It combines modern aesthetics (a Medium-like interface, a block-style editor) with broad compatibility. It's a single html file that runs on damn near anything, and gives you exactly what you need to write your story - and nothing else. No fonts to worry over. No lengthy packages or libraries to install and download. Just keep it in your browser and write.
Modern word processors are fantastic, but they try to do too much for my liking. There's usually immense feature creep in most commercial software; and when it comes to open-source editors, often a stunningly stupid number of libraries and configurations that have to be done.
After several novels and many papers under my belt, I've moved on from using every feature under the sun to being a much more simple man:
- I want an interface that looks friendly (and doesn't look like an IDE), tracks my daily word progress, and in case of a power cut, preserves my data without needing an Internet connection.
- I want to write, not spend the rest of my lifetime configuring environment variables or figuring out a user interface designed to appease every possible slice of the market.
- I want to be able to set the thing up on a new device, especially the low power writing devices that I use, without hassle.
Mokuton does exactly that. You open it in your browser and start writing: that's it. It uses browser cache to store what you write, so even in case of power cuts you don't lose data. It exports to Markdown, so any data generated by this program can be read and modified by any text editor. It tracks word counts so you can set daily writing goals for yourself and watch as the progress bar fills up (top to bottom, because that's how we write in English). It is a single html file and extremely lightweight that can be opened on pretty much any modern browser. It is as simple as I can make it.
- Download and open mokuton.html.
- Use the left sidebar to navigate your directories and open files. Set your daily word count goal in the right sidebar.
- Click in the main editor area to start writing.
- Use the top toolbar for formatting; if you need to figure out keyboard shortcuts, click the help icon.
Mokuton is built using Editor.js, Font Awesome for icons and Google Fonts for the fonts used. If you want to put together your own writing interface, I highly recommend Editor.js.
Mokuton Editor is open-source software licensed under the MIT license. Please enjoy it. I am not responsible for what you do with it, but I hope it's useful.
With the help of Gemini-CLI:
- Mokuton-terminal removed. Dark mode added to Mokuton instead. The choice is persistent.
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Work was saved to localStorage but never loaded back, meaning a refresh would clear the editor.Added an initialization check that restores the editor's state from localStorage on startup. Text will now stay in the browser even if you close the tab or lose power. This also means you can just reload to fix any UI issues.
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The progress meter was clearing and recreating 200 DOM elements on every keystroke, which would cause lag on low-power devices. The box grid is now created once at startup. typed words merely toggle a .filled class on existing elements.
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The Bold, Italic, and Underline buttons were non-functional stubs. Implemented document.execCommand triggers for the toolbar buttons. Switch Case button now toggles selected text between UPPERCASE, lowercase, and Title Case.
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The "Select Directory" and file handling features only worked in Chromium-based browsers (Chrome/Edge). Added slightly betterfallbacks for Firefox, Safari, and older browsers:
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Markdown export is better. It converts HTML formatting tags into proper Markdown syntax (e.g., text → text) and handles more block types like delimiters and captions. Markdown import is also better: standard markdown is turned into native editor.js blocks.
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Start screen removed. Added a clear page function as well. Improved CSS slightly. File selection limited to .md and .txt because it's all too easy to free the whole thing by opening a 20MB word document or something equally stupid.
Wood Release (木遁, Mokuton, Viz: Wood Style) is a nature transformation kekkei genkai, a combination of Earth and Water Release. It was famously used by Hashirama Senju, and in fact is not known to have naturally occurred in anyone else, with the exception of the Ten-Tails, whose true form is the God Tree, leading to it being regarded as impossible to use without having his cells. Because of Wood Release's power and versatility, there have been various efforts to reproduce it after Hashirama's death. - https://naruto.fandom.com/wiki/Wood_Release