Writing in ST-Log magazine, David Plotkin says "I suspect ST Writer's popularity surprised Atari" due to its lack of a GUI and its use of "variety of arcane codes in your document" and other annoying features like only opening a single document at a time and the need to run a separate program to change printers. He notes "The trade-off for these shortcomings is speed, and many people swear by ST Writer because it is so fast." and that it includes numerous features not seen in most word processors, like "double column printing, headers and footers".
