Novel Assistant
A creative writing environment built into VS Code. A quiet WYSIWYG page to write on, a project structure shaped like a novel rather than a repository, and git underneath it the whole time.
code --install-extension baryo-dev.novel-assistantcopyThe problem
Novelists want two things that no single tool gives them.
They want a quiet place to write: a page, a serif, no chrome, nothing blinking. Scrivener and iA Writer do that well.
They also want to be able to answer "what did chapter nine say last Tuesday, before I rewrote the ending?" That is version control, and writing apps are terrible at it. They give you a "history" that is really an autosave, and no way to see what actually changed.
Programmers solved the second problem twenty years ago. The tool is sitting on the writer's machine already, and it is unusable, because VS Code looks like a cockpit and a novel is not a codebase.
Novel Assistant makes VS Code behave for a writer, and quietly leaves git switched on.
What it does
Open the command palette and start a project:
Ctrl+Shift+P -> Novel Assistant: New Project -> pick a folder -> writeFrom there:
- A WYSIWYG page to write on. Merriweather, warm paper, centered, a toolbar you can ignore. It does not look like an editor.
- A structure shaped like a book, generated for you: Manuscript, Characters, Locations, Timeline, Research, Notes.
- git initialised automatically, so every session is committable whether or not the writer ever learns the word "commit".
- A history view that diffs against the last save, so you can actually see what you changed rather than trusting your memory of it.
- Live word count, because every writer is counting anyway.
Status
Version 0.1.0 on the marketplace, and honestly still early. It works, people are using it, and it does not yet do everything the structure implies. Treat it as a good first draft of itself.