novelWriter – open-source plain text editor designed for writing novels
github.com
github.com
I know it sounds like I'm affiliated based on that gushing review but I am not, just a really happy writer that finally found a good tool and wanted to share!
I’d rethink this analogy for the HN crowd
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It’s effectively proprietary but if you’re desperate, you can retrieve all of the individual files as they are standard formats.
* Ulysses is plain text markdown.
* Scrivener uses RTF. (There is markdown support but iirc it's on top of rich text, not in place of it.)
:)
Couldn't get either Leanpub or Ulysses to fix it, and it was a known problem.
That said, Ulysses is a nice editor, as long as that behavior doesn't cause issues.
Much of what Scriviner provides is also useful?
For programming books especially I recall Scrivener 3 added basic support for code blocks. No syntax highlighting, but if you export to HTML or LaTeX you can use a library or package for that.
Recently, Vellum was recommended to me. Vellum looks very good, and I will test it on my next work.
(Best analogy for developers: if Microsoft Word is a text editor, then Scrivener is an IDE. Project oriented, multiple sub-documents, tracks metadata relating to subdocument state, allows tagging and searching, and it's an editor on top.)
Wow.
https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/blob/master/docs/scr...
I've taken a slightly different approach for novel outlines. Rather than use the `@` syntax, KeenWrite includes support for pandoc's ::: div syntax, which is quite flexible. Here's a screenshot showing an exported PDF generated from a Markdown document:
https://i.ibb.co/gTytTs1/novel-outline.png
On the left, variables are shown. Those variables can be fed into R statements. In the screen shot, the R code performs date calculations so that the dates are guaranteed to be consistent and correct, which is useful to keep complex timelines straight.
Are you using the variables just for outlines or also for the novels themselves? It seems like it would be more complex to do in the middle of a scene or line of dialogue because there's multiple ways to refer to things. It's an interesting problem to think about, though.
> Plus, we'll be about `r#cms(round.up(travel.time( v$location$protagonist$latitude$value, v$location$protagonist$longitude$value, v$location$proximal$latitude$value, v$location$proximal$longitude$value, v$location$proximal$travel$speed$value )))` minutes to the `r#x( v$location$proximal$name$short )` by `r#x( v$location$proximal$travel$mode )`
The preview panel shows:
> Plus, we'll be about thirty-five minutes to the redwoods by maglev.
This allows me to change the locations' latitude and longitude and not have to remember where that particular blurb was written: the travel time will be recomputed and the resulting number rewritten according to the Chicago Manual of Style (cms) rules. (What's more, the travel time is first computed by a REST call to a map API to get the distance by vehicle; failing that, it performs a Haversine distance calculation.)
Regarding the last, it seems a shame that this collides with a scheme commonly used for bibliographic references, but I guess the idea is that a novel won't have such things.
"A picture is worth a thousand words"
In fact my data is already split between Semantic Synchrony[1] and org-roam[2], and it's a bummer.
My work notes are in OneNote. My personal notes are in Apple Notes. Long form writing is in Scrivener.
This helps me separate mind space as well as reduces the overhead of managing files and data within a domain.
That said, if you're regularly accumulating notes in roam, and then wanting to reference those notes while writing in novelWriter (say), then yeah, being able to import those notes would be good.
Not that I'm against them! A great novel is a beautiful thing, and I'm glad someone is out there to enjoy them.
I can see the argument that my experience of human interactions is a biased and incomplete sample. That's clearly true. But they are the relevant ones to my experience.
And I'm always disappointed at the bias in the human interactions portrayed by novels. They are almost invariably driven by unrealistically evil people, and the stakes are typically too high to bear any relevance to most of human life. Most conflict is between people none of whom can be well characterized as evil. There is substantial variation in peoples' values, and in the information they have, and those are the important drivers of what people do.
Damn, I should write a novel.
