Linux versions, but the Mac version is out of closed beta and available to all.

Whether you're a developer or a writer, a good text editor is a must-have. The humble text editor is great for managing code, writing down quick notes, or just as a distraction-free writing tool. This week, we're looking at five of the best, based on your nominations.

Editing is one of the most important parts of writing, but it's hard to know where to start sometimes. Hemingway is a web app that highlights hard-to-read sentences, adverbs, complicated phrases and passive voice so you can make your writing more clear.

iPad: There are apps that are great for writing and then there are apps that great for editing. The recently updated Phraseology does both, but it really excels when you start editing text by showing you helpful statistics.

Mac/iOS: ia Writer is one of the more popular minimal text editors, and the Pro edition for both Mac and iOS adds some useful extra features. While it retains the simplicity of just offering text on a page, Writer Pro also includes several modes for different stages of writing and an incredibly useful syntax control to give you a lot more power when you're editing.

iPad: You have a lot of choices when it comes to text editors on the iPad, but a large chunk of them are very simplistic. If you're looking for a text editor with serious power, Editorial is what you're looking for.

Windows: Markdown is an awesome formatting language that lets you create rich documents using plain text syntax and MarkdownPad puts it to great use Windows.