[HN Gopher] novelWriter - open-source plain text editor designed...
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novelWriter - open-source plain text editor designed for writing
novels
Author : dragonsh
Score : 167 points
Date : 2021-06-08 08:53 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| replwoacause wrote:
| Reading through the code base was a joy for me since I'm newer to
| Python. Very well written, documented and easy to follow.
| lazrgatr wrote:
| I 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]
| bluenose69 wrote:
| Although 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.
| ehw3 wrote:
| I 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.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Why 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 wrote:
| Highland 2 does this very nicely, and you can keep it all in
| .md
| alok-g wrote:
| Link: https://highland2.app/screenwriters.php
|
| Requires MacOS.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| True.
|
| 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 wrote:
| Didn'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 wrote:
| Yes.
| alok-g wrote:
| Moving sections around is doable in Microsoft Word too using
| Navigation Pane.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| earlier discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25833328#25833594
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| If 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!
| IncRnd wrote:
| I've used Scrivener for a few years, too. Prior to Scrivener I
| used text files with lots of back end work. When the day came
| for me to switch I looked at both Ulysses and Scrivener. Today,
| in retrospect I am extremely happy that I chose Scrivener,
| since it has treated me so kindly!
|
| Recently, Vellum was recommended to me. Vellum looks very good,
| and I will test it on my next work.
| canadianfella wrote:
| > Jira level power
|
| No thanks
| brtkdotse wrote:
| > It gives you Jira level power
|
| I'd rethink this analogy for the HN crowd
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I think they were saying that hn crowd tends to dislike
| jira
| Otek wrote:
| Well, it's slow an unintuitive in many aspects but I
| don't think anyone will deny that Jira is a powerful tool
| weedfroglozenge wrote:
| Working on CPTR-045
| notjustanymike wrote:
| I suspect you meant:
|
| Loading CPTR-045
|
| Loading CPTR-045
|
| Loading CPTR-045
|
| Loading CPTR-045
| nathell wrote:
| At least it's not COVID-19
| melling wrote:
| What are people using to write non-fiction (e.g technical
| books)?
|
| Much of what Scriviner provides is also useful?
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Madcap Flare is pretty popular in the technical writer
| sphere.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| Scrivener explicitly targets non-fiction writers as well.
| There are template projects for essays, papers and proposals,
| with support for LaTeX as well as various citation styles (I
| recall at least APA and MLA). The notes and research sections
| of the project are even more useful for non-fiction writing
| in my opinion.
|
| For programming books especially I recall Scrivener 3 added
| basic support for code blocks. No syntax highlighting, but if
| you export to HTML or LaTeX you can use a library or package
| for that.
| cstross wrote:
| Can confirm: have used Scrivener more or less exclusively for
| books since 2008, in which time I've written and sold about 15
| novels. Scriv is a bit gnarly and bloated these days -- feature
| creep is a thing! -- but it still makes refactoring complex
| compound documents with multiple narrative threads vastly
| easier than any mere word processor.
|
| (Best analogy for developers: if Microsoft Word is a text
| editor, then Scrivener is an IDE. Project oriented, multiple
| sub-documents, tracks metadata relating to subdocument state,
| allows tagging and searching, and it's an editor on top.)
| contravariant wrote:
| Out of interest what kind of file format does Scriviner use? Is
| it vaguely human readable or some kind of proprietary blob?
| staticman2 wrote:
| If I recall correctly a Scriviner file is actually a nested
| collection of rich text format (.rtf) files with a indexing
| file.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| The Mac version is actually a package. (folder pretending to
| be a file; OS-level feature) The text files are RTF. It uses
| xml for some metadata. But the structure is a byzantine nest
| of folders with uuid (or hash, can't remember) names.
|
| It's effectively proprietary but if you're desperate, you can
| retrieve all of the individual files as they are standard
| formats.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| Proprietary with exports to markdown, PDF, RTF, plain text,
| etc.
