Was curious to see what tools everyone uses for both writing and storage.
Personally I use Word for writing, Excel for planning and progress tracking, and a local MediaWiki server for note taking.
What about you?
I use Legendkeeper. I used to use Obsidian but it got too overwhelming for me because I kept tinkering with plugins and CSS appearance snippets. the dataview plugin is awesome though, as someone who came originally from using Notion for everything.
I don’t really recommend Notion anymore, but I do still use Obsidian for journaling and writing if I’m doing it solo. so between Legendkeeper and Obsidian for me, it’s just preference. I feel like LK is capable of handling things that aren’t ttrpgs, even though it was it’s intended purpose, I think.
+1 for obsidian. it’s very easy to get distracted with tinkering around but dataview is amazing. being able to query your notes like a database is so great
I’m planning on trying Obsidian for my next project. I’ve been using it to keep notes on my WIP already though.
What I’m currently using is SmartEdit Writer which I wouldn’t actually recommend to anyone. It doesn’t really have a ton of support, but it does enough that I’m not going to take the time to migrate my current project.
Scrivener has been my default go-to but mostly because I’ve been attached to it for a while. I reckon there’s a lot of better tools nowadays though.
I’ve looked at a lot of the other tools that exist and none have the polish and sheer capability of Scrivener. If you just need a place to write, other tools are great. But if you want formatting and output control, Scrivener is unparalleled. And when you’re ready to publish, you can easily produce whatever format you need with intelligent, automated exports. It’s incredible.
I will second that all day every day. Scrivener has the ability to scratch all my little writing itches like nothing else has. I’ve been using it so long I’ve still got the old version and it’s just a comfy writing blanket for me at this point.
I thought about updating to the new UI version but I think I’m beginning to understand the crotchety old timers of yore and their attachment to typewriters.
Just a word processor (LibreOffice in my case). I’ve tried a few different programs with more story drafting tools (Scrivener, Y Writer, etc.) but found I got too lost in the extra features and spent all my time with them instead of actually writing the story. I can see how they can be very helpful, but I’m a pantser–all I really want is something to put words on.
I use Obsidian.md for my Worldbuilding notes and Libreoffice Writer+LanguageTool to write the actual story.
Emacs + orgmode. Quite technical, not for the faint of heart, but it is an amazing tool to keep everything in plain text. If you are not a technical person, probably this is not for you, as it requires quite the tinkering, but once configured to your workflow, it is very good.
Second place for Manuskript (source code), that is an open source scrivener-like application. I like it a lot, but I always go back to emacs, but probably someone here can appreciate it.
Similar: I use Codium with a vim input plugin and keep everything in plaintext as well. I write in markdown and use small scripts and tools like pandoc to produce epub versions that I can take with me on my phone. I use the notation features in my e-reader to do editing. All content except for a couple fonts and images are textual, making it ideal for tracking changes with git.
Yes, the git part is amazing, as well. Not only you can keep track of changes; you can also see your daily progress and word counting :) Totally recommended for any text based workflow.
Although I like GNU Emacs a lot (it is my IDE, my scratchpad, my IRC client, my Matrix client, my Gopher browser and my part-time e-mail reader) and I use org-mode for my TODO lists and structuring for my more complex blog posts, I (personally) consider it inadequate for writing long-form prose. I always feel that it expects me to have a list wrapped around it. I know that org-novelist exists, but it tries to enforce a workflow that’s not mine.
I just had a brief look at Manuskript and it crashes immediately. I think I’ll wait for 1.0.0 before I try again.
I’m one of those writers that has to really be in the mood to write or else it feels forced. So, to limit my distractions or case of “Ugh, okay I’ll just look for 5 more minutes…” which turns into a hour.
I found those really neat program called Ommwriter. Its literally just text. There’s no UI or anything. I think you can customize the background, but I haven’t felt the need to change anything.
I’ve tried a few different ones, and keep coming back to scrivener. Dabblewriter was almost as good, but I got tired of the yearly payment and it being a website only (sure, PWA so it could work offline) had me going back to scrivener
In our totally professional career of 5 months, we’ve come to certain conclusions.
