{"id":68,"date":"2025-07-09T08:45:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-09T06:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/no-software-suited-me-so-i-decided-to-build-my-own-spoiler-im-not-a-developer\/"},"modified":"2026-07-11T10:08:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-11T08:08:00","slug":"writing-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/en\/writing-software\/","title":{"rendered":"No Software Suited Me, So I Decided to Build My Own (Spoiler: I’m Not a Developer)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

July 2025.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let’s pick up where we left off. I had a three-thousand-year-old universe spilling out in every direction, three character voices to keep straight without mixing them up, and notes scattered across every medium imaginable. I needed a tool. A real one. A single place to put all of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I did what everyone does: I went looking. I tried things out. And I walked away disappointed every single time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scrivener, or the software you have to learn before you can use it<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Let’s start with the heavyweight. Scrivener is the gold standard, the one everybody recommends. Its features are powerful, I won’t argue with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it never clicked for me. Never.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem is that before you can write with it, you have to learn how to use it. Understand how it works, its logic, its menus. Watch tutorials. Pick apart an interface that feels like it belongs to another era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And me, instruction manuals are like the booklets that come with electronics: I never read them. Except when I’m really struggling, and even then, reluctantly. I want a tool to be intuitive. You open it and you get it. Modern, pleasant, warm, not some cold interface that demands a degree before it’ll let you put down a single word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A piece of software you have to study before writing has, in my book, already lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The others: too expensive, or trapped in the cloud<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I looked elsewhere. And there, two walls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first, the price. Some tools made it clear pretty fast that writing a novel was going to cost me one more subscription, forever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second, even more of a dealbreaker: everything online. The mandatory cloud. And that, for me, is a no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let me describe my nightmare to you. One fine day, the sun is out. I feel like grabbing my laptop, settling in under a tree at the back of the garden, and writing in peace. Except my software needs a connection. So there I am, turning on my phone’s hotspot, watching the signal bars, praying it holds long enough to get through a chapter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No thanks. I want to write where I want, when I want, whether wifi exists or not. My novel is mine, it lives on my machine, and it shouldn’t depend on anyone to open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The spark: what if I made my own?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

That’s when a little idea came knocking. Not some earth-shattering revelation. Just a quiet, obvious thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have to tell you something: I didn’t start from nothing. In a previous life, back when I was a field technician, I’d already had some fun coding myself a little homemade program to manage my service tickets. A custom tool, cut exactly to my measure, that did what I needed and nothing else. And I’d loved it. That slightly peculiar pleasure of using a tool that feels like you, because you’re the one who dreamed it up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, faced with my overflowing notes and not a single piece of software that suited me, the thought came almost naturally. Why not? Why not build myself my own writing tool, intuitive the way I like it, local the way I want it, with exactly the features I need to tame my universe?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One small detail, though. I’m not a developer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I work in IT, in a hospital setting, and I’m a pure self-taught type. Coding a little entry manager, sure. But a real writing application, a complete one, with a text editor worthy of the name, character sheets, world management… that was a whole other ballgame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Except this time, I wasn’t going to be alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The copilot<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Because if I was going to do this, it would be with the AI at my side. Claude Code, to be precise. My code copilot, the one I’d explain what I wanted to, the one I’d build with, test with, fix with, start over with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea, suddenly, didn’t seem so crazy anymore. Ambitious, yes. A little reckless, surely. But doable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I sat down. I opened an empty project. And I began.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had no idea what I was getting myself into.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Because very quickly, this little personal tool started to grow. Far more than expected. But that’s a story for the next episode.<\/em><\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scrivener too complex, the others too expensive or locked in the cloud. So, a self-taught technician and definitely not a developer, I decided to code my own writing software \u2014 local, intuitive, mine \u2014 with AI as a copilot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-behind-the-grimoire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69,"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions\/69"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/le-grimoire.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}