Writing writing software
I'm an independent author, and I recently started getting into Linux after decades as a Windows-only person. This means I have need for software to write my books that runs on Windows and Linux. Currently, I use Scrivener, which is fine, but doesn't work on Linux. There are things that do, like novelWriter, which is open source, loaded with features and under active development. Indeed, for my purposes, it feels like overkill almost, a bit like Scrivener has always felt.
There are also online editors like Atticus, although this is relatively expensive and seems to use the troublesome lifetime pricing structure where you only pay once and have access forever. This, of course, requires that they recruit new users consistently to pay for the existing ones, and that makes me twitchy.
What I'm looking for, then, is simplicity and open source. I didn't find exactly what I wanted, so of course I'm now making it myself.
Introducing Plotwise Writer.
It's early days, but my goal is to have everything right there in the toolbar and to magic away as much complexity as I can while still allowing customisation. It will also be free and open source. The MVP feature set looks like this:
- Nested customisable folder structure
- Always saved; never lose anything
- Version history on documents
- Simple export to PDF or EPUB3
- Writing statistics, word count targets, etc
- Customisable but with useful defaults
- Light and dark themes
- No AI nonsense
Other formats and features will come in time, as will things like importing from other software, and spell check, which I'm currently assessing.
I'm hoping to start releasing some alpha versions in the coming months.