Plaintext editors and markdown/html are all you will ever need if you are just doing digital publishing.
If you want your book to look nice on print, Libreoffice Writer will do the job, although you probably won’t be using even half of the features.Oh wow, interesting! When you’ve got your files in markdown or html, how do you get it into a readable format when you’re ready to share it?
I’ve been really enjoying Scrivener since version 3 dropped on windows. It really helps me keep things organized. That’s a big deal because I am kind of all over the place. It’s also really good for organizing GM notes for TTRPG campaigns!
It does have a learning curve, and it has a lot of features that I don’t actually use, but even just the basic functionality is very nice.
I also use Scapple, which is their whiteboard-like storyboarding tool. For what it is, it’s by far my favorite because it’s so lightweight and stripped down. I don’t think that one’s being developed anymore, but honestly it’s simple enough that it doesn’t need to be.
Obsidian. Previously Visual Studio Code (well…), WriteMonkey, Notepad++, but in the end—VSCode has a great idea for the UI, and I already write in Markdown, so Obsidian was a natural choice the moment I learned it exists.
I mostly write notes and technical texts. Started off with Evernote, then tried a bunch of things: Obsidian, Notion, Joplin, ended up using Logseq. IMO Logseq is perfect for people who value their independence from the cloud: it is local-first, stores everything in text, works well with Git.
I would have really appreciated not being tied to it’s editor, but so far it’s the most convenient app I used for my purposes.
I’m on Capacities, which is probably a weird choice to most people but it works well for my incredibly strange brain so that tracks
I’ve tried just about every piece of writing software commonly used, and a bunch of less commonly used ones ones, including a ton of old ones for MS-DOS.
In my subjective opinion, only a few pieces of software really stood out to me.
Scrivener is darn good and hard to beat, it has everything a writer could want in one place as an all in-one-solution. If you’re using Linux, Scrivener actually released their last Linux version for free once they stopped developing it, which still works excellent to this day.
There are also a couple Scrivener-alikes that bear mentioning: NovelWriter and SmartEdit Writer.
NovelWriter is one of the few free and open source writing tools that is both stable and supremely functional. It uses a Markdown-like language for formatting (which may be off putting to some, and a positive for others), and has a really nice UI for organizing your story, similar to scrivener. It’s not nearly as feature complete as scrivener, but if you don’t need those features, NovelWriter is an excellent piece of software.
SmartEdit Writer is a straight up scrivener clone made for Windows, and is also 100% free. It was stable in my testing, the developer is responsive on their website, and its quite polished software overall.
For more traditional word processors, I found the Atlantis Word Processor to be one of the nicest I’ve ever used. It’s extremely performant, stable, incredibly tiny (only 3mb), and has a lovely GUI that’s quite customizable. It also works perfectly in Wine if you’re using Linux, and I use it as a replacement for LibreOffice. They offer a full paid version, and a fully functional, if less customizable, Lite version for free.
Lastly, there’s the Distraction Free writing software, which is a purely barebones affair with very little formatting ability and usually non-WYSIWYG.
Of those, I liked GhostWriter and WriteMonkey. Combined with an organizer/note taking app like CherryTree, you can somewhat effectively emulate a scrivener-like workflow.
And for those curious, though George R.R. Martin still uses Wordstar 4.0 on his old DOS machine, I personally found 99% of DOS word processors to be pretty garbage. They’re unintuitive, make it difficult to convert their old formats to something modern and usable, and often have a very specific workflow that is totally alien to modern sensibilities. The only DOS word processor that actually felt modern and was still completely usable (maybe as a more formatting capable distraction free thing?) was WordPerfect 6.2, which was new enough to export RTF files, and utilized IBM’s user interface guidelines, which have aged gracefully.
This post finally loaded for me! So its a little late but, I use Libre Office for writing (and VSCode if Interactive Fiction), Google Docs for notes, and sometimes for the writing itself if I need to edit on the go, and Notebook.ai for worldbuilding, and their timeline functionality.
Honestly? Google Docs. I just love the access I have to it no matter where I am.