Hammer — Own your book, build your world

Own your book,<br>build your world

Free and open source. Works offline, on every device you own, and every chapter stays a plain text file on your own disk.

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Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. Free and open source.

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<br>For version control, or moving into another tool.<br>EPUB<br>For beta readers on e-readers and phones, where the text has to reflow.<br>PDF<br>For when the layout must not move.<br>Word<br>For anyone who will leave comments or track changes.<br>RTF<br>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.

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