Where your whole novel comes together.
Novalist is a free, offline-first desktop app for writing novels — manuscript, worldbuilding, plotting, timelines, maps, export and version control in one window, with your project stored as plain files in a folder that stays yours.
Novalist is an offline-first desktop application for writing novels. It handles the full scope of a writing project — manuscript editing, worldbuilding, plotting, timelines, exporting, and version control — in a single, self-contained tool. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Offline-first
A project is a folder of plain files — scenes as HTML, metadata as JSON. Back it up, sync it, open it in any editor.
Cross-platform
One app for Windows, macOS and Linux, built on .NET 8 and Avalonia.
The full craft
Manuscript, codex, plot grid, timeline, maps, research, export and Git — without leaving the window.
Open & extensible
MIT licensed, with a complete extension SDK for views, exports, themes and more.
Features
Every tool a novelist needs.
Loaded straight from the project README — this list updates the moment the repository does.
Download
Begin your draft.
Installers are built per release for all three platforms and published on GitHub.
Prefer to build from source?
Novalist builds with the .NET 8 SDK:
git clone https://github.com/Drommedhar/novalist-official.git cd novalist-official dotnet run --project Novalist.Desktop/Novalist.Desktop.csproj -c Release
Full instructions live in the README.
Changelog
The story so far.
Release notes, loaded live from GitHub. The newest version is expanded; open any other release to read its notes.