NaNoWriTool

NaNoWriTool is a text editor specifically geared towards NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, in which thousands of people from all over the world attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.

System requirements

NaNoWriTool is based on the .NET platform. Many Windows systems have this installed nowadays. If the program fails to run, download and install the latest .NET runtime here.

Mono is an open source implementation of the .NET platform for non-Windows operating systems. It should be possible to run NaNoWriTool under Mono on Linux and Mac OS X.

Download

You can download the latest version of NaNoWriTool here (a small .EXE file). No installation is required; simply save the file anywhere on your computer and run it.

If this does not work, visit the download page on SourceForge for the full list of file releases. This allows you to download older versions and select a download mirror.

IMPORTANT: the current version has a bug that might cause all formatting to get lost if you change the display font, foreground or background colour. Change these settings first, before creating or opening your manuscript, to work around this problem.

Screen shot

This screen shot shows the NaNoWriTool editor in action. A 15-minute word war is going on, and our brave young novelist has typed 6 words so far during this word war. Luckily, he has 14 minutes and 47 seconds left to increase that number.

Features

Current features of the editor include:

• the ability to edit plain text files, much like Notepad
• a real-time word counter in the status bar
• the word counter exactly matches the counting algorithm of the NaNoWriMo website
• showing the word count target for the day in the status bar (assuming you write the same number of words every day)
• a timer for word wars that also counts the number of words you have typed during the word war
• a full screen mode that eliminates all distractions
• changing of the display font to suit your preferences
• changing of foreground and background colours for maximum readability
• simple formatting features, in particular: chapter headings and emphasis
• a wide margin that makes text easier to read and can be clicked and dragged to select lines of text

Planned features, that are not yet implemented, are:

• automatic uploading of your word count to the NaNoWriMo website
• automatic and reliable backups, to an external drive if possible
• automatic replacement for special characters, in particular: straight quotes ("") by curly quotes (“”), double dashes (--) by en-dashes (–), triple dashes (---) by em-dashes (—), triple dots (...) by ellipses (…)
• a mode that starts to do annoying things (such as play sounds) when you stop typing for a while, like Write or Die

There are also some features that I do not plan to include:

• support for non-Western or right-to-left languages (I can't test this)
• support for multiple character sets (UTF-8 should be enough for most people)
• full-fledged formatting features (really, you don't need these when typing a first draft)
• a spell checker (hey, this is NaNoWriMo!)

Development

NaNoWriTool is currently under development, but is already usable. However, as with all software, it will contain bugs. You can help out by reporting these through the bug tracker.

The source code is available under the BSD license from the SourceForge Subversion repository. Anonymous checkout is possible through the repository URL https://nanowritool.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/nanowritool. If you have some experience with C#, .NET and WinForms and would like to help developing this tool, contact me!

Contact

If you have a suggestion, question or problem, want to chat about NaNoWriTool instead of working on your novel, or want to send me a million dollars out of gratitude and are not a Nigerian prince, you can drop me a line at ttencate+nanowritool(AT)gmail(DOT)com.