River Writer
A quiet Mac app for screenplays, stage plays and novels
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River Writer is a free Mac app for screenplays, stage plays and novels. You write plain text (.fountain ormd) and a live preview shows the formatted, print-ready pages beside it: Screenplay, Multi-cam, Stage Play or Manuscript. Git versioning is built in, so you can commit drafts, restore files and try an alternate ending on a branch. Outline, scratchpad and todos live as plain files in your project. No accounts, cloud, telemetry or AI; it makes no network connections. Open source (MIT).
PH · launched Oct 24, 2026 · 81 upvotes (top 2%) · 0 views
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Content generation
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Commercial product
- Productivity
- Open Source
- Writing
- GitHub
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
Could you build this?
Yes A native Mac text editor with a live screenplay preview and git integration is buildable, since Fountain parsing and git wrappers already exist, though print pagination takes effort.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 249 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #12 of 250 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 292 days after the earliest competitor.
- Writer Studio · ph · 2026-10-01 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Sonetia: Plan & Write Novels · ph · 2026-09-27 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- StoryWriter · ph · 2026-11-01 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Stet · ph · 2026-10-31 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Writing App for Novelist · hn · 2026-03-02 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.49
Show 3 more
- Flaw · ph · 2026-10-31 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Plaintxt · ph · 2026-10-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Pen Friend · ph · 2026-10-10 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.47