Draftline

Draftline is a desktop writing environment for novelists. It combines a focused rich-text editor with offline spelling and grammar checks, character and relationship indexing, story-planning tools, and optional AI-assisted editing.

Draftline runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, with packages built and tested for each.

1.0 is here. Draftline is stable and ready for real work: the format is settled, and it has been used daily on book-length manuscripts throughout development. That is not a claim of being bug-free, and anything you hit is worth telling us about — Help → Report an Issue in the app opens a report with your version already filled in, or open one in the issue tracker directly.

Official website · Changelog · Documentation

Features

• Rich chapter-based manuscript editing powered by TipTap and ProseMirror
• Fast offline spelling and grammar diagnostics
• Character detection, entity resolution, aliases, appearances, and relationship analysis
• Private local chapter structure, pacing, readability, dialogue, keyword, and extractive-summary analysis
• Story bible, timelines, beat sheets, foreshadowing, and knowledge tracking
• Chapter-scoped find and replace
• Local evidence-backed Ask Draftline explorer with manuscript-generated starting points, natural questions, confirmed-character aliases, chapter and character-knowledge trails, missing-name and singleton signals, exact excerpts, and source navigation
• Automatic source-backed Story Timeline with chapter density, event/character/place/time filters, explicit uncertainty, and direct manuscript navigation
• Source-backed Continuity review for identity gaps, one-off characters, knowledge ordering, conflicting physical facts, suspicious clock movement, and thin plot coverage
• Persistent local fact/event evidence indexing with exact source sentences, durable author review decisions, a ranked review queue, and an inspectable Evidence Archive
• Optional activity-based local saves, embedded chapter version history with side-by-side restore, and rolling manuscript backups
• EPUB and DOCX import, and a guided export wizard for EPUB, DOCX, reading-copy PDF, print-ready and hardcover interiors, and audiobook narration scripts
• Optional AI line editing, copy editing, rewriting, and inline assistance
• Bundled plugins with capability/resource metadata and a marketplace foundation for optional local analysis packs

Privacy and AI

Draftline stores manuscripts locally in .draftline project files. Spelling, grammar, character indexing, relationships, and bundled story/pacing analysis run locally.

AI features are optional and disabled until configured. When an AI feature is used, the selected manuscript text and its editing instructions are sent to the provider or command-line tool selected in Settings. Supported paths include local endpoints, provider APIs, Claude Code, and OpenAI Codex. Those services have their own privacy and data-retention policies.

Draftline installs and runs tested, version-pinned Claude Code and Codex CLI releases from its local application-data directory. AI editing requests run in disposable workspaces with model-facing shell, filesystem, browser, application, and sub-agent tools disabled. Global CLI installations on PATH are not used by Draftline.

AI debug logging is opt-in because its logs can contain prompts and manuscript text. Draftline also creates local rolling backups containing the complete manuscript.

Technology

• Go backend using Wails v2
• React 18 and TypeScript frontend
• TipTap/ProseMirror editor
• Zustand state management
• prose/v3 local natural-language processing
• Vitest and Go test suites

Downloads

Prebuilt packages are attached to each GitHub release: a Windows installer and portable exe, a universal macOS disk image, and Linux packages: a .deb for Debian, Ubuntu, and their derivatives, an .rpm for Fedora, RHEL, Rocky, and openSUSE, and an AppImage for other distributions (the AppImage does not start on Ubuntu 22.04; use the .deb there). See docs/RELEASING.md for platform requirements and signing status.

Building from source

Requirements

• Go 1.25 or newer
• Node.js with npm
• Wails CLI 2.15.0
• The platform dependencies listed in the Wails installation guide

Install the matching Wails CLI if needed:

go install github.com/wailsapp/wails/v2/cmd/wails@v2.15.0

Run Draftline in development mode:

cd wails
wails dev

Build a desktop executable:

cd wails
wails build

Testing

From wails:

go test ./...
go vet ./...

From wails/frontend:

npm test
npx tsc --noEmit
npm run build

Repository layout

Draftline/
├── docs/                  Architecture, data-model, feature, and roadmap documentation
├── wails/                 Desktop application and Go backend
│   ├── frontend/          React and TypeScript user interface
│   └── internal/          Book, backup, indexing, export, and support packages
├── CHANGELOG.md           Linear build-version history
├── ROADMAP.md             Current product roadmap and refactoring plans
└── LICENSE                MIT License

The capacitor directory contains experimental work and is not the primary desktop application.

The .draftline format

A .draftline project is a ZIP-based archive containing a manifest, chapter HTML, book metadata, embedded chapter history, and optional analysis and story-planning data. See the data-model documentation and book backend documentation for details.

Draftline reads and writes its own archives, keeps embedded chapter history inside them, and maintains rolling local backups alongside your projects.

Versioning

Draftline uses linear build versioning in the form MAJOR.MINOR.BUILD. The build component increases for each change on the main branch; major and minor components identify manually selected milestones. It does not claim Semantic Versioning compatibility.

See docs/VERSION.md for the version-maintenance process.

License

Draftline is available under the MIT License.