For the past few years I've been writing my essays in Obsidian, using about a dozen plugins to get all the features I want in a word processor. But even though the core Obsidian app is well built, the plugins I depended on were not well maintained, and things often broke. Once Claude Code made it possible to write my own app with all of these features built-in, I thought I'd give it a try.

Two months later I had a working app! I've made it open source, added documentation, set up a website https://finalfinalapp.cc and decided to release it to the world. I even joined the Apple Developer program so that I could properly notarize the app.

It is still in beta and therefore a bit rough around the edges, but it is good enough that I am already using it for my own writing projects.

The website has screenshots and lists the key features that make this app unique, such as the ability to zoom in on a section, add inline annotations, version tracking, Zotero support, word count goals, custom themes, Markdown and WYSIWYG editing modes, and spelling and grammar check.

Most importantly for this group, the app has a built-in outline view based on section headers, and you can zoom or reorganize the outline via drag-and-drop.

For more detailed instructions, open the app and load the "getting started" docs from the "Help" menu (they should launch automatically the first time you use the app).

If you are interested in the process of how I developed the app, I've kept a development blog https://vibing.kerim.one/ as well.

The app is open source, free, and collects no user data. If you have support questions, spot bugs, or want to contribute, please use the app's GitHub repository (linked from the homepage listed above). You can even fork the code and make your own version of the app if you like!

The title was meant to read "- A free word processor for academics" ....
"

Congratulations.

Claude is really impressing me. I recently ran across a website that I believe uses Claude to scrape YouTube transcripts on demand and format them (and summarize too, I think) in Markdown for you. It even offers a dedicated free Obsidian plugin to get those transcripts automatically imported from within Obsidian. (I wish I could remember the site - I thought I'd bookmarked it but no.)

In line tasks! Very nice.

@satis Yes, I think we may soon move beyond static "apps" and just have an AI that spins up features on demand

@Amontillado Yes, that was an important one for me!

This looks exciting. I'm curious to know how it does versioning. Does it keep copies itself, diffs, or something like git?

It uses a database underneath.

I really like the academic focus, and the pandoc integration.

Maybe also take Quarto (https://quarto.org into consideration?

(Apparently, it keeps saying that Zotero is not running).

I'm not familiar with quarto. I'll have to learn more about it.

Zotero not running might be a configuration error. Be sure to check the "Getting Started" guide from the Help menu.

Congratulations!

Your evolution from user to developer is admirable!

I'm not on MacOS, so I can't try the software, but the feature list is impressive.

Any chance of getting Claude to port it to Windows or Linux (the latter may be easier) ?

Thanks!

It is open source, so anyone could port it if they like. However, it would not be enough to simply ask Claude to do it. As I document in my development blog, it is testing and debugging that takes up most of the time in creating a working app. All my testing tools are designed using Swift, which is Apple only, so someone would need to create not just a new app but an entirely new set of tools to test that it is working. They would also need to understand the macOS app to know what the app should look like on other platforms.

https://vibing.kerim.one/

This inspired me to write a longer post on the topic of porting to other platforms:

https://vibing.kerim.one/posts/2026-03-18-porting/

@bvasconcelos

Sorry, "zotero not running" was a genuine bug. Should be fixed now.