Vespers

a focused writing app for fiction writers

Vespers is a desktop app for novelists who want to outline, draft, and revise their prose in one place — without the clutter of Word, the overhead of Scrivener, or the surveillance of the cloud.

— Built by a fiction writer, for fiction writers.

Vespers editor with an outline sidebar on the left showing beats, chapters, and scenes; prose on the right with a strikethrough, a highlight+comment, and a standalone post-it note visible.

Free during the 1.0 launch

Download for macOS Apple Silicon · 8.6 MB · macOS 12+

Why Vespers

Honest metrics Pomodoro-based accounting instead of word-count goals. See the time you actually put in — not just what you typed.
One surface Outline (structure, drag & drop), Editor (prose with revision marks), Focus (pomodoro timer + tasks), Dashboard (writing history). One app. No context switching.
Keyboard-first ⌘⇧] to walk your editorial marks. ⌘⇧M to leave a note. ⌘P to jump between scenes. Fast because writers are fast.
Offline & yours Your prose lives as plain markdown files on your Mac. No cloud, no subscription, no account. Export to .docx or a folder any time.

What's inside

Every writing session is a pomodoro. Every revision leaves a snapshot. Every mark you leave is one keystroke away from the next. The dashboard shows you a month of your work at a glance — additions, deletions, marks resolved, focused time.

There's no "Distraction-free Mode" toggle because there aren't any distractions to hide.

Every view

Vespers Dashboard — writing time, words per active day, active days, manuscript words per day sparkline, additions vs deletions bars, prose signals (readability, dialogue %, sentence length), and a contributions total. — Dashboard — 30-day writing time, additions and deletions per day, prose signals, contributions. Honest metrics of the work you actually put in.

Vespers Outliner Progress subtab — every scene as a row with word count bar, revision sparkline, additions/deletions ticks, readability grade, pomodoros logged, and last active timestamp. — Outliner — beats, chapters, scenes, with word counts, revision history, and pomodoros logged against each. See the shape of the whole manuscript at once.

Vespers Focus & Tasks panel — pomodoro timer at 21:55 paused, today's intentions with per-task pomodoro pips, yesterday's carry-over section with quick 'done' and 'today' actions. — Focus — one running pomodoro, today's intentions, yesterday's carry-over. Short-cycle tasks, not day-long monoliths.

Requirements

macOS 12+ on Apple Silicon. Windows and Linux builds are on the roadmap — sign up for updates via GitHub Watch on the app repo.