This very much depends on both the author and the genre of fiction. Not every fiction novel even has a notion of "evil" (or outright evil, there may be characters who are "bad" in some sense or the antagonist, but not outright evil in their nature or quality in an over-the-top fashion). From your description of fiction it sounds largely like the fantasy genre in particular which is very often written as good vs evil kind of stories (though not universally, just very common). Other genres or other writers within that genre are often more interesting.
And not without reason -- if you want drama, they give you that. But I don't think they often do much to usefully inform a person about anything.
After all, language is a poor simulacrum of life, but, then, we use it else "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" and forced to use shadow puppets deep in Plato's cave.
To your broader point, it depends what you want out of the novel. If you want world-building and dialog -- as I pointed out -- you won't get those from the Cliff notes.
I think that's fine, as I don't want them. Or rather, I don't want them as much as I want other things I can spend my time on.
And you're right, I don't read much fiction. The only piece I remember reading all year was The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, a short story by Hemmingway. It was fine.
Reminds me of my father, who claims there's no better wine than Carlo Rossi, and no good movie since Dr Zhivago.
But you're right, there do exist such books. I said "almost entirely". I admit I'm limited to the sample I've experienced personally but it's over 90%.
Also I admit it omits children's lit and romance novels, which are two huge omissions.
> I admit I'm limited to the sample I've experienced personally but it's over 90%.
You need to read a wider selection of books, then. Try, say, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, Of Mice and Men, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, A Christmas Carol, The Grapes of Wrath, The Time Machine, Dune, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Foundation series, anything by Ray Bradbury... there's a very long list of books that are not driven by simplistic good vs. evil conflicts.
Usually authors try to make high stakes feel relevant by making you feel close to the characters or by connecting the high stakes situation to universal themes, although not always successfully. More interestingly, many good novels make relevant and fairly ordinary stakes feel like high stakes. Kurt Vonnegut's short stories[0] and The Bell Jar are great examples.
I don't want to pile on or try to convince you that novels are actually for you (sounds like they aren't), but I think this is an interesting distinction to make about "high stakes."
[0] Presumably his novels too, but I haven't read them yet.
How would you approach this task in vim? I use vim extensively, but only on remote servers and without configs or plugins. What plugins or settings would you use to set up vim for novel writing?
I use these for my D&D campaigns and they're _amazing_
What's a roleplaying campaign but a collaborative novel with a few too many dice?
That’s why I caveated things. I have used Emacs a long, long time and I still do, but I have simplified my setup and backed off of it for many editing chores.
I don’t think the utility is there for someone to spend the man hours customizing an editing environment for say Python dev when something like Pycharm exists, for example. Even vscode with a few extensions is very powerful and reaching IDE levels of capability.
Emacs and living in its lisp machine is amazing and Zen and something I leveraged when I enjoyed the whole process. These days I simply don’t have time :)
friendliness? emacs doesn't need friends, it needs power users.
Lol, I have to remember this line... "yeah, this house has no bathroom, but you can build one yourself that it's as good as it gets!"
https://i.imgur.com/G6HXGCw.png
(CW: Emacs^2)
Groff+Mom.
You can create profesional books with just a 486/Pentium.
Vale is a nice one (a bit of work to configure and figure out) for enforcing style rules. Ltex for spelling and grammar. Markdownlint for making sure the markdown is right. Proselint is another one. Some of these overlap in what they do of course.
I also configured vscode to turn soft wrapping on for markdown.
I would say that of all forms of procrastinating writing that novel, writing novel-writing software is most sublime. That, or maybe taking a "research trip" to Tibet or something.
Requires MacOS.
One poor man's highland is putting together the requisite functions in VSCode or Atom. Neither currently has an add-on with the ability to move sections of .md, but if someone adds this, it would be a huge contribution to the writer community.
You absolutely need to offer controls to zoom the text. On a HD (retina, 4k, etc) display, the text is insufferably small.
Genuine question.
Granted, the Docs team recently started rolling out a new canvas-based version of the app that should be faster and more efficient, but honestly I'm not really holding my breath.
By ~40 pages in, it already takes multiple seconds for letters to appear when you type them. I don't even want to imagine writing a 300+ page book in there.