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).
Hey Product Hunt! 👋
I spent a couple of years working in film, including as an assistant director on a feature, and I wanted a writing tool that stayed out of the way: plain-text files I own, the formatted page right beside my words, and real version history without another subscription or account.
So I built River Writer. Screenplays and stage plays are .fountain, novels are .md, and a project is just a folder, so your work opens in any editor. Drafts are versioned with Git under the hood (no setup), so you can branch off to try an alternate ending and come back.
It makes no network connections: no cloud, no telemetry, no AI. It's MIT-licensed and you build it from source for now.
I'd love feedback, especially from screenwriters and novelists: what would make this your daily writing app?
Will there be a normal download, or is building from source the only way for now? And can it open Final Draft files?
About River Writer on Product Hunt
“A quiet Mac app for screenplays, stage plays and novels”
River Writer launched on Product Hunt on October 24th, 2026 and earned 81 upvotes and 4 comments, placing #12 on the daily leaderboard. 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).
River Writer was featured in Productivity (664.3k followers), Open Source (69k followers), Writing (59.4k followers) and GitHub (41.5k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 237.5k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted River Writer?
River Writer was hunted by Arjun Acharya. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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Arjun Acharya