MD Novel Tools

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• What is it? It's a toolkit to mimic Literature & Latte's wonderful Scrivener, but for plaintext Markdown files.
• Why you do this? Writing, synchronizing, and editing long-form documents is easier when document versions can be compared. What better way to compare and keep track of your writing than using Git, or another source control management system?
• How does it work? Right now, you need to have Python and Pandoc installed. Then you download the source and run the tools.pyw file and boom, you get an app:

Features

Tree View

• Double-click a file to open it in your default Markdown editor.
• Resizable columns.

Toolbox

• Pick Dir selects a directory to use as the base level for your manuscript. It will look for/put other, non-manuscript files in the parent of this directory.
• Rebuild Tree refreshes the file tree. The app doesn't automatically do this for you. (It's hard to watch files, cross platform, in Python.)
• Compile MS
• Spread Newlines†: Inserts a space between lines with text.
• Metadata Creates or opens a metadata file next to your manuscript folder. Default provided with common items.
• Always on Top Makes the app float over other windows.
• Toggle Date hides or shows the Date column, which may or may not be useful to all writers.

† Operates on selected files

Comments

• > Comments look like this. < They're Blockquotes that end with a < character.
  • Markdown doesn't have a dedicated commenting system out of the box, so we've opted to use BlockQuote because a a lot of fiction doesn't use this typographical convention. I'm looking for other solutions as well.
  • Comments are stripped from the text when you Compile MS

Suggested Markdown Editors

• Typora
• Sublime Text
• Atom.io