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novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels
- DocTomoe 5y agoearlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25833328#25833594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25833328#25833594
- maydup-nem 5y agoit's amazing what people will do to avoid using emacs
- NeutralForest 5y agoEven if you prefer markdown over org-mode, there's stuff like https://www.zettlr.com/ https://www.zettlr.com/ which works really well
- totetsu 5y agoZotero integration would be a plus over orgmode too
- NeutralForest 5y agoThere's emacs-zotero and zotxt you can use with org-mode. Add org-ref into the mix and it's all good.
- totetsu 5y agoThanks
- lifty 5y agoit's amazing what people will do to avoid writing a novel
- torh 5y agoit's amazing what people will do to avoid reading a novel
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoI think it's amazing people read novels. Even if I had infinite time I'm not sure I would. Not that I'm against them! A great novel is a beautiful thing, and I'm glad someone is out there to enjoy them.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wellthisisgreat 5y agoAudiobooks are a good middle ground if the voice actor matches your perception of the narrator.
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoI'm a voracious consumer of podcasts and the audio edition of the Economist. Alas, it leaves me no time for fiction.
- torh 5y agoI might. But for now, I found that I prefer to read biographies. They just seems to give me more joy.
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoGreat point. I love biography. The myriad details that don't matter at all to me if someone made them up are absolutely fascinating when they're (more likely) real.
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoThe crucial ideas in a piece of fiction, I find I generally can absorb much faster in some other format. It's true that the flavor of the world and the human interactions is lost. But I have an actual world to provide those. I can see the argument that my experience of human interactions is a biased and incomplete sample. That's clearly true. But they are the relevant ones to my experience. And I'm always disappointed at the bias in the human interactions portrayed by novels. They are almost invariably driven by unrealistically evil people, and the stakes are typically too high to bear any relevance to most of human life. Most conflict is between people none of whom can be well characterized as evil. There is substantial variation in peoples' values, and in the information they have, and those are the important drivers of what people do. Damn, I should write a novel.
- sicariusnoctis 5y agoThis is a strange way to say "stubbornly use an editor that is inferior to vim". :P
- RealStickman_ 5y agoMaybe he uses Evil-Mode
- maydup-nem 5y agoI do : )
- Grimm665 5y agoGenuine question: as a long time Emacs user, and someone with 0 hours writing novels, I feel I would already have a general idea of how to set up Emacs org-mode to be comfortable for novel writing. How would you approach this task in vim? I use vim extensively, but only on remote servers and without configs or plugins. What plugins or settings would you use to set up vim for novel writing?
- bitexploder 5y agoLong time emacs user. I have been enjoying vscodium with some Emacs and markdown plugins for almost all writing and note taking. Been using PyCharm for Python dev. Just felt I didn’t have time to fiddle with my lisp code and Emacs setup the last few years. I still hop in for org mode once in a while, otherwise, I have moved on. VS code is kind of this generations Emacs. I think it does most things better for most people.
- olivierestsage 5y agoVscode/vscodium may be nice for a lot of tasks, and probably preferable for many users overall, but I think there will always be a certain mindset of developer/writer/person who prefers the Emacs approach. When I tried Emacs after Vscode I was blown away by the ability to write my own customizations that can affect every level of how it operates (and I'm not part of a generation that learned Emacs by default).
- bitexploder 5y agoI do agree, ultimately it comes down to a few factors: inclination and time being chief among them. Does tinkering in Emacs actually save me time or is it something I am doing because I like doing it. There is a non-trivial cost to living in the Emacs ecosystem. That’s why I caveated things. I have used Emacs a long, long time and I still do, but I have simplified my setup and backed off of it for many editing chores. I don’t think the utility is there for someone to spend the man hours customizing an editing environment for say Python dev when something like Pycharm exists, for example. Even vscode with a few extensions is very powerful and reaching IDE levels of capability. Emacs and living in its lisp machine is amazing and Zen and something I leveraged when I enjoyed the whole process. These days I simply don’t have time :)
- eointierney 5y agoWith org-mode and writeroom I use these for my D&D campaigns and they're _amazing_ What's a roleplaying campaign but a collaborative novel with a few too many dice?
- toyg 5y agoThat should tell you something about the general usability and friendliness of emacs.
- maydup-nem 5y agogeneral usability? emacs is as usable as you make it. friendliness? emacs doesn't need friends, it needs power users.
- toyg 5y ago> general usability? emacs is as usable as you make it. Lol, I have to remember this line... "yeah, this house has no bathroom, but you can build one yourself that it's as good as it gets!"
