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.
For more details, and how to install and use novelWriter, please see the main website and documentation.
Project Links
- Website: novelwriter.io
- Documentation: docs.novelwriter.io
- Internationalisation: crowdin.com/project/novelwriter
- PyPi Project: pypi.org/project/novelWriter
- Social Media: fosstodon.org/@novelwriter
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novelWriter is written with Python 3 (3.9+) using Qt5 and PyQt5 (5.15 only), and is released on Linux, Windows and macOS. It can in principle run on any Operating System that also supports Qt, PyQt and Python.
Please don't make feature pull requests without first having discussed them with the maintainer. You can make a feature request in the issue tracker, or if the idea isn't fully formed, start a discussion on the discussion page. Please also don't make pull requests to reformat or rewrite existing code unless there is a very good reason for doing so.
Fixes and patches are welcome. Contributions related to packaging and installing novelWriter will also be appreciated, but please make an issue or a discussion topic first. Before contributing any code, please also read the full Contributing Guide.
Project credits are available in CREDITS.md.
Note: As of April 2024 only pre-releases are made from the main branch. Full releases are
made from the release branch. So if you're submitting a fix to a current release, including
changes to documentation, they must be made to the release branch.
New translations are always welcome. This project uses Crowdin to maintain translations, and you can contribute translations at the Crowdin project page. If you have any questions, feel free to post them to the Translations of novelWriter issue thread.
For more details, and how to use Qt Linguist for translations, see the i18n instructions.
This is Open Source software, and novelWriter is licenced under GPLv3. See the GNU General Public License website for more details, or consult the License document. Bundled assets and their licences are listed in the Credits document.