Scrivener is the go-to app for writers of all kinds | Hacker News Reader

Scrivener is the go-to app for writers of all kinds

literatureandlatte.com

22 pointsTomte12 comments

I use this for screenplays. One of its strengths is the ability to switch between a "storyboard" view on cards, an outline form, and the narrative text. This is very useful for story planning.

Another cool feature is 30 free days of usage, not 30 calendar days. It counts how many days you use it and you get 30 to play with.

I use Scrivener for writing fiction (novel-length, usually). It's really really good. There are a few features I wish they had, and I wish the UI was a little cleaner and easier, but for the most part, I really really enjoy using it.

If you're a writer at all, then it's worth buying a license. If you participate in NaNoWriMo each year, then they offer a discount to winners, so keep an eye out for that, too.

But no Linux install. Mac/Win only.

(Not a criticism, the reasons are entirely understandable; there are probably not many writers who use a Linux platform; just worth noting for the tiny minority of us who do prefer Linux.)

Scrivener works pretty well with Wine (https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/how-to-install-and-ac...)

They had a Linux beta they were playing with for a while, but it's somewhat old at this point: https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/linux-1-9-01-beta-rel...

It’s a legit question, wouldn’t Mac version be easier to run on Linux than the windows version?

In theory, maybe. In practice, not so much.

Darling (https://www.darlinghq.org/) is not anywhere near usable for GUI applications. In particular, Darling is missing support for a lot of the macOS-specific libraries (Cocoa, AppKit, etc). Additionally, the macOS-specific things evolve pretty quickly and backwards compatibility is frequently dropped, so even if somebody put in a ton of effort to reimplement all of the missing functionality right now, it might not be usable a few years from now.

Windows, OTOH, hasn't included hard BC breaks in decades. For the most part, even very very old Windows programs will still run on Windows 10 (not sure about 11). Not having to redo the work every few years has given the Wine devs a lot of time to get bugs ironed out.

Do I understand correctly that Scrivener on macOS uses Cocoa, but the Windows version uses Qt? That must be some effort to maintain! But good for users.

I used this during my masters and it is really a remarkable piece of software!

As compared to Word it’s a lot more explicit and has way less magic than Word (i.e. margins and new lines didn’t had different heights depending on Enter vs Shift+Enter.

All of this is anecdotal and it’s been a while since I used this software but the impression I got that I didn’t had to fight it as much as Word

I bought a copy of the Windows version recently and while I haven't used it much, let alone mastered it yet, it's clearly an amazing piece of software for the price. It's a shame there aren't more quality tools in the sub-100$ range. This one is really a stand-out product.

When I last used this, the Windows version was missing tons of book authoring tools from the macOS version. IIRC, you could not do recto verso. Since moved on to better tools.

Like what? I use scrivener because it’s been helpful for organizing research and doing outlines. It’s a beast of a program though - much to learn - so made an effort to find something better/easier. OneNote/EverNote didn’t cut it, but always interested in more intuitive alternatives in this space.

Not an endorsement because everybody has different needs, but I'm using Obsidian for notes, and Word for formatting for print and ebooks with appropriate recto verso, gutters et al.

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