WordGrinder: a word processor for processing words

New! v0.2 released! With bug fixes!

What?

WordGrinder is a Unicode-aware character cell word processor that runs in a terminal. 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:

Ultra-clean, uncluttered display.
Looks good even on a terminal.
Single- and double-width Unicode character support. No right-to-left or combining characters, unfortunately, but everything else should work.
Intuitive, friendly menu system and fast-access keyboard shortcuts. The keyboard shortcuts are all configurable from within WordGrinder.
All configuration settings get saved automatically in your document.
Just enough character and paragraph style support to let you get the job done, while not enough to let you waste time configuring them.
Multiple documents in a single file.
HTML import and export.
Small and efficient codebase. (5500 lines of code!)

Disclaimer: WordGrinder is very beta software. Look at the version number, for heavens' sake. It's certainly got bugs. Use and enjoy, but do not trust. Save regularly and expect it to crash at any moment (although it seems fairly stable in the author's experience).

Where?

WordGrinder is hosted on SourceForge.

You can get the most recent version of WordGrinder from the project download page.

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.

How?

WordGrinder is distributed as source. It's written in a combination of C and Lua. This means you have to have Lua installed if you want to use 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, but you may (depending on whether your OS has them packaged for you) need to compile the following packages:

Debian and Ubuntu have all the necessary requirements pre-packaged. (That's what the author wrote it on.)

What's new?

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!

Who?

WordGrinder was written by David Given. The program is freely distributable under the terms of the New BSD License.