Hammer

A simple tool for building stories and worlds they live in.

Android

Productivity

Open Source

Writing

GitHub

In 2020 I was living in a van, writing in places with no signal. I was using a free writing app that claimed to work offline. After about a week off-grid it stopped working. When I got back to civilization it started working again, but my manuscript was gone. I browsed the app's community forum and found a lot of other authors asking the same question I was: where did my manuscript go? Hammer is what I built instead, and it follows three rules: 1) Offline first: it must work offline, forever. Sync between your devices if you want it, but nothing waits on a server and nothing breaks because a service is down. 2) Transparent Data: I should be able to browse and understand the data without needing this program or a computer science degree. 3) Never. Lose. Data. It should be paranoid about user data loss. Designed from the ground up to ensure it could never happen. On top of that it's a real writing tool, not just a text box. It has the tools I think aspiring and independent writers need to craft their projects: - Write your story as a series of scenes, as small or as large as you like, and drag them into a new order whenever the book needs it. Keep notes and draft revisions alongside them. - Plan your story out by giving your scenes outlines, and then reading your story in outline form. - Build your world out in the Encyclopedia. Create entries for Characters, Locations, Events and more, and Hammer will automatically find what scenes they are referenced in. - Hammer can track your writing activity, helping keep you motivated and keep the pace up so you actually finish projects. - When you're ready, send your scenes to an editor. Whoever that may be, an editor, or maybe just a friend, relative, or friendly stranger on the internet. They can mark it up with edit suggestions from a simple web interface. - When it's time to get your project out to beta readers, you can export to many popular formats, such as EPUB, PDF, DOCX or RTF, or you can share on the web, publicly or privately. The clients are genuinely native on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. Kotlin and Compose Multiplatform, one codebase, not a website in a box. Privacy is particularly important to me, so the app has no telemetry and no license check phoning home. A thousand little decisions made over the past four years of crafting this code base to respect privacy. The app is MIT licensed and completely free, with no paid tier. Sync is optional: self-host the server yourself or support the project on Patreon and use ours. If this project vanished tomorrow, the copy on your machine would carry on working exactly as it does today, and your book is already in a format every text editor on earth can open. I've been an open source developer for more than 20 years. I think it's an important good in the world. It helps those who can't pay for the software they need right now. And it provides a check against the surveillance capitalism that is eating the world. If you can't read the code, you can't trust the code these days. I'd love to hear what you think, especially from anyone who has lost a draft before.