Marktwain

About Marktwain

Markdown is great, but using it for writing novels or other long projects sucks, and apps that are good at writing novels either don't use markdown or are full of features I never use. Marktwain is markdown for people who write novels. - YOUR WORDS AS TEXT. Every project is just a folder on your hard drive, every scene/chapter is a markdown file inside that folder. No format issues, just glorious plain text files. - NOTES THAT TRAVEL. Chapter summaries, notes and to-dos are visible in the app and stored as front-matter inside each markdown file. If you decide you hate using this app, everything you put into your novel is already in your text files and ready to take with you. Backing up your work is as easy as zipping up the folder. - FOCUS MODE AND SCANNED PAGES. Focus mode is table stakes for a writing app and Marktwain has it. But I like to get started with pen and paper and typing that in later always required a bit of futzing around. Marktwain lets you attach scanned pages (PDF or image) to each markdown file. Click the attachment and you get a simple side-by-side view of your focus-mode editor and your scan. Type away! - CLEAN EXPORT. Ready to print your manuscript? Export it to a fresh markdown doc with all your notes, summaries and tasks stripped out — it's just the novel, cleanly formatted and ready for whatever app you prefer to turn markdown into pretty documents. - THINGS YOU EXPECT. It counts the words. CMD+B will insert the markdown syntax for bold text. There's a light mode and a dark mode. Go into settings and choose your font (I like to use Courier Prime). Basic features like that exist. - BUT THAT'S IT. If it’s not a feature I use, Marktwain doesn’t include it. It cannot colour code every adjective. It will not help you set, track or meet your daily writing goals. It will never assess your relative Hemingwayness. It doesn’t even render the markdown or highlight the syntax or include shortcuts for things like lists and six layers of headers. Lots of apps do that stuff. My personal preference is IA Writer. I love it. I wrote this sentence in it. It sucks for writing novels. So now there’s Marktwain. - EVENTUALLY. I’ll probably burn some credits improving the dictionary integration, because oh how I do love a thesaurus, and I'll have to add an outlining feature when I start my next novel and need to use it. But I think that's pretty much it. These are the features I need and use today. If I ever need something else, I’ll add it then.