novelWriter

What novelWriter is

novelWriter is a free, open-source plain text editor for organizing fiction projects and their notes as smaller documents. It uses Markdown-inspired formatting and metadata lines for details such as characters, point of view, and locations. Documents can be organized into folders, reordered, nested as sub-documents, tagged, and linked to project notes with cross-references. Novel View and Outline View show chapters and scenes alongside metadata and related links. The Manuscript Build tool assembles selected documents for printing or export to Open Document, Word, PDF, HTML, and Markdown. Project files stay in a dedicated local folder and can be synchronized between computers with standard file-sync tools; the maker also documents use with version control software. During local use, the app says it does not transmit usage data. Update checks contact GitHub’s public API, and critical error reports are shown to the user rather than sent automatically. The app is designed for fiction, not technical writing or research organization. Linux and Windows packages are listed; macOS releases are discontinued, though a Python package can still be installed on a Mac with a Python environment. The project began in 2018.