| flenserboy wrote:
| I know plenty of writers who are fond of Scrivener. My personal
| choice for a paid product (as I use a Mac) is Ulysses -- going
| back and forth between the Mac & iOS versions is painless, and
| its bare-bones, grouped-file interface fits right with my
| workflow. Export options are plentiful, and it pairs well with
| Pandoc. Both are good.
| browningstreet wrote:
| I tried using Ulysses with Leanpub and it wasn't compatible -
| it adds blank markdown here and there and breaks the Leanpub
| rendering process.
|
| Couldn't get either Leanpub or Ulysses to fix it, and it was
| a known problem.
|
| That said, Ulysses is a nice editor, as long as that behavior
| doesn't cause issues.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Note for those interested:
|
| * Ulysses is plain text markdown.
|
| * Scrivener uses RTF. (There is markdown support but iirc
| it's on top of rich text, not in place of it.)
|
| :)
| crooked-v wrote:
| Ulysses is "sorta Markdown". There are a bunch of fiddly
| proprietary differences from "real Markdown" that get in
| the way of things like being able to cleanly copy-paste
| material across, especially the second you touch images or
| other media (which are just magic placeholders in the
| Ulysses UI rather than properly handled Markdown text).
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| As 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/
|
| [2] https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam
| pwinnski wrote:
| Many 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.
| Tagbert wrote:
| I'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.
| thangalin wrote:
| My open-source plain text editor, KeenWrite, is strikingly
| similar:
|
| 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
|
| 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 wrote:
| That 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.
| anthk wrote:
| Tiny alternative:
|
| Groff+Mom.
|
| You can create profesional books with just a 486/Pentium.
|
| https://www.schaffter.ca/mom/mom-01.html
| mdrachuk wrote:
| Is there a story behind that logo?
| totetsu wrote:
| Probably a pretty dissatisfying one.
| ggambetta wrote:
| "Noveldown", as in "markdown for novels"? Just guessing here.
| jedimastert wrote:
| I 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"
| jonplackett wrote:
| What is it that a writer gets from this that they don't get from
| Google docs?
|
| Genuine question.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| Have 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 wrote:
| Yeah I have experienced the crankiness - just wondered if
| there are other things too?
| [deleted]
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I'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.
| falcolas wrote:
| So, 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.
| maydup-nem wrote:
| it's amazing what people will do to avoid using emacs
| toyg wrote:
| That should tell you something about the general usability and
| friendliness of emacs.
| maydup-nem wrote:
| general usability? emacs is as usable as you make it.
|
| friendliness? emacs doesn't need friends, it needs power
| users.
| lifty wrote:
| it's amazing what people will do to avoid writing a novel
| torh wrote:
| it's amazing what people will do to avoid reading a novel
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| I 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]
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| Audiobooks are a good middle ground if the voice actor
| matches your perception of the narrator.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| I'm a voracious consumer of podcasts and the audio
| edition of the Economist. Alas, it leaves me no time for
| fiction.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| The 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.
| actuallyalys wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Usually authors try to make high stakes feel relevant by
| making you feel close to the characters or by connecting
| the high stakes situation to universal themes, although
| not always successfully. More interestingly, many good
| novels make relevant and fairly ordinary stakes feel like
| high stakes. Kurt Vonnegut's short stories[0] and _The
| Bell Jar_ are great examples.
|
| I don't want to pile on or try to convince you that
| novels are actually for you (sounds like they aren't),
| but I think this is an interesting distinction to make
| about "high stakes."
|
| [0] Presumably his novels too, but I haven't read them
| yet.
| spookybones wrote:
| This comment reads as someone who doesn't read much
| fiction. Your misconception is that fiction is merely a
| capsule for the delivery of ideas rather than being a
| multifaceted work. It is like someone who proclaims that
| cuisine is not the best delivery of nutrients, that it's
| much easier to blend ingredients, and then, impressed
| with his assessment, proclaims that he should make his
| own smoothie.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| The "should write a novel" bit was a joke.
|
| To your broader point, it depends what you want out of
| the novel. If you want world-building and dialog -- as I
| pointed out -- you won't get those from the Cliff notes.
|
| I think that's fine, as I don't want them. Or rather, I
| don't want them as much as I want other things I can
| spend my time on.
