Ghostwriter Could Be the Tool You Need to Write a Novel
Writing is hard—especially if you’re working from home. There are constant distractions: the washing machine’s on its final spin cycle, the dogs need to be walked, and the kids are due back from school in an hour.
Sitting in front of your PC, you have a blank Google doc open in front of you, but there are also open tabs for Facebook, Wikipedia, your favorite news outlet, and a dozen or so other notification-enabled tabs.
If this sounds familiar, you might want to consider using Ghostwriter—a distraction-free writing tool for Linux, Windows, and macOS.
What Is Ghostwriter?
Ghostwriter is a multi-platform, Markdown-based text editor. Versions are available for Linux, for Windows (as a portable app only), and for macOS (although you’ll need to compile it yourself).
The purpose of Ghostwriter is to force you to put words onto the page without being distracted by notifications, flashing tabs, worries about which font you’re using, or any anything else which could tear your attention away from the stream of words flowing from your fingers.
Aside from the built-in light and dark themes, with more available online, there are very few configuration options, and those options which are available are ones that will make you more productive.
You can opt for the full-screen experience, meaning you won’t even be aware of your desktop, and you can enable “Hemingway Mode”, which stops you from wasting time editing as you write by the simple expedient of disabling your backspace and delete keys. This essentially turns your PC into a typewriter where the only way is forwards!
Ghostwriter displays a live word count at the bottom of the window, and if you’re determined to pull your attention away from producing the next great American novel, you can display more live statistics in sidebar tabs.
Markdown is a simple formatting convention, and when you want to see how your literary opus will look when completed, you can even enable a Live preview.
How to Install Ghostwriter on Your Computer
Ghostwriter seems to have been written with Linux usage in mind, and there are repositories available for both Ubuntu and Fedora. If your distro is neither Ubuntu nor Fedora, it’snot too difficult to compile software on any Linux distribution, although it can be time-consuming.
How to Install Ghostwriter on Ubuntu
Pop open a terminal (usuallyCtrl+Alt+T), and paste the following commands—hittingReturnafter each one.
Install Ghostwriter on Fedora
Open a terminal, and paste the following commands—hittingReturnafter each one.
How to Install Ghostwriter on Windows
Ghostwriter is available on Windows only as a portable app. Follow the instructions below to add the program to your computer.
How to Install Ghostwriter on macOS
Ghostwriter can be compiled from source to run on macOS. However, the developers warn that there are a few minor quirks.
Grab the source code fromGitlab, then see theREADME.mdfile for build instructions.
Using Ghostwriter to Write Your Novel
After launching Ghostwriter for the first time, you’ll want to set the theme which is least likely to distract you. There are two: light and dark. If you really must insist on distracting yourself in a distraction-free editor, you can edit your own theme insettings>themes. It’s worth spending as little time as possible on the theme; aesthetics are important, but writing is even more essential.
Ghostwriter is a Markdown editor, which means that what you see on the page isn’t how it will appear when rendered. You canread a more complete guide to Markdown. But there are only a few features you need to use Ghostwriter effectively.
To create an H1 heading, preface the line you want with a “#”. For H2s, add a second “#”, all the way to H₆.
You can italicize text by wrapping it in single asterisks. Use double asterisks to bold text.
It may take time to get used to using Markdown, but after a while, you’ll find it more intuitive than menu bars. If you get stuck, the bottom item on the left menu bar will show you common markdown conventions.
One of our favorite Ghostwriter features is “distraction-free mode”, which you can activate by clicking the headphones icon in the bottom right corner of the editor. This takes your focus to the next level by removing even the distraction of the rest of your own text. With “distraction free mode” active, text outside the paragraph you’re currently working on fades to gray—making it harder to read and less likely to pull your attention away from your current sentence.
You can still look through the text, and it’s still easy to read, but it’s not distracting—which is kind of the point of a distraction-free writing tool.
Get Writing With Ghostwriter!
With minimal configuration options, Ghostwriter gets out of your way, helps you stop procrastinating, and allows you to make more progress on your writing project. Optional settings such as distraction-free mode, full-screen, and Hemingway mode stop your attention being pulled away by other apps on your machine, by your own text, and by the editing process. The lack of configuration options is another great bonus, as the fewer things there are to fiddle with, the more writing you’ll get done.
Once your novel is completed, you’ll need to convert it to one of the common formats which are used by consumer reading devices such as Amazon’s Kindle range or Kobo. The most common eBook formats are epub, mobi, and AZW.
Here are the best ways to convert any ebook file so that it works smoothly on your Amazon Kindle.
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