Get your Hammer
Free, and free to keep.
Writing in Hammer
Built for the way a novel actually gets written
Scenes you can move, an encyclopedia that knows who is in them, a timeline, notes, and a record of what you actually wrote.
An editor that stays out of the way
Your scene, the outline you wrote for it, and your notes about it, all on one screen. Word count and metadata sit to the side when you want them and disappear when you don't.
Break the book into scenes as small as you like, then drag them into a different order when two characters need to meet earlier.
An encyclopedia that looks like your world
Characters, places, events and anything else you invent, with pictures. Tag them, search them, keep them a keystroke from the page you are on.
Hammer reads your scenes and works out who is in them. Open a character and it lists every scene they appear in; open a scene and it shows the characters and locations it found, which you confirm or dismiss. Nobody has to remember to tag anything.
Which means you can answer the question every draft eventually raises: where did she go? Three chapters without your antagonist show up as an absence you can see.
See the plot laid out in order
Put the events of your story, or the history of your world, on a dated and tagged timeline, so you can see that the potion comes before the trial, and that three chapters pass without your antagonist.
Somewhere to put the thought you just had
The observation about your own book that arrives at the wrong moment. Tag it, find it later, keep it next to the manuscript instead of in a file on the desktop called notes2-final.txt.
It counts what you wrote, not what survived
Hammer watches each save and counts the words you added, ignoring deletions and rearrangements. Spend a day cutting a chapter to pieces and it still records the writing you did, because you did do it.
Daily and weekly goals, today's count, this week against last, your current and longest streak, your best day, and a twelve-week heat map. It also knows your weekday average against your weekend one, which turns out to be more useful than it sounds.
Sync, and sessions merge across devices: the four hundred words you got at a bus stop land in the same total as the ones at your desk. Hammer can even tell you which device you write best on.
And the log is a plain text file in your project folder, like everything else. Your writing history is yours to read, or to delete.
After the draft
When the book has to leave your desk
Writing is only half of it. At some point a draft has to reach an editor, a beta reader, an agent, or a stranger. That is usually where a writing app stops and the copy-paste starts.
Send it to your editor. They don't need an account.
Choose the scenes, type an email address, and Hammer sends a link. Your editor opens it in a browser and marks your prose up with suggested edits. No download, no signup, no copy of your project handed over.
You see when they opened it, how many of the scenes they have read, and how many suggestions are waiting for you. Label each request for your own benefit: my agent, beta read 2. Links expire, and you can revoke one at any point.
Show it to three people
Private links are password protected, can carry an expiry date, and can be revoked whenever you like. Make a separate one per reader if you want to know who is still reading.
Or publish it to everyone
A public story page under your pen name, an author page collecting your published work, and a place in the community feed.
You can see how many people actually read it, all time and day by day.
And it tells you what publishing publicly can cost you before you do it, not after.
Five formats, and it tells you which to pick
- Markdown
- For version control, or moving into another tool.
- EPUB
- For beta readers on e-readers and phones, where the text has to reflow.
- For when the layout must not move.
- Word
- For anyone who will leave comments or track changes.
- RTF
- For when you don't know what they use.
Hammer explains each one at the moment you are choosing, instead of leaving you to guess from a row of file extensions.
The three rules
Now the part that matters in ten years
Everything you just saw is built on three rules. Every one of those features writes to plain files in a folder you own, which is the whole reason to pick this over the alternatives.
Offline first
It works with no internet, forever
Hammer has never required a connection and never will. Write in a cabin, on a plane, in a van parked somewhere with no signal. Sync between your devices if you want it, through a server like this one or one you run yourself, but nothing waits on a server and nothing breaks because a service is down.
Transparent data
Open the folder and it makes sense
Not a database, not a proprietary bundle. Open the project folder with Hammer shut and the shape of your book is already there: a file per scene, named the way you named it. Search it, back it up, mail it to yourself. Reading your own work should never require this program, or a computer science degree.
Never lose data
It is paranoid about losing your work
Losing your work is the one bug this program is not allowed to have. Sync starts by backing up the whole project. A draft saved before a big rewrite is always there to go back to. Unsaved edits are written to disk as you type, so a crash costs you a sentence at worst. When two devices disagree, Hammer asks which one is right instead of quietly picking.
Why it works this way
I wrote these rules after losing a manuscript
I once lived in a van, traveling and writing in often very remote places. I was not working at the time, and was using free writing software that claimed to support offline work. As I came to learn, that claim didn't hold up. After about a week offline, 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 saw many other authors asking the same question I was: Where did my manuscript go?
The seeds of the idea for Hammer were born out of this experience. Why was everything a webpage these days? I just wanted to use my own computer that was right in my hands to write and store my stories.
What it costs
Nothing
Hammer is free and open source under the MIT license. No trial, no card, no account needed to write, and no paid tier of the app. If this server vanished tomorrow, the copy on your machine would carry on working exactly as it does today.
Reasonable questions
Do I need an account?
No. Download it and write. An account only exists so you can sync between devices, and it is entirely optional.
Where does my writing live?
In a folder you choose on your own device, as plain text files, one per scene, alongside small readable files for your notes and encyclopedia entries.
Can I get my manuscript out?
It was never in. Your scenes are already ordinary files you can open, copy, or hand to anyone, whether or not Hammer is installed. When you want one file instead of a folder, export the whole book as Markdown, EPUB, PDF, Word or RTF.
Does my editor need to buy anything?
No, and they don't need an account either. You send a link, they mark up the scenes you chose in their browser, and you get the suggestions back. The link expires and you can revoke it.
What happens if Hammer goes away?
Nothing happens to your book. It is already in a format every text editor on earth can open. The source is MIT licensed, so anyone who wants to keep the app alive can.
Is my writing sent anywhere?
Only if you switch sync on, and then only to the sync server you chose, whether that is this one or one you run yourself.
Which platforms?
Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. The same app and the same files on each, not a website in a box.
