ghostwriter

ghostwriter is a Windows and Linux text editor for Markdown, which is a plain text markup format created by John Gruber. For more information about Markdown, please visit John Gruber’s website at http://www.daringfireball.net. ghostwriter provides a relaxing, distraction-free writing environment, whether your masterpiece be that next blog post, your school paper, or your NaNoWriMo novel. For a tour of its features, please visit the ghostwriter project page.

Screenshots

You can view screenshots of the application at ghostwriter's project page.

Documentation

A quick reference guide is available here. ghostwriter also has a community wiki here. You can read up on help topics or contribute your own.

Installation

Windows

On Windows, you can either download the setup.exe and go through the setup wizard (recommended), or you can run the portable version (advanced users). To install via the setup wizard, download ghostwriter-x64_installer.exe from the Windows repository here to the location of your choice, double click on its icon to run, and follow the installation steps. Note that you must have administrator rights to install.

The portable version is a zip file which you can unzip to any location on your computer. Within the zip file is a simple folder containing the ghostwriter.exe file. Double click on this file to run the program. The dictionaries subfolder contains your Hunspell dictionaries. The data subfolder contains the location of your personal dictionaries, themes, and application settings. The portable version is an excellent alternative for when you do not have administrative rights to install the application. You can take it anywhere on a thumb drive and run it--at school, a friend's house, etc.

Linux

If you are running Ubuntu or one of its derivatives (Linux Mint, Xubuntu, etc.), open a terminal, and enter the following commands:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wereturtle/ppa
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install ghostwriter

There is also now a staging PPA for release candidate builds for advanced users who wish to test drive the latest features/fixes. To install the latest release candidate, enter the following commands from a terminal:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wereturtle/staging
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt install ghostwriter

Fedora users can install ghostwriter from Copr by opening a terminal and entering the following commands:

$ sudo dnf copr enable wereturtle/stable
$ sudo dnf install ghostwriter

There is likewise a staging repository for Copr, where the latest release candidate can be installed with the following commands:

$ sudo dnf copr enable wereturtle/staging
$ sudo dnf install ghostwriter

Finally, you may follow the build instructions below to install on Linux with the latest source code.

MacOS

You can download an application bundle for MacOS and copy it under /Applications (for all the users) or $HOME/Applications (for the current user). That application should work on osx 10.10+, but was tested only on macOS 10.13. Please remember that this build is experimental and you'll find some bugs. Please report those on the issue tracker.

Build

If you wish to build from the source code, you will need Qt 5, available from http://www.qt.io/ if you are on Windows, or in your Linux distribution's repository. If you are on MacOS you will need the latest Qt 5 from brew.

This documentation assumes you already have the source code unzipped in a folder.

Windows

Building on Windows requires Visual Studio. Open a terminal window, and enter the following commands:

> cd <your_ghostwriter_folder_location>
> qmake
> nmake release

Unless you have built ghostwriter as a standalone executable statically linked to your own build of Qt's source code, you will need to copy the necessary Qt and Windows .dll files to the same location as ghostwriter.exe so that the executable can find the required libraries. This can be accomplished by running the windeployqt tool.

IMPORTANT: If compiling against Qt 6, note that having OpenGL components (in this case, QWebEngineView) will force the entire window to be rendered in OpenGL. This triggers a bug in Windows in full screen mode where menus can no longer be displayed, such as the menu bar menus or popup menus.

This issue was not present in Qt 5, since ANGLE was available to bypass the default OpenGL implementation and use DirectX. With ANGLE having been removed from Qt 6 and the documented solutions not entirely working, you will have to use software rendering instead if you wish to work in full screen mode. Please see the section below on command line arguments for further instructions on disabling GPU acceleration.

Obviously, the best option is to continue using Qt 5 on Windows for as long as possible.

Linux

Before proceeding, ensure that you have the necessary packages installed for Qt 5.

For Debian or Ubuntu distributions:

$ sudo apt install g++ qtbase5-dev libqt5svg5-dev qtmultimedia5-dev qtwebengine5-dev libhunspell-dev pkg-config libqt5concurrent5 qttools5-dev-tools

For Fedora:

$ sudo dnf install qt-devel qt5-qtbase-devel qt5-qtsvg-devel qt5-qtmultimedia-devel qt5-qtwebengine-devel hunspell-devel qt5-linguist

For other Linux flavors, the list will be similar; qmake will tell you if you are missing anything.

