Good alternative text editor for writers

When you’re trying to work on a novel or another type of large writing project, basic word editing programs just don’t cut it. With a typical writing program, you either need to save your novel by individual chapters or as one large chunk of a document. Either way, it’s inconvenient and not ideal for organizing your ideas. yWriter simplifies the process of organizing your writing projects.

yWriter allows you to create separate folders for your individual projects. From there, you can take organization one step further and divide each project into separate chapters. yWriter isn’t just about writing the main body of your project though. You can also store notes about characters, locations, items and scenes. In addition, yWriter will keep a tally of the number of words you’ve written in your entire project, as well in separate chapters or scenes.

Another nice thing about yWriter is that it offers a project wizard that is quite helpful for people who are new to the program. In addition, there is an option to perform weekly checks for newer versions of yWriter, so you will be informed the moment the next version becomes available.

Unfortunately, yWriter’s interface is a little plain, especially compared to other text editing programs like Scrivener. Its features, however, match up quite nicely to other similar writing tools.

For aspiring writers who need a free and effective way to organize projects, yWriter is a good choice.

This free novel writing program has evolved over the years into a powerful piece of software, allowing you to break your book into chapters and scenes. Tracking progress is easy with the ‘status’ flags that you can apply to each scene: outline, draft, 1st edit, 2nd edit or done.

Because losing work is the pits, this program will also create autobackups by date and time, as frequently as once a minute if desired. These can be browsed at will, making it easy to revert to an earlier version of your work. Includes a text editor, project overview, daily change log and much more.

yWriter is one of the most cohesive freeware programs for writers. With helpful tools like a word count (doesn’t just tell you your total words, but breaks it down by individual words and how many times they are used), time line, story outline, and places to write scene summaries (and viewpoints, goals, conflicts …) yWriter guides writers through their story on their terms.

It’s not necessary to use the time line or scene summaries, but if that’s what you’re used to doing, it’s there for you. This program is all about what works for you as a writer, and what methods you use to keep yourself on track and consistent.