Draft is a markup-based writing application meant to be used by writers and academics. However, it is a bit too early in its development stage to be used by either of those people. At the moment, Draft provides the following features:

• organizing "Texts" (sheets) into "Groups"
• tagging texts with labels
• preview and export HTML equivalent of text markup
• markdown support in editor with a cheatsheet for reference
• LaTeX math support
• spell checking
• thesaurus lookup
• word goals
• search for text content/tags.
• and an (experimental) typewriter mode.

The author would like to have a bit more utility than the above mentioned features as well as more stability before recommending it for general usage. If you try it out and find issues please report them (see contributing).

To build Draft, the following dependencies are needed:

• gtk3 >= 3.20
• gobject-introspection
• gtksourceview3 >= 3.24
• gspell
• python3
• pygobject3
• meson >= 0.41
• ninja
• python3-cairo
• python3-mistune
• python3-whoosh

Some optional dependencies required for additional features:

• mythes (for thesaurus along with preferred language pack)
• python3-pygments (for syntax highlighting in preview mode)

For now, the only way to try out the app is to build from source:

git clone https://github.com/saifulbkhan/draft.git
cd draft

Now if one does not want to pollute their system with unstable software, they can install it locally. For example, to install it to the common alternative prefix $HOME/.local we can use the following set of commands:

meson build --prefix=$HOME/.local
ninja -C build install

... or they can install Draft system-wide:

meson build
sudo ninja -C build install

Draft is far from complete. In fact, in its current state it appears to be a glorified markdown-to-html converter. But there is room for much growth and refinement. Features like - being able to export to commonly used formats (other than HTML), live preview, cloud-based synchronization and maybe even a document version control would be welcome additions. The editor can also be polished for a much better writing experience. Same goes for Group and Sheet views, which are not as interactive as they ought to be. These ideas seem ambiguous and more like wishful thinking, but stay tuned for details on each of these goals. If a contributor would like to work on any of them, please create an issue and we can talk about it in depth.

That said, there must be plenty of bugs hanging around as well. Known ones are being looked at. Reporting and working on bugs would be even more appreciated -- let's try to create a more stable product before bringing in even more features and increasing the complexity.

Any form of help and constructive criticisms are definitely welcome.