novelWriter

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 format is well suited both for version control software and file synchronisation tools.

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

This project is developed and maintained with care by actual humans.

	Free code signing on Windows provided by SignPath.io, certificate by SignPath Foundation.
	Free package repository hosting is graciously provided by Cloudsmith.

novelWriter is written in Python and uses Qt6 with PyQt6 Python binding as the UI framework. It runs 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 issues tracker, or if the idea isn't fully formed, start a discussion. Please also don't make pull requests to reformat or rewrite existing code unless there is a very good reason for doing so. Please do not submit AI generated content. See our AI Policy for details.

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 read the full Contributing Guide.

Project credits are available in CREDITS.md.

Note: New features and most pre-releases are made on 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.

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.