I stumbled across this app when I was searching for a writing app I can use for academic writing. It was probably designed for any form of long-form writing, particularly for writing novels. The developers own website for Ahti is at:
https://www.bretmerritt.com/#ahti

As you can see from the screenshots, it will be very familiar to Scrivener users. Which is just perfect for me. I find I work well in writing apps that have a binder layout and text void of markdown symbols. I do not know why I am wired this way, I just am.

Ahti is a simpler, more modern, version of Scrivener that many folks have been after. Not only does the interface provide a clam and clean place to write in, but the app also has versions for the Mac, iPad and iPhone. Of particular importance to me was that it syncs between devices using iCloud. (No more being forced to use Dropbox to sync with iOS devices, at last!)

Files are stored in plan text in .md format, which was surprising to discover. So you have the security of knowing you have the manuscripts in a format that can be used widely should the app ever disappear.

In the first day of putting Ahti to use, I have found it be lightning fast. The only time I found it a little sluggish was when I was opening an existing manuscript on another Mac or iOS device for the first time. This maybe more an issue with how iCloud works than a problem with the app. I have found when I open the same manuscript the second time onwards it is very snappy. At the moment, it doesn't seem to be able to save pdfs nor images. I have yet to make contact with the developer, but when I do I will ask whether this is on the radar in future development.

I haven't been able to find a trial for the app, but it so cheap that this wasn't an issue at all. Even with the Japanese yen at the lowest it has been in close to 40 years, the price is about a the same price you pay for fancy coffees these days. On the Japanese Mac App Store it is priced at ¥1,000 which gets you all versions of the app. The price in US dollars is $5.99. The link in the Mac App Store is:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ahti/id6781643515?platform=mac

Looking at the developers website, it appears that Brett is "senior frontend engineer". I don't really know what this means, but he seems to know something or two about computing and programming. I am scratching me head trying to work out how he was able to develop the almost perfect writing app. ;)

By the way, MojoPad has now become my daily goto app. It has become my "thought studio". I see Ahti being my go to app when I need a dedicated place to just write and complete a research paper, whether that be on the Mac or on the iPad, or, when inspiration hits and can't wait, the iPhone.

Hi Darren, thanks for sharing this great find!

Right now I'm trying out Ahti via the online demo the developer has on their website. As you said, it's a simplified clone of Scrivener, and I can see it's been carefully designed. I find it curious (as you also noted) that it has a rich text editor interface but writes the project files in Markdown. However, the author explains it very clearly in the application's presentation. In that regard, I want to ask you a question: have you been able to confirm that Ahti can read MD files that you place in the project tree yourself? If this is possible, the program could be very useful for accepting files from external applications, like iA Writer or Obsidian. Could you confirm if this is possible?

Regards.

Ahti is superb! Many thanks for the tip; I've acquired it. I've also discovered Draftline and Kindling, both free, open-source and multi-platform. Draftline in particular is impressive, with a similar range of features and functions.

I suppose this is the Draftline we want:

https://draftline.ink

Ahti is also very nice. Thanks for all the tips.

Sorry – yes, exactly. And Kindling can be found here: https://kindlingwriter.com

What also impresses me about these "small developers" is the sheer quality of their websites!

The artisanal approach to software, perhaps?

Paul Korm wrote:

I suppose this is the Draftline we want:

https://draftline.ink

The number of writing apps now available is nice, but perhaps a bit overwhelming. How to choose the best one for your own style? Does anyone have any concern for the longevity of free apps?

I don't know about Windows, but on macOS, it seems that apps are more stable and keep working across new OS iterations. Though, I still fume when I remember how Apple itself changed macOS and unapologetically killed Bento by doing that.

I often ask Claude to look into .app packages to see if they are vibecoded or might have had app-generation tools applied to build them. Claude examined Ahti, and thinks it was built with Tauri, a Rust shell, using a template and might have had AI assistance in the build because pieces of the template were left behind, suggesting the dev didn't clean up fully. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, but it's not the kind of craft work one would expect from long-established artisans like George Browning of Curio, etc. Though, George publicly discusses using Cowork and other tools to assist his coding. It's a new world.

It really is. I was reading an honestly rather depressing post on Reddit just yesterday by an AI manager/supervisor who had been interviewing three senior software engineers for places on his team and found they were all totally committed to AI for everything – coding, reviews, quality control, etc. And made some absurd statements in response to his question "But would you really trust AI to code programs for healthcare, warfare, high-security installations?"

My (soon to be) daughter-in-law is a high-level coder, and the company she currently works for (originally an open-source company!) essentially obliges their software engineers to use AI. As she says, the canny ones use it to produce stuff that looks superficially impressive, but when you settle down to turn their "concepts" into real products, you realise just how inadequate the code is – especially in terms of security (her specialisation). Humans, eh? Sigh...

Hello @tberni

I was wondering the same thing, so I copied and pasted an .md file directly into the "Manuscript" folder Ahti creates in a vault. I had the application open at the time, and I noticed it changed the file name slightly by adding a number in front of the file name. I then looked at the binder in the app, and the .md file appeared. I took a look at the text, and it appeared exactly how it appears for me in the app I created the text (MojoPad) with changes in the font settings in Ahti, namely font size and font type.

Actually, before I did this, I tried using the only import possible at the moment, "import project," and Ahti threw up an error, which was expected, as it wasn't a project; it was a "page" I was trying to import. Maybe the developer can consider adding a file menu for importing a file in various formats. I tried this with a plain text file, and Ahti didn't recognize it, so it seems to work with only .md files at the moment.

Anyway, this is good to discover, as this means you work with other apps that produce .md files. :)

tberni wrote:

I want to ask you a question: have you been able to confirm that Ahti can read MD files that you place in the project tree yourself? If this is possible, the program could be very useful for accepting files from external applications, like iA Writer or Obsidian. Could you confirm if this is possible?

Thank you @MadaboutDana for the information about Kindling and @Paul Korm for Draftline.

I downloaded both and some initial reactions where that Kindling had the closest "feel" to Ahti UI-wise, which would probably see me using Kindling over Draftline. This is purely personal preference. When writing, it best to use the app that gets more writing done.

Unfortunately, both apps do not seem to have an app for the iPad. So, I happy with Ahti.

I am really happy to see more and more of these type of apps springing up recently. That these apps are open source and free is very encouraging for the long term. I appreciate the developers working on these apps as a labor for love. Though, I might add, that Ahti is so inexpensive that I am sure the developer is working with the same sense of giving to community. I am truly thankful to all! :)

On the developer's website for Ahti (https://www.bretmerritt.com/#ahti under the heading "Technologies" it lists what was used to develop Ahti. As I my coding knowledge and experience is with BASIC for the Commodore Vic 20 and C64 and basic HTML, I can't make head or tail of what it means. But it does seem the developer knows his stuff.

I clicked the link to the LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/bret-merritt/ page the developer provides on his GitHub page (https://github.com/bretm9 and saw that he studied software and design after student game design at university. Bret seems to have followed an interesting path. I also appreciate his personal stance for justice. This is the very reason I gave up a career in the business world to pursue a second career as a researcher at university. :)

Paul Korm wrote:

I often ask Claude to look into .app packages to see if they are vibecoded or might have had app-generation tools applied to build them. Claude examined Ahti, and thinks it was built with Tauri, a Rust shell, using a template and might have had AI assistance in the build because pieces of the template were left behind, suggesting the dev didn't clean up fully. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, but it's not the kind of craft work one would expect from long-established artisans like George Browning of Curio, etc. Though, George publicly discusses using Cowork and other tools to assist his coding. It's a new world.

Hi all!

I'm the developer of Draftline. I made an account just to say thank you. I check where traffic comes from now and then on Google Analytics, and seeing Outliner Software show up as a referrer, then finding this thread, was the first time I've seen Draftline come up somewhere organically. That was a genuinely exciting moment for me, so thank you MadaboutDana and Paul for the kind words and the link!

The labor of love is very real. Draftline started as the tool I wanted for my own novel after I had problems with cloud software on planes and writing retreats, and even in the short time since I put out the first public build, I've watched a lot of new writing apps show up. Some of that is the AI coding boom, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. With so many beautiful, easy-to-use options appearing, it's much harder for a low-quality app to skate by, which keeps developers always innovating and striving to make the best product they can, and writers end up with better choices all around which is always the goal! More options means a better chance someone finds exactly the tool that fits them.

Darren, on the iPad point: a mobile companion is planned, both for android and for iOS, it just doesn't exist just yet. After living in the desktop app for a while I kept wishing I had something on my phone for writing on the go, so it's coming out of my own need at some point in the future.

I'd love to hear any feedback or features you guys might like to see in it or might make the app even better!

Thanks again, this made my week!

I realise I haven't yet mentioned my very favourite markdown writing app on Windows, Linux and MacOS: Pendown MD Editor ( https://pendown.app ). This is by far the most accomplished general markdown editor I've ever used – I regard it as the benchmark, not least because you can view or edit multiple documents side by side, it opens (like Typora) any folder as a "workspace" without any complicated vaults (but still offers a full workspace search function, which works extremely well). Other excellent points? You can edit in a WYSIWYG view (which I use by preference), with no markdown code whatsoever – or you can use a standard two-pane "code" view, which is useful if you're using it, for example, to edit files in an Obsidian vault. It uses "smart" punctuation (or should I write “smart” punctuation?), is extremely quick, and best of all, is free!

There are lots of other nice features, but the (again, very elegant) website explains them rather well.

Cheers,
Bill

I thought I would share another recent find, NEO, a writing app developed by Hugh Howey, the author of "Silo" which was made into a drama series on Netflix.

NEO is runs on the Mac and Windows PC. It does not have a mobile version. The app is focused on squarely on writing, distraction-free, and has some interesting, well-thought out ways of manipulating the text and menus using keyboard strokes.

Oh, and it is free. Information about NEO can be found on Hugh Howey's website:
https://hughhowey.com/introducing-neo/

Interesting! And of course I've downloaded it immediately, because it's free!

The only thing I'd say about many of these apps is that they take up So. Much. Space. NEO is 360 MB of app (let alone the support files); Pendown, on the other hand, is just 7 MB in size... Just sayin'! Growly Notes, despite its OneNote-like sophistication, is just 25 MB. Whereas Zettlr, a – fairly straightforward – writing app I'm quite fond of, takes up an amazing 1 GB (well into Microsoft/Apple territory!), at least on Linux.

That might, in fact, be an interesting topic for discussion. Zavala, I notice, only takes up about 25 MB; Traverse takes up even less, at just 11.5 MB. Outlinely, one of the best now defunct outliners, tops out at 31 MB. Plainva, an open-source effort to duplicate much of Notion, takes up just 66 MB; Octarine is just over 33 MB. The revitalised Quiver is just 23.5 MB in size. The outstanding but also, alas, defunct Noteship took up just 22 MB; the long-established Notebooks a modest 31 MB. Kosshi is under 50 MB, as is the venerable MacJournal; Justnote just over 50 MB. Kindling 63 MB, EdgeMark (a lovely open-source Sidenotes equivalent for Mac) just 12.5 MB, Draftline 65 MB, Coppice 25 MB (about the same as Bike). And finally Ahti, the subject of this particular thread, takes up less than 12 MB! As you can see, if you want to super-rationalise your writing environment, there are plenty of options (for info, Scrivener takes up 226 MB).

And where each Microsoft Office app takes up about 2.5 GB, SoftMaker Office (a more or less MS-compatible/cloned equivalent) takes up less than 800 MB (and that's the whole thing, not just individual apps). LibreOffice, Collabora and OpenOffice are similarly modest compared to MS and Apple.

As already mentioned elsewhere, I'm also fascinated by the fact that the equivalent Android apps (where they exist) are almost all much smaller than the desktop versions (as are the iOS apps, to be fair). Food for thought!

NB: all the above figures are taken directly from my MacBook's Applications folder, and don't take support files into account.

I have to say, NEO is very elegant. A little constraining, and it takes a little while to work out the underlying logic – but it is highly logical, and the constraints are actually quite pleasant. The outline/manuscript layout is not dissimilar to a kind of mix of Ulysses and Scrivener, so very attractive: you can focus intimately on specific sections, or you can zoom out to take in the entire text. Further exploration required!

Oh, and even though only Windows and Mac are mentioned on the website, there's a Linux AppImage in the GitHub repository... Nice!

Here I am trying to whittle down the number of apps I use, and everyone keeps leading me to enticing new apps! (Really, though, thank you.)

That's almost certainly the result of whether the app was built natively on macOS with Swift or Objective-C, calling pre-existing macOS frameworks, or whether the app is an Electron or similar. The latter tend to package Chromium browser and Node.JS code into the app package. You can have multiple copies of Chromium on your drive and not know it because devs used Electron. Apps that have a lot of assets embedded in them, like templates, samples, etc., are bigger. And some devs are still shipping Universal binaries with both Silicon and Intel versions of the app inside.

I just checked my own apps folder and found 14 Electron apps -- so I have 14 embedded copies of Chromium -- 3.5 GB of wasted space.

MadaboutDana wrote:

The only thing I'd say about many of these apps is that they take up So. Much. Space.

Hi, Paul,

How do you check for this?

Thanks.

Paul Korm wrote:

I just checked my own apps folder and found 14 Electron apps -- so I have 14 embedded copies of Chromium -- 3.5 GB of wasted space.

Inside the .app package, this folder is the signature of an Electron app:

Contents/Frameworks/Electron Framework.framework

You could check apps one by one, but I gave Claude temporary access to /Applications and told it to look for that signature in all apps. (Claude itself is one.)

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

How do you check for this?

Thank you, Paul!

Paul Korm wrote:

Inside the .app package, this folder is the signature of an Electron app:

Contents/Frameworks/Electron Framework.framework

You could check apps one by one, but I gave Claude temporary access to /Applications and told it to look for that signature in all apps. (Claude itself is one.)

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>How do you check for this?

Darren McDonald2 wrote:

I thought I would share another recent find, NEO, a writing app developed by Hugh Howey, the author of "Silo" which was made into a drama series on Netflix.

NEO is runs on the Mac and Windows PC. It does not have a mobile version. The app is focused on squarely on writing, distraction-free, and has some interesting, well-thought out ways of manipulating the text and menus using keyboard strokes.

Oh, and it is free. Information about NEO can be found on Hugh Howey's website:
https://hughhowey.com/introducing-neo/

The name chosen for this app poses a slight problem… NeO already exists (Takashi Hamada's outliner).

Paul Korm wrote:

Inside the .app package, this folder is the signature of an Electron app:

Contents/Frameworks/Electron Framework.framework

You could check apps one by one, but I gave Claude temporary access to /Applications and told it to look for that signature in all apps. (Claude itself is one.)

Hmmm... I wonder if Claude just ran:

find /Applications -type d -name Electron\ Framework.framework

and called it the miracle of AI.

Fear AI. Truly fear the Unix graybeard, because shells bow before his presence. ;-)

Yeah, sure, that works too, though this is the right syntax:

sudo find /Applications -type d -name Electron\ Framework.framework

I said nothing about AI miracles, I just used a utility -- nothing strange or fearful about that

I suspect you're right (although it doesn't really account for the MS and Apple bloat, nor the relative svelteness of their mobile apps -- but then of course they're phoning back to the mothership more or less constantly).