Release 2026.1#
Release Notes#
This release focuses on adding improvements to several existing features of novelWriter. There are new settings for the manuscript tools, improvements to the text editing experience, and a few new features for the editor. A new icon theme has also been added, and a couple more colour themes.
Note that from this release, novelWriter switches to using the year as the main release version number, and an incremental minor version, starting with 2026.1.
User Interface#
The first release of 2026 adds the Lucide icon theme, which you can select from Preferences. Several themes have had minor modification to icon colours for consistency.
Two new light colour themes designed specifically for colour blindness have also been added. A new setting in Preferences will also add dotted lines under formatting codes to further distinguish them from the text in order to make them more visible for people who see fewer colour variations.
The various settings pages and dialogs should also respond better to screen readers now, although there are many further improvements to be made in this area.
Manuscript Features#
There are several new features and settings for the Manuscript Build tool available in the Manuscript Build settings dialog:
The font size of headings can be adjusted, and a new setting to make them upper case was added.
It is now possible to use blank lines between paragraphs for office type document manuscripts instead of paragraph text margins. This makes more sense for manuscript formatted with fixed width fonts in a typewriter style.
Some of the settings have been moved and reorganised into different sections.
Text Editor Features#
Several improvements have been made to the text editor based on user requests.
The in-editor search feature will now move to the previous document also when searching backwards, if the setting to continue searching in the next document is enabled.
A new option in the right click menu will let you split an open document either at the cursor position, or move a section of selected text to a new document. This should make it much easier to split a single document in two.
If you use a fixed width font in the editor, you may not want headings to have a larger font size than the text. You can now turn off the scaling of headings in Preferences.
Each part of the document bread crumbs path in the editor and viewer header is now clickable, and will highlight the relevant document or folder in the project tree.
The keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down will now, respectively, move the cursor to the previous or next paragraph in your document.
A setting in Preferences under Text Editing now lets you use single asterisks for bold. Enabling this feature does not mean you have to edit all places that use double asterisk notation. They will still work.
Other Changes#
Minor improvements have been made to navigation by keyboard in the Welcome dialog, and in the project search panel. Visual improvements with more tooltips labels and icons have been made in various places in the user interface.
Download Links#
Linux#
AppImage
The AppImage should run on any recent Linux distro.
Download: novelwriter-26.1-x86_64.AppImage [84.5 MB] Checksum File
Debian Package (Trixie, Ubuntu 25.10+)
The package is built for Debian Trixie, but should also work for newer Ubuntu, Linux Mint and other Debian-based releases.
Download: novelwriter_26.1_all.deb [3.52 MB] Checksum File
Debian Package (Bookworm, Ubuntu 24.04)
The package is built for Debian Bookworm, but should also work for older Ubuntu, Linux Mint and other Debian-based releases.
Download: novelwriter_26.1-oldstable_all.deb [3.52 MB] Checksum File
Windows#
Setup Installer
This is a standard setup installer for Windows. It is made for Windows 10 or newer.
Download: novelwriter-26.1-amd64-setup.exe [104 MB] Checksum File
Free code signing is provided by SignPath.io, certificate by SignPath Foundation.
Other Packages#
Python Wheel
The Wheel package can be installed with pip install <file_path>.
Download: novelwriter-26.1-py3-none-any.whl [5.70 MB] Checksum File
Source Code
The source code packages are archived files of the entire source code.
See also the novelWriter Repository.
Note
For the time being, the MacOS releases have been discontinued. There are currently no one available to maintain these releases. This is an open source project, and it depends on volunteers and contributors to run. See this discussion for more details.
If you own a Mac and have a Python environment set up, you can still install the Python package of novelWriter and run the latest release. See Installing from PyPi for more details.
Older Releases#
Past release packages are available for download on GitHub.