What

Opuscule is a minimalist writing and note-taking application with a few twists.

Its main goal is to help you write the smaller parts of bigger documents quickly, in any order, with as little clutter as possible, but you can also use it as a simple note-taking or blogging tool.

Your notes can then be exported as HTML documents: browse them locally, share them online, or even link them together to build a static website.

Opuscule is developed with Godot and is available for Windows, macOS and Linux.

Download Opuscule

It's free, and will probably go open source if I find enough time to release code I'm not ashamed of.

Why

I am a professional game designer and hobbyist game developer.

Writing game concepts and game design documents often means working on several small documents at the same time, depending on priorities and inspiration, and sharing different bits of information with different persons.

Opuscule is the result of these considerations, and will evolve for years to come. It's primarily focused on suiting my own needs, so it probably won't please everyone. But I hope you'll find it useful.

Screenshots

Features

Current features

- Full keyboard controls
- Autosave on each keystroke
- Optional content categorization into "books"and "pages"
- Books and pages reordering
- Side navigation panel
- Automatic backup after each page manipulation
- Human readable and manually editable save files
- Export to raw text or Markdown
- HTML markup support
- Mini-website generation with HTML export
- Full screen, no distraction mode
- Color themes

Planned features

- HTML tags shortcuts (Markdown is in the works)
- Individual page export
- Game design templates
- Custom links and scripts for HTML export
- Custom themes
- Translations

Hypothetical features

- Pages hierarchy
- Search system
- Statistics
- Hundred Rabbits themes support
- Tags and internal links
- Background drones / ambient noise blocker (I'm developping another app for this)
- In-app image support
- Drag & drop support
- Node-based pages organization
- See the roadmap for more details

Version 0.3.3 (in progress)

Added

- Custom color themes

Version 0.3.2

Added

- The window size is now saved when resized, and restored when the application starts
- Double-clicking on a book in the navigation panel opens the properties screen and selects the book title field
- Double-clicking on a page in the navigation panel opens the properties screen and selects the page title field
- More space between books list and pages list when both are displayed
- Mouse pointer now changes depending on which element is below
- Alternate experimental HTML export theme with various improvements, subject to heavy changes in upcoming releases (Esc > X)
- Markdown headers support (experimental HTML export only)
- New HTML export properties screen (F4)
- RSS feed export (Esc > R)
- Always on top command (Esc > O)

Changed

- Pressing Esc when the Info, Properties or HTML export screen is open now sends back to write mode.
- Changed the spash screen color to hide the ugly window resizing
- Creating a new book now opens the properties screen

Fixed

- Fixed a bunch of date-related issues that occured when adding or moving pages
- Somewhat fixed the button text colors in file dialogues

Version 0.3.1

Added

- Navigation panel listing books and pages, books only, or pages only (F3)
- Left click on a book or a page to display it instantly
- Navigation instant keyboard shortcuts
- Alt + Up/Down to display previous/next page
- Alt + Left/Right to display previous/next book
- New game theme, with gameboyish shades of green
- New star theme, with a deep space-inspired palette
- Text wrap for Linux and macOS

Changed

- Navigation arrows have been changed to reflect the visual logic of the navigation panel
- Up/Down now display previous/next page or increase/decrease current page number
- Left/Right now display previous/next book or increase/decrease book page number
- Updated help screen
- More readable file dialog buttons styling
- The top status bar / window title now updates in real time

Fixed

- A crash could occur if a new page was added after displaying the properties screen
- The title of newly created or inserted pages should now be properly updated

Version 0.3

Added

- Move command mode (M > Arrows) to reorganize books and pages
- M > Left / Right to move pages inside a book
- M > Up / Down to move books inside the library
- Syntax highlight for "#" Markdown headers
- Syntax highlight for "figcaption" HTML tag

Changed

- 3 text wrap modes with narrow / wide / full column width (Esc > W, Windows only for now)
- 2 highlight modes with non-alpha characters / HTML markup (Esc > S)
- Markdown export changed (Esc > K)
- Logo font updated

Fixed

- Changing data folder won't override the first book of a non-empty folder anymore
- Black & white image filter now only apply to dark theme
- "iframe" HTML tag highlight is now limited to a single line
- Images in HTML export are now resized to fit the column width

Version 0.2.3

Added

- Text wrap (Esc > W, Windows only for now)
- Fast export mode to desktop (Esc > F > T / M / H)

Changed

- Updated help, properties and info screens
- HTML export:
- Better styling for "q" / "blockquote" tags

Fixed

- "img" HTML tag highlight is now limited to a single line
- Minor .txt and .md export formatting enhancements

Version 0.2.2

Added

- Syntax highlight for basic HTML tags
- HTML export:
- HTML/CSS cleanup
- Small tweaks

Changed

- New non-IBM font (Hack)
- Updated help and properties screens

Fixed

- HTML export doesn't crash the app anymore
- It's no longer possible to write while the help screen or info screen are open.

Version 0.2.1

Added

- Markdown export:
- Table of content with links
- Back to top links

- HTML export:
- Table of content with links
- Back to top links
- Animated eye candy
- Favicon
- Social networks preview
- Random SVG header backgrounds

Changed

- Icon
- Spash screen

Fixed

- Read only mode now uses the same color for every character

Major

- Moving books (Esc > M > Up / Down) when using a cloud sync client such a MEGA on the data folder can cause some books to be overwritten by the moving book. Pause or shut down your cloud sync client before moving books.
- Crashes may happen if you've edited your opuscule files with Notepad. Don't use Notepad, it will mess your files formatting.
- Pasting something into the book title text field right after adding the book causes the app to crash.

To investigate

- Crash when adding a page (from position 2) after moving one to position 1.

Minor

- LineEdit selection isn't themed, meaning a selected text field on the properties screen can be unreadable with some themes.
- Various parts of the FileDialog need proper styling.
- The focus color of buttons isn't themed yet.
- When adding a new page, the page title doesn't update in the status bar (possibly fixed)
- Lengthy pages can lag. It's probably a Godot issue, but what's causing this is unclear. It could be due to syntax highlighting or to the saving system.

Soon

- Custom themes
- Clean HTML export
- HTML markup shortcuts (Markdown makes this redundant)
- Separate URL field for the author link (done)
- Easy books files import/export
- Custom fast export path

Soonish

- Timed backup
- Single page export
- Linked single page export (not sure what this meant?)
- In-app dynamic table of content
- Special pages to add custom CSS and JS
- Proper manual
- Mouse wheel shortcut to change page / book
- Visual feedback when changing command mode

Later

- Sort pages by name
- Sort page by date
- Backup settings
- Font size settings
- Custom header levels for pages titles
- Markdown syntax highlighting
- Book export templates with special formatting:
- For screenshots / image gallery
- For audio files / playlists
- French (and maybe other languages) translation
- HTML header background selection?
- PICO-8 color theme (HTML export too damn ugly)
- Arrow shortcuts for themes
- Global manual backup (copy data folder somewhere else)
- Regular font option?