I have a fondness for small software programs, produced by people who are passionate about a single product. Any of these programs is welcome relief to the corporate bloatware produced by huge software companies. I have a lot of small-house software, but what if I had to choose a single one? If I were stuck on a desert island with a computer and one software program, what would it be? That’s easy.

Everyone does word processing, and I do it for a living. I searched for years among a dearth of options for an alternative to Word. And I found it: Scrivener. It is simply the best software in the world for writing. Faced with the tyranny of the W icon, I boldly proclaim: Give me Scrivener, or give me dearth.

Word imposes endless toolbars and cryptic icons offering complex solutions for which there are no known problems. But Scrivener starts and stays with what a writer needs. No surprise: Scrivener was originally created by a single person, who started as a writer and still uses it for his own work.

Word imposes endless toolbars and cryptic icons. But Scrivener starts and stays with what a writer needs.

You choose how to use the program. One option is a clean, full-screen view — you against the text with no buttons or menus. Or you can break a project into smaller documents and organize them as an outline, or even as index cards on a virtual corkboard (Fig. 1). This flexibility illustrates the first key advantage: A “file” in Scrivener is not a single document, but a whole project — an ecosystem.

A second Scrivener advantage is its split-screen view, which displays two documents side-by-side (Fig. 2). Of course, this is useful for editing between writing files within a project. But since Scrivener is an accomplished host, the reference documents can be almost anything: Word files, PDFs, photos, videos, web links. For an ongoing book venture, I have more than a thousand reference documents embedded in my project, ready at a moment’s notice. Navigation among these files is a snap with a “binder” along the left column of the window. Like the rest of the program, the binder is simple enough to pick up immediately, but packed with plenty of customizable power when you’re ready.

Version tracking can be the bane of any writer’s existence — following the progress (or its opposite) of a document as it passes between interested parties. Scrivener’s approach is elegant: A “snapshot” function stores multiple versions of a document as “layers” under a single name. One version is live; others are available for comparison or retrieval with a mouse click.

When your project is ready for the cruel world, Scrivener’s “compile” function turns your many Scrivener documents into a single output file in a number of forms: Word, of course, along with PDF, HTML, rich text, and even Kindle and e-pub formats. Along the way, your output can be automatically converted to the exact text specifications of your client or publisher.

Is there more? Plenty: automatic formatting for screenwriting, daily writing targets to keep you on schedule, keyword embedding, elegant footnote management, even a random name generator for fiction authors. Here’s one: Demetrius David.

Right now, Scrivener is a Mac-only program, but there is a Windows Beta version on the site — for those Windows users not yet broken to the corporate software saddle. If you are a writer, get it. Get it now.

If I were stuck on a desert island with plenty of food and water, I’d have to figure out a way to use coconuts to charge my laptop batteries. After that, just give me Scrivener. Oh . . . and the Internet, which I’ll use to contact rescuers once the book is finished.