IA’s devs are unapologetically opinionated about how people should write, and for years they have purposefully restricted the number of ways the screen can be customized. That has its advantages - I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent pfaffing about inside Ulysses, customizing fonts, sizes and text and background colors (and importing and trying out themes created by others) to get most comfortable. I like IA Writer and I own it for iOS/Mac, but it’s not my main writing app.
But until the last version (and the app has been around since maybe 2012) you couldn’t make text smaller or larger beyond what they thought was an appropriate size, there were no tags, and for many years there was just a single (albeit nice) embedded font that could be used: Nitti Light. Even today, they now only let you choose between some tweaked open-source fonts of their choosing, which makes me a little batty. And the lack of colors you note echoes Apple’s removal a couple of OS versions ago of colored icons from the Finder’s Favorites/Drives sidebar column, which I abhor.
Still, it’s a really good app for getting out of the way and writing. On iOS I generally prefer to write in IA Writer more than in Ulysses. But on the Mac the imposed restrictions came to chafe over time, although I think they have a winner in their new Quattro font.
When I’m writing I have a couple of fonts I prefer to write with, so I tend to use apps that let me choose the font. And I also don’t like spending long periods of time in the standard too-bright and too-contrasty light mode, or the one single dark mode. That’s why, for me at least, on the Mac I have tended to standardize on Ulysses and BBEdit, where I’ve customized the fonts and colors.
