Windows Installer

You can install novelWriter as a standalone application on Windows 10 (64-bit) by downloading the installer for the latest release from the Releases page on GitHub. The download link should end in “setup.exe”.

This is a standalone installation that does not require that you first install Python on your system. All of the necessary dependencies, including the Qt framework, is bundled with this installer, which is why it is so much larger than novelWriter itself.

Installing from PyPi

You can install novelWriter and its dependencies from PyPi. Please check the novelWriter Project Page for more details. This assumes you already have Python and pip installed on your computer. If so, running the following should be enough:

pip install --user novelWriter

Running From Source on Linux and macOS

You can run novelWriter from the source code directly. You can download the source code of the latest release from the