- allarm 5y agoIt’s not a correct analogy though. In case of Emacs the house has a bathroom for you, a sauna for your whole family, separate bathrooms for your cat and your dog and at least one bathroom for an extraterrestrial entity that breathes helium. And yeah, in case you’re not satisfied with that amount of bathrooms you can build up your own after some training.
- mhd 5y agoHow an actual author (Vernor Vinge) uses Emacs: https://i.imgur.com/G6HXGCw.png https://i.imgur.com/G6HXGCw.png (CW: Emacs^2)
- dubya 5y agoThis illustrates what I miss using WYSIWYG programs like MS Word or Google Docs: the ability to easily comment out lines without deleting them, or leave notes to oneself.
- mdrachuk 5y agoIs there a story behind that logo?
- bluenose69 5y agoAlthough I'm happy to stick with vim, so I'm not in the target audience, I do appreciate these additions to markdown: 1. `%` for comments 2. `synopsis:` for helping with indexing etc 3. `@` for a keyword-value system Regarding the last, it seems a shame that this collides with a scheme commonly used for bibliographic references, but I guess the idea is that a novel won't have such things.
- the_lonely_road 5y agoIf anyone is looking for a paid product, Scriviner has been amazing for my novel writing productivity. You can sync your smart phone version to your desktop version using Dropbox. It gives you Jira level power over how your organize your project and has really easy export functionality that turns your writing into all kinds of industry standard sizing and layouts. I know it sounds like I'm affiliated based on that gushing review but I am not, just a really happy writer that finally found a good tool and wanted to share!
- brtkdotse 5y ago> It gives you Jira level power I’d rethink this analogy for the HN crowd
- weedfroglozenge 5y agoWorking on CPTR-045
- nathell 5y agoAt least it’s not COVID-19
- notjustanymike 5y agoI suspect you meant: Loading CPTR-045 Loading CPTR-045 Loading CPTR-045 Loading CPTR-045
- kayodelycaon 5y agoI think it's pretty apt. Scrivener is a large, configurable application. The only real difference in the analogy is stock Scrivener is easier to navigate and nicer to use than stock JIRA.
- gentleman11 5y agoI think they were saying that hn crowd tends to dislike jira
- falcolas 5y agoSo, some feedback should a developer come here: You absolutely need to offer controls to zoom the text. On a HD (retina, 4k, etc) display, the text is insufferably small.
- KingOfCoders 5y agoWhy is use Scrivener, is I need a tool where I can easily move sections and subsections around and give each a status/flag. There some other things in Scrivener that are nice, but this is core to me. Any other editor for writing books where I can easily see and move sections around is not for me.
- omarhaneef 5y agoHighland 2 does this very nicely, and you can keep it all in .md
- alok-g 5y agoLink: https://highland2.app/screenwriters.php https://highland2.app/screenwriters.php Requires MacOS.
- omarhaneef 5y agoTrue. One poor man's highland is putting together the requisite functions in VSCode or Atom. Neither currently has an add-on with the ability to move sections of .md, but if someone adds this, it would be a huge contribution to the writer community.
- faceplanted 5y agoDidn't you mean to say "where I _can't_ easily see and move things around"? or are you making a different point I'm not understanding, because it looks like you're negating yourself and I'm not sure what you mean.
- KingOfCoders 5y agoYes.
- alok-g 5y agoMoving sections around is doable in Microsoft Word too using Navigation Pane.
- jedimastert 5y agoI don't know if the developer will see this, but I don't feel like it's worth making a bug; I almost always prefer screenshots to be near the top of a readme like this. I could glean most of the selling points from a glance at the screenshots, and especially for an interface for creative outlet I need to see the UI anyways. "A picture is worth a thousand words"
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoAs a fan of personal knowledge bases, siloing my novel(s) in a separate app from the rest of my writing would bother me. In fact my data is already split between Semantic Synchrony[1] and org-roam[2], and it's a bummer. [1] https://github.com/synchrony/smsn/ https://github.com/synchrony/smsn/ [2] https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam
- Tagbert 5y agoI’m the opposite. I prefer to separate domains of activities and often use separate tools for that. My work notes are in OneNote. My personal notes are in Apple Notes. Long form writing is in Scrivener. This helps me separate mind space as well as reduces the overhead of managing files and data within a domain.