|
| And you're right, I don't read much fiction. The only
| piece I remember reading all year was The Short Happy
| Life of Francis Macomber, a short story by Hemmingway. It
| was fine.
| browningstreet wrote:
| This is funny, thank you.
|
| Reminds me of my father, who claims there's no better
| wine than Carlo Rossi, and no good movie since Dr
| Zhivago.
| crooked-v wrote:
| You seem to be entirely overlooking the existence of
| books that have very limited stakes and don't even
| feature "bad guys" in the first place, like Andy Weir's
| _The Martian_.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Fighting to survive alone on an alien planet seems pretty
| high stakes to me.
|
| But you're right, there do exist such books. I said
| "almost entirely". I admit I'm limited to the sample I've
| experienced personally but it's over 90%.
|
| Also I admit it omits children's lit and romance novels,
| which are two huge omissions.
| crooked-v wrote:
| If the survival of a single person is "high stakes" in
| fiction, then what do you even consider "low stakes"?
|
| > I admit I'm limited to the sample I've experienced
| personally but it's over 90%.
|
| You need to read a wider selection of books, then. Try,
| say, _The Great Gatsby_ , _Pride and Prejudice_ , _Of
| Mice and Men_ , _Frankenstein_ , _Jane Eyre_ , _A
| Christmas Carol_ , _The Grapes of Wrath_ , _The Time
| Machine_ , _Dune_ , _The Hitchhiker 's Guide to the
| Galaxy_, the Foundation series, anything by Ray
| Bradbury... there's a very long list of books that are
| not driven by simplistic good vs. evil conflicts.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This very much depends on both the author and the genre
| of fiction. Not every fiction novel even has a notion of
| "evil" (or outright evil, there may be characters who are
| "bad" in some sense or the antagonist, but not outright
| evil in their nature or quality in an over-the-top
| fashion). From your description of fiction it sounds
| largely like the fantasy genre in particular which is
| very often written as good vs evil kind of stories
| (though not universally, just very common). Other genres
| or other writers within that genre are often more
| interesting.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| You're right, evil is not a universal plot driver. But at
| least one of exceptional evil or exceptionally high
| stakes drive the majority of fantasy, sci-fi, crime,
| horror, and political novels.
|
| And not without reason -- if you want drama, they give
| you that. But I don't think they often do much to
| usefully inform a person about anything.
| yottalove wrote:
| Often you must lie in order to tell the truth.
|
| After all, language is a poor simulacrum of life, but,
| then, we use it else "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof
| one must be silent" and forced to use shadow puppets deep
| in Plato's cave.
| bitexploder wrote:
| Long 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 wrote:
| Vscode/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 wrote:
| I 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.
|
| Ultimately, 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 :)
| mhd wrote:
| How an actual author (Vernor Vinge) uses Emacs:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/G6HXGCw.png
|
| (CW: Emacs^2)
| dubya wrote:
| This 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.
| sicariusnoctis wrote:
| This is a strange way to say "stubbornly use an editor that is
| inferior to vim". :P
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| Maybe he uses Evil-Mode
| maydup-nem wrote:
| I do : )
| Grimm665 wrote:
| Genuine 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?
| NeutralForest wrote:
| Even if you prefer markdown over org-mode, there's stuff like
| https://www.zettlr.com/ which works really well
| totetsu wrote:
| Zotero integration would be a plus over orgmode too
| NeutralForest wrote:
| There's emacs-zotero and zotxt you can use with org-mode.
| Add org-ref into the mix and it's all good.
| totetsu wrote:
| Thanks
| eointierney wrote:
| With 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?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm going to suggest that "novelWriter" find a new icon.
| account-5 wrote:
| Haha
| kstrauser wrote:
| I haven't _literally_ laughed out loud at an HN comment in
| ages.
|
| Wow.
| Otek wrote:
| How did the author of the logo not notice this?
| imilk wrote:
| haha that has to be on purpose. If it's not... just wow
| modeitsch wrote:
| Great idea
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(page generated 2021-06-09 23:01 UTC)