I’m sure any professional programmer who took a big sip of coffee before looking at WareWoolf’s code would immediately spit it onto their monitor. But I’ve been using it for a year now, and it works! So I’m doing a beta release and calling it v0.9.0.

You can view it on Github here: https://github.com/brsloan/warewoolf

I am nervous about it, as I know that it must have bugs that only come up when someone other than me uses it, and I’m afraid someone will lose their work and want to murder me, but that’s life on the internet. We must not live in fear.

My legions of avid followers will no doubt recall that I built a word processor (“writerDeck”) and wrote WareWoolf for use on it. So it is designed primarily for use in a writerDeck with no mouse, but works fine on desktops too.

Really, it started as just an exercise to see if I could build a simple text editor in Electron, but once I saw how easy that was, I started expanding it and adding tools I wished other applications had, until suddenly I had a (nearly) fully featured novel writing program. So since it started as just a test/lark, I did not use good clean code principles (encapsulation, etc.), and while it works the code is a kind of spaghetti ball. Eventually I hope to rewrite it properly.

I would also like to write an even more simple, terminal-based version in C, but that will take learning C, and it will be a while before I can give that the proper time and attention it needs. I must, after all, balance building fiction-writing tools with actually writing fiction. No doubt my split attentions will prevent me from mastery of both things. Life would be simpler if I had fewer interests, but far less interesting.

A Note on /r/WriterDeck

On a slightly related note, the subreddit I set up last year to build a community of people interested in building their own writerDecks is now up to 610 members. There are dozens of us! And many people on there have produced beautiful and interesting machines, such as the Mythic I and the Muse. I knew there was some interest in these machines, but never expected to gain so many members so quickly.

As Raspberry Pis grow more available again, I hope to see many more, and to build many more myself!