New! v0.3.2 released! Fixed an unpleasant and very silly typo that caused WordGrinder to crash if you tried to turn autosave on (as the author found, to his cost). This version now has a crash handler that will try to let you save your document if/when any other bugs show up.
WordGrinder is a Unicode-aware character cell word processor that runs in a terminal (or a Windows console). It is designed to get the hell out of your way and let you get some work done.
Perhaps you'd like to see some screenshots.
WordGrinder is a word processor for processing words. It is not WYSIWYG. It is not point and click. It is not a desktop publisher. It is not a text editor. It is not do fonts and it barely does styles. What it does do is words. It's designed for writing text. It gets out of your way and lets you type.
The author wrote it to have something to write novels on.
Features you might like:
Disclaimer: WordGrinder is beta software. It's under development and it has bugs. While it seems pretty solid in the author's experience, if you use it for real data it will probably crash, wipe it all, and shoot your dog. Use and enjoy, but with care.
You can get the most recent version of WordGrinder from the project download page.
If you are a Windows user, you will want the binary package called wordgrinder-for-windows-X.X.zip. Simply unzip this into a folder somewhere and read the README.
If you are a Unix user (or, probably, OSX), you will want the source package called wordgrinder-X.X.tar.bz2. You'll have to build this yourself. Decompress it somewhere and read the README.
If you want assistance, or wish to make comments, suggestions, feature requests or simpy want to talk about it, then you're welcome to join the mailing list.
Note to Windows users: this section only applies if you want to compile WordGrinder from source, which you probably don't.
WordGrinder is written in a combination of C and Lua. This means you have to have Lua installed if you want to compile it. It also makes extensive use of Unicode, which means you'll need a Unicode-aware version of ncurses. Full instructions are included in the README.
When building for Windows, I cross-compile from Linux using MinGW (a much friendlier way of doing it than using native Windows tools, believe me). Nevertheless, you should still be able to use Cygwin to build natively.
Depending on whether your OS has them packaged for you, you may need to compile the following packages:
Debian and Ubuntu have all the necessary requirements pre-packaged. (That's what the author wrote it on.)
Version 0.3.2, 2008-11-03: Fixed a very simple and very stupid typo that caused a crash if you tried to turn autosave on. Added a simple exception handler to try and prevent data loss on error in the future.
Version 0.3.1, 2008-09-08: Minor bugfix revision to correct a few minor but really embarrassing crashes in 0.3: no crash on HTML import, no crash on File->New. Also some minor cosmetic fixes I noticed while doing the work.
Version 0.3, 2008-09-07: New version released with a silly number of bug fixes, and lots of new features (like the table of contents, the scrapbook, the autosaver, etc). Also a Windows version.
Version 0.2, 2008-01-13: New version released with many, many bug fixes, and a few new features (like a running word count).
Version 0.1, 2007-10-14: First useful release!