Welcome, Traveler! NEW!
You have reached the official home page of TextWriter, a distraction-free writing tool in the spirit of Dark Room and WordStar. Plain text in, plain text out. No cloud, no subscription, no "AI writing assistant" looking over your shoulder — just you, the words, and a blinking caret on a dark screen.
Think of it as a text editor from yesterday, rebuilt with the conveniences we expect today. Fullscreen, keyboard-first, and fast enough to get out of your own way.
A note about the downloads: TextWriter is an independent, unsigned application. Windows SmartScreen and macOS Gatekeeper will warn before the first launch. That warning is expected, and the download page explains it plainly and provides SHA-256 checksums so you can confirm that your download is the exact file published by this project.
| Quick Facts | |
|---|---|
| Made for | novelists, journalers, anyone who writes a lot of plain text |
| Runs on | Windows, macOS & Linux |
| File format | plain .txt / .md — always readable, no lock-in |
| Price | free or pay what you want |
| Built by | Matti Yott |
| Technical Details | |
|---|---|
| Built with | Tauri 2 — Rust + vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, no framework, no bundler |
| License | open source under the MIT License |
| Source code | GitHub repository |
| Community | forks, remixes, and independent continuations welcome |
TextWriter is open source under the MIT License. If you see a different direction for it, fork the repository, reshape it, and make it yours. Build a personal edition, add the features you want, or carry the idea somewhere entirely new — the code is there to be used.
Why Another Text Editor?
Because the good ones from thirty years ago never really got better — they just got replaced by things with more buttons. TextWriter brings back the fullscreen, keyboard-first, nothing-between-you-and-the-page feeling of programs like Dark Room and WordStar, and adds only what a modern writer actually needs: autosave that never loses your work, ten themes to write in, and a handful of small conveniences that stay out of the way until you reach for them.
YES: TextWriter is for you if you want to open a plain file, write, save it, and know exactly where your words are.
PROBABLY NOT: It is probably not for you if you need real-time collaboration, cloud synchronization, rich page layout, or thirty-seven sidebar panels.
⬇️ Get TextWriter 🔍 See What It Does
Curious what it actually looks like?