Next, open a terminal window, and enter the following commands:

$ cd <your_ghostwriter_folder_location>
$ qmake-qt5
$ make
# make install

The last command will install ghostwriter on your machine. If you need to install the application in an alternative location to /usr/local, enter the following command in lieu of the second command above, passing in the desired value for PREFIX:

$ qmake PREFIX=<your_install_path_here>

For example, to install under /opt, you would enter:

$ qmake PREFIX=/opt

Note: If you see blank areas where there should be icons, then you are missing the Qt dependency for the SVG images. On Debian and Ubuntu, this is libqt5svg5. Other Linux distributions may vary on the exact package name.

MacOS

1. You need either XCode or XCode command line tools to install and run brew and to build ghostwriter and other Qt applications.

• You can install XCode from Mac App Store
• You can install XCode command line tools from your terminal typing xcode-select --install

2. Install homebrew. In a terminal:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

3. Install Qt 5 from brew.

$ brew install qt5

Note: If you installed XCode command line tools, Qt will fail building the application with an error like Project ERROR: Could not resolve SDK Path for 'macosx' Error while parsing file <ghostwriter.pro>. Giving up.. Please follow the instructions to build Qt applications without installing XCode

4. run brew link

brew link qt5 --force

Note: This command allows you to use qmake from the CLI. You'll need it for the final step.

5. Clone this repository and build ghostwriter:

git clone https://github.com/wereturtle/ghostwriter
cd ghostwriter
qmake
make

Make sure you're cloned the repo, not just downloaded the src tarball.

5. If you want ghostwriter in your applications folder, from the repo root do:

$ sudo cp -R ./build/release/ghostwriter.app /Applications

6. To use ghostwriter from the command line, do:

$ sudo ln -s /Applications/ghostwriter.app/Contents/MacOS/ghostwriter /usr/local/bin

FreeBSD

Prerequisites

• Git (git or git-lite)

Install the dependencies

sudo pkg inst hunspell en-hunspell pkgconf qt5-svg qt5-multimedia \
qt5-webengine qt5-concurrent qt5-buildtools qt5-qmake qt5-linguist

You will also need to install QtWebEngine

Get the sources

git clone https://github.com/wereturtle/ghostwriter

Build

cd ghostwriter
qmake
make
sudo make install

Command Line Usage

For terminal users, ghostwriter can be run from the command line. In your terminal window, simply type the following:

$ ghostwriter myfile.md

where myfile.md is the path to your Markdown text file.

An option to disable GPU acceleration --disable-gpu is also available. Simply type the following:

$ ghostwriter --disable-gpu

A scenario where you may consider using software rendering would be if compiling against Qt 6 on Windows, and running the application in full screen mode. See documented bug under the Windows build instructions above for further details. Note that the application may inconsistently launch on Windows with GPU acceleration disabled, and it may take several attempts before you can start it successfully.

Portable Mode

You can download the Windows Portable version of ghostwriter, or make your own on any OS. Simply create a folder named data in the same folder as the ghostwriter.exe or ghostwriter executable file (depending on the OS). The application will now use settings and themes in this folder. If you need to migrate existing themes you created while running in non-portable mode, simply copy them from the relevant folder below:

• Windows: C:\Users\<your_user_name>\AppData\Roaming\ghostwriter\themes
• Linux: /home/<your_user_name>/.config/ghostwriter/themes
• MacOS: ~/Library/Application Support/ghostwriter/themes

Note: The MacOS settings location needs to be confirmed. A full sample application path would also be helpful (instead of listing ~/). If you are a hobbyist MacOS developer and if you can confirm where ghostwriter stores it's settings, please put in a pull request with your revisions to this README file.

Additional Markdown Processors

ghostwriter has built-in support for the cmark-gfm processor. However, it also can auto-detect Pandoc, MultiMarkdown, or cmark processors. To use any or all of the latter three, simply install them and ensure that their installation locations are added to your system's PATH environment variable. ghostwriter will auto-detect their installation on startup, and give you live HTML preview and export options accordingly.

Contribute

Please read the contributing guide on how to contribute.

Licensing

The source code for ghostwriter is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3. However, various icons and third-party FOSS code (i.e., Hunspell and cmark-gfm) have different licenses compatible with GPLv3. Please read the COPYING or LICENSE files in the respective folders for the different licenses.