- pwinnski 5y agoMany writers, likely the majority, feel the opposite. The prevalence and popularity of "distraction-free" writing software suggests that having projects siloed away from each other is a popular feature. That said, if you're regularly accumulating notes in roam, and then wanting to reference those notes while writing in novelWriter (say), then yeah, being able to import those notes would be good.
- replwoacause 5y agoReading through the code base was a joy for me since I’m newer to Python. Very well written, documented and easy to follow.
- lazrgatr 5y agoI don't suppose anyone knows of something like this, but for a thesis? I have trouble keeping clarity and pulling disparate sections together. Though there is a chance that this is procrastination talking....
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- BizarroLand 5y agoMaybe Citavi? Used for keeping track of your citations and sources.
- jillesvangurp 5y agoI've been using vs code more and more for markdown editing. A couple of extensions help make that a decent experience. There are a few extensions that help with grammar and style as well that are really helping me to write better text. Vale is a nice one (a bit of work to configure and figure out) for enforcing style rules. Ltex for spelling and grammar. Markdownlint for making sure the markdown is right. Proselint is another one. Some of these overlap in what they do of course. I also configured vscode to turn soft wrapping on for markdown.
- thangalin 5y agoMy open-source plain text editor, KeenWrite, is strikingly similar: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/blob/master/docs/screenshots.md https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/blob/master/docs/scr... I've taken a slightly different approach for novel outlines. Rather than use the `@` syntax, KeenWrite includes support for pandoc's ::: div syntax, which is quite flexible. Here's a screenshot showing an exported PDF generated from a Markdown document: https://i.ibb.co/gTytTs1/novel-outline.png https://i.ibb.co/gTytTs1/novel-outline.png On the left, variables are shown. Those variables can be fed into R statements. In the screen shot, the R code performs date calculations so that the dates are guaranteed to be consistent and correct, which is useful to keep complex timelines straight.
- actuallyalys 5y agoThat looks like a really nice tool. I really like the "bunch of markdown/reStructuredText/Org-mode files" approach both KeenWrite and NovelWriter use. Are you using the variables just for outlines or also for the novels themselves? It seems like it would be more complex to do in the middle of a scene or line of dialogue because there's multiple ways to refer to things. It's an interesting problem to think about, though.
- thangalin 5y agoThe variables are for use in the novels themselves. Mostly for aspects that won't change often: names, places, invented nouns, nick-names, character tics, vehicle velocities, dates (relative or otherwise), and so on. One of my favourite uses of R and variables is this piece of dialogue: > Plus, we'll be about `r#cms(round.up(travel.time( v$location$protagonist$latitude$value, v$location$protagonist$longitude$value, v$location$proximal$latitude$value, v$location$proximal$longitude$value, v$location$proximal$travel$speed$value )))` minutes to the `r#x( v$location$proximal$name$short )` by `r#x( v$location$proximal$travel$mode )` The preview panel shows: > Plus, we'll be about thirty-five minutes to the redwoods by maglev. This allows me to change the locations' latitude and longitude and not have to remember where that particular blurb was written: the travel time will be recomputed and the resulting number rewritten according to the Chicago Manual of Style (cms) rules. (What's more, the travel time is first computed by a REST call to a map API to get the distance by vehicle; failing that, it performs a Haversine distance calculation.)
- anthk 5y agoTiny alternative: Groff+Mom. You can create profesional books with just a 486/Pentium. https://www.schaffter.ca/mom/mom-01.html https://www.schaffter.ca/mom/mom-01.html
- JKCalhoun 5y agoI'm going to suggest that "novelWriter" find a new icon.
- jonplackett 5y agoWhat is it that a writer gets from this that they don’t get from Google docs? Genuine question.
- filleduchaos 5y agoHave you ever written anything longer than about a couple dozen pages in Google Docs? Its performance is straight-up atrocious. Granted, the Docs team recently started rolling out a new canvas-based version of the app that should be faster and more efficient, but honestly I'm not really holding my breath.
- jonplackett 5y agoYeah I have experienced the crankiness - just wondered if there are other things too?
- filleduchaos 5y agoIf you're speaking of writing a novel, that alone is a complete dealbreaker all by itself. By ~40 pages in, it already takes multiple seconds for letters to appear when you type them. I don't even want to imagine writing a 300+ page book in there.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ehw3 5y agoI once wrote in a comment in an Emacs Lisp todo list program that "Of all forms of time-wasting, writing time-management software is most sublime." I would say that of all forms of procrastinating writing that novel, writing novel-writing software is most sublime. That, or maybe taking a "research trip" to Tibet or something.
- modeitsch 5y agoGreat idea