J JustWrite
i

IWhat you keep

Yours, on your desk.

Most writing tools today rent you a chair in their building. JustWrite gives you the chair. The book, the table, the lamp — all of it stays at your house.

i Local first

On your machine.

Your manuscript is a file. It lives on your computer, in your filesystem, where you can back it up, copy it, archive it. No account, no upload, no waiting for a server.

no cloud · no account

ii Your model, your keys

Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

Cloud or local — your choice. OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, OpenRouter, Mistral, Together, any provider that speaks chat-completions. Or run Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp, vLLM on your machine and the whole loop is offline. JustWrite never sees the bill or the prose.

BYO model · keys never leave

iii Free, and open

Source on GitHub.

No subscription. No paywalled feature tier. Read the code, fork it, audit it, build it yourself. Pay only what your chosen AI provider charges — which, for local models, is nothing.

MIT · zero-cost runtime

Compare: most modern writing apps make a copy of your novel and store it on a server you don't own, behind a subscription you'll keep paying after the book is finished. We took a different lap.

IISketches

From the studio.

Real captures from the working app, against a real novel-in-progress — the same rooms, seen from the desk.

JustWrite Home — project goal, today's session, fortnight, cadence
Home A daily ledger of the work. Word goal, deadline, the day's session, fortnight, cadence — and a card that drops you back into the chapter you were last in.
JustWrite manuscript editor — a scene of the sample novel on a serif page
Manuscript A typesetter's page. Write a scene on a quiet serif page, with the manuscript spine on the left. Step back to the chapter's scene cards, read it straight through, or open versions, critique and the multi-reader panel from the chapter.
JustWrite — a scene drafted from its summary, the AI-written words in violet
Draft from plan A scene from its summary. Switch on AI scene drafting for a book, give a scene its summary, and Draft from plan writes it from that and the story around it. The AI's words stay marked in violet until you make them yours.
JustWrite Characters — protagonist detail with role, one-liner and three-act arc
Characters Wants, needs, and the lie they tell. Each character has wants, needs, the lie they tell themselves, the truth they deny — and a three-act arc. A consistency audit flags contradictions across chapters; a relationship-arc tracker maps how each bond evolves.
JustWrite — Name ideas beside a character's name, a seed prompt and a list of names
Name ideas Brainstorm where you name things. Name ideas sits beside every name, Title ideas beside every title. Give it a seed — or none, and the page and the book steer — then Use puts the pick in place.
JustWrite — a conversation with the protagonist, with cited scenes and Save to sheet
Talk to a character Interview your cast. Ask anyone in your story a question and they answer in the voice their sheet gives them, with the scenes behind it cited. Save to sheet puts what you learn back on their page.
JustWrite Worldbuilding — category filters and articles for the novel's world
Worldbuilding A wiki for the world around the book. Free-form articles organised by category — Geography, History, Cultures, Languages, Factions, Magic & lore. Tag them; cross-reference them; search them.
JustWrite — a location's sheet drafted from a one-line description, fields to tick and apply
Draft with AI A sheet from a sentence. Describe a place, an object or a group in a line, and the AI drafts its sheet from your words and the book. Tick the fields you want, edit them inline, then apply — fields you've already written stay yours.
JustWrite Relations — a graph of the story's characters, places and objects
Relations Everyone and everything, in one graph. Characters, locations and objects. The lines come from shared scenes, shared groups and shared strands — you don't draw them here; they appear from the work you do everywhere else.
JustWrite Plot board — narrative strands across chapters, with their beats
Plot board Strands across chapters. Each narrative strand reads as a row; each chapter a column. Drop a beat on the grid and it links back to its scenes. Templates included — Three-Act, Save the Cat, Hero's Journey, Story Circle — and a strand can suggest its own next beats.
JustWrite Timeline — chronological event list with dates and entity tags
Timeline The story's chronology, laid flat. Every event you attach to a character, location, object, group, or the setting — sorted by in-story date. Click an event to edit it; the order reads cleanly even when the chapters don't.
JustWrite Analysis — status, strands by word count, words per chapter
Analysis A reading of the work. KPIs and a 30-day pace chart up top, then a 53-week heatmap, milestones, status breakdown, narrative strands by word count, words per chapter — and AI readings below for story tension, voice drift, a reverse outline, and plot holes.
JustWrite AI Settings — Routing by feature, a feature's prompt, test input and preset columns
The Lab Look inside the AI calls. Every AI feature, opened up: the prompt it sends, the preset it runs on, and a test input to try it against. Run settings side by side and save the one you like as a preset — useful when you're tuning a local model.
JustWrite AI Settings — the computer's hardware and the local providers
AI Settings Bring your own. Plural. A built-in local engine sized to your graphics card, or any provider you add — Ollama, LM Studio, OpenAI, Claude, Gemini and more. Pick a default, then route each feature to its own model.
JustWrite Settings — Appearance theme presets with live preview pane
Settings · Appearance Theme presets, or tune your own. Studio, Fine Press, Ivory Press, Calm Modern, Editorial. A live preview pane shows your settings against a real page. Light, dark, or follow the system. Save your mix as a preset.

IIIFind it

Take it for an evening.

JustWrite is free and open. Download it for desktop, or browse the source. If you write something with it, we would love to hear about it.

Browse on GitHub Read the docs Latest release
  • macOS.dmg · arm64 / x64
  • Windows.exe · x64
  • Linux.AppImage · .deb · .rpm