novelWriter is a plain text editor designed for writing novels assembled from many smaller text documents. It uses a minimal formatting syntax inspired by Markdown, and adds a meta data syntax for comments, synopsis, and cross-referencing. It's designed to be a simple text editor that allows for easy organisation of text and notes, using human readable text files as storage for robustness.

The project storage is suitable for version control software, and also well suited for file synchronisation tools. All text is saved as plain text files with a meta data header. The core project structure is stored in a single project XML file. Other meta data is primarily saved as JSON files.

The full documentation is available on readthedocs.io.

The application is written in Python 3 (3.6+) using Qt5 and PyQt5 (5.3+). It is developed on Linux, but should in principle work fine on other operating systems as well as long as dependencies are met. It is regularly tested on Debian and Ubuntu Linux, Windows, and macOS.

The project isn't taking feature contributions at the moment. If you have an idea, please make a feature request in the issue tracker. Fixes and patches are welcome. So are new translations. Contributions related to packaging and installing novelWriter will also be appreciated.

If you want to help translating novelWriter into another language, please see the README in the nw/assets/i18n folder for further details.

Before contributing any code, please read the full Contributing Guide.

Some key features of novelWriter are listed below. Consult the documentation for more information.

Note that novelWriter is not a proper Markdown editor. It is a plain text editor that uses Markdown-like syntax to allow for a minimal set of formatting that is useful for the specific task of writing novels. The formatting is currently limited to:

• Headings levels 1 to 4 using the # syntax only.
• Emphasised and strongly emphasised text. These are rendered as italicised and bold text.
• Strikethrough text.
• Hard line breaks using two or more spaces at the end of a line.

That is it. Features not supported in the editor are also not exported when using the export tool.

In addition, novelWriter adds the following syntax used for its additional features:

• A line starting with % is treated as a comment and not rendered on exports unless requested. Comments do not count towards word counts and other statistics.
• If the first word of the comment is synopsis:, the comment is indexed and treated as the synopsis for the section of text where it occurs. These synopsis comments can be used to build an outline and exported to external documents.
• A set of meta data keyword/values starting with the character @. These are used for tagging and inter-linking documents, and can also be included when generating a project outline.
• A variety of thin and non-breaking spaces are supported. Some of them depend on the system running at least Qt 5.9. Earlier versions of Qt will unfortunately strip them out when saving.
• Tabs can be used in the text, and should be properly aligned in both editor and viewer. This can be used to make simple tables and lists. Note that for HTML exports, most browsers will treat a tab as a space, so it may not show up like expected. Open Document exports should produce the expected result.

The core export formats of novelWriter are Open Document and HTML5. Open Document is an open standard for office type documents that is supported by most office applications. See Open Document > Application Support for more details.

You can also export the entire project as a single novelWriter-flavour document. These can later be imported again into novelWriter. In addition, printing and export to PDF is offered through the Qt library, although with limitations to formatting.

The editor has syntax highlighting for the features it supports, and includes a set of different syntax highlighting themes. Optional GUI themes are also available, including dark themes.

The structure of the project is shown on the left hand side of the main window. Project files are organised into root folders, indicating what class of file they are. The most important root folder is the Novel folder, which contains all of the files that make up the novel itself. Each root folder can have subfolders. Subfolders have no impact on the final project structure, they are there for you to organise your files in whatever way you want.

The editor supports four levels of headings, which determine what level the following text belongs to. Headings of level one signify a book or partition title. Headings of level two signify the start of a new chapter. Headings of level three signify the start of a new scene. Headings of level four can be used internally in each scene to create separate sections.

Each novel file can be assigned a layout format, which shows up as a flag next to the item in the project tree. These are mostly to help the user track what they contain, but they also have some impact on the format of the exported document. See the documentation for further details.

Supporting notes can be added for the story plot, characters, locations, story timeline, etc. These have their separate root folders and are optional to use.

The different notes can be assigned tags, which other files can refer back to using @-prefixed meta keywords. This information can be used to display an outline of the story, showing where each scene connects to the plot, and which characters, etc. occur in them. In addition, the tags themselves are clickable in the document view pane, and control-clickable in the editor. They make it possible to quickly navigate between the documents while writing.

For a regular installation, it is recommended that you download one of the minimal zip files from the Releases page or the novelwriter.io website. The documentation has detailed install instructions for Linux, Windows, and macOS. They are pretty straightforward.

If you want to run novelWriter directly from the source code, you must run the novelWriter.py file from command line.

Note: You may need to replace python with python3 and pip with pip3 in the instructions below on some systems. You may also want to add the --user flag for pip to install in your user space only.

Dependencies can generally be installed from PyPi with:

pip install -r requirements.txt

On Linux, you can most likely find the dependencies in your distribution's repository. On Ubuntu and Debian, run:

sudo apt install python3-pyqt5 python3-lxml python3-enchant

If you want to set up a launcher and icons on Linux, you can run:

python setup.py xdg-install

First, make sure you have properly set up Python3 with Homebrew. If not, check their documentation. In addition, the following steps are necessary to install all dependencies:

brew install enchant
pip3 install --user -r requirements.txt
pip3 install --user pyobjc

Windows does not by default come with Python installed. If you haven't installed it already, get it from python.org/downloads. Remember to select "Add Python to PATH" during the installation.

The script windows_install.bat in the setup folder can be used to create desktop and start menu icons for novelWriter. The script will also install dependencies for you from PyPi.

If you install from source, you must build the translation files yourself if you want to switch to a different GUI language than British English. This requires that you have the Qt translation framework installed. Check the specific instruction in the README in the i18n source folder for how to build the translation files.

If you need to debug novelWriter, you must run it from the command line. It takes a few parameters, which can be listed with the switch --help. The --info, --debug or --verbose flags are particularly useful for increasing logging output for debugging.

This is Open Source software, and novelWriter is licensed under GPLv3. See the GNU General Public License website for more details, or consult the LICENSE file.

Bundled assets have the following licenses:

• The Typicons-based icon themes by Stephen Hutchings are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The icons have been altered in size and colour for use with novelWriter, and some additional icons added. The original icon set is available at stephenhutchings/typicons.font.
• The Cantarell font by Dave Crossland is licensed under OPEN FONT LICENSE Version 1.1. It is available at Google Fonts.
• The Tomorrow syntax themes use colour schemes taken from Chris Kempson's collection of code editor themes, licensed with the MIT License, and the main repo is available at chriskempson/tomorrow-theme.
• Likewise, the Owl syntax themes use colours from Sarah Drasner's code editor themes, licensed with the MIT License, and the main repo is available at sdras/night-owl-vscode-theme.

novelWriter with default system theme:

novelWriter with dark theme: