Manuskript

It has been 2 months since I first signed up for a write.as account, and I am finally getting around to a 2nd blog post. #NaNoWriMo didn't really happen for me this year. Life is busy, with a lot of different things competing for my attention, but that is alright.

I am playing around with Manuskript. And as an open-source project, you can see all the code and contribute to it. Manuskript is published under GPL 3.

It is a cross-platform, open-source writing tool that is similar to Scrivener. It is making good progress. I want to be able to open my documents on Mac or Linux, depending on what I have in front of me at the time, and Manuskript looks like it will allow me to do that.

Manuskript very much lends itself to developing books via the Snowflake method, a method for writing fiction developed by Randy Ingermanson. There are even preset fields for the characters for goals, conflicts and epiphanies.

I want to use writing tools that work cross-platform, help me to organize my story through developing characters and settings, helping me to think about the big picture when needed, and concentrate on individual scenes without distractions when possible.

One note on using Manuskript on macOS Catalina. Apple really doesn't like it when users run software from unidentified developers. You have to right-click on the software and choose Open. Manuskript was more of a pain, because macOS Catalina's “Gate Keeper” process was giving me warnings for every single file! For example, I had to explicitly allow QtMultimedia, QtNetwork, etc. When I ran the manuskript file, I had the options to “cancel” or “move to trash” on every one of these files. Not helpful!

I had to go into Preferences-Privacy & Security-General. At the bottom, there is an “Allow apps downloaded from” section. Each time a file was prompted with the “Move to Trash” and “Cancel” options, this section in the preferences also showed the file where I could explicitly allow it to run. But going through every file took over 10 minutes of choose “yes, allow, yes, allow, oh manuskript process stopped, start this over again, etc”.

It was a huge pain. I know Apple has been heading in this direction with macOS for a while, with their strictness moving closer and closer to the “walled garden” approach they use with apps on their phones. This is a big reason why I am going to totally make the switch to Linux in the future. I already have two computers running Linux, an old Dell laptop (used by the kids) and a Raspberry Pi. My next phone will be a Linux phone. And someday I will replace this laptop, which is a MacBook Pro. But it is a perfectly good laptop, and I'm not one to throw away good hardware. So I have to struggle to bend this machine to my will, and sometimes against Apple's.

I understand Apple is trying to protect their users from bad software, but... this is my computer! I'm a technical person. Allow me to install my software without jumping through hoops!