Do you know anyone who claims to have never felt sad? I don’t, and neither do the people I know. Since all of us feel sad from time to time (some more than others), some of us seek ways to vent that feeling. And be it natural impulse or the first result from a Google Search, we come across the idea of writing our way to happiness. Does it work? Apparently it does, thousands have claimed that it works for a long time.

How I met monkkee

I, like many, write for leisure at times. It can be tough when you also write for a living, but it’s still one of my favorite things to do.

I never wrote anything personal on a piece of paper. The first time I wanted to write something that I don’t want others to read, I figured out how to make .doc files password protected. Over time, I also realized that my Google Drive is also password-protected, and I can write directly in the Drive. From there, I struggled.

Google Play Store has 2.87 million apps, and at least a thousand apps for writing/editing, word processing, but not one brings back the comfort of opening a MS Word file on a Windows XP machine. I had started to think that I will have to settle with something like Evernote or MS Notebook. That’s before I came across a good article on a shady website on web apps for journaling. For the uninitated, web apps are simply applications that exist as a website. Grammarly is a web app. Most of the well-known web apps also have a desktop client and/or mobile apps (Android and IOS).

In that blog post, I came across the name ‘monkkee’. For a long time, I thought it was Monkee. But it’s monkkee. I want you to remember this name if you write for leisure, passion, hobby – no matter how infrequently.

Real strengths and fabricated weaknesses of monkkee

Now here’s what monkkee can’t do.

You cannot use it for work. There’s no way to collaborate with others on a document. That disqualifies all questions about using monkkee for work, unless your work does not require any collaboration. That’s quite rare.

There’s no fancy editing option. You can do the standard bold and italics. You can also choose from a few font and change their size, but that applies to the entire document, not just the selected parts.

The editor looks a little outdated. That’s not a bad thing if all you want is a good writing experience.

To sum it up, monkkee is not for professional work. But it has the best user interface and most pragmatic features among the thousands of apps that are working in the same niche.

Why monkkee stands out

There are tonnes of apps in the niche of journalling. As far as I know, most people do not journal in Google Docs or MS Word. Journey, Penzu, LiveJounral, and a few other names are popular in this space. But monkkee takes the principle of minimalism to its peak of practical usefulness. Here’s an example: in monkkee, you can directly save your files to Google Drive, but you do not have to do it all the time. There’s a feature called temporary storage in monkkee where the files you open frequently are stored. For backup, you can save your files directly on your computer or in GDrive.

Everything about monkkee hits the right chord. I know much of it is my personal and subjective preferences, but I also have a feeling that not enough people know about monkkee.

I know it seems gushing at this point, but monkkee is indeed a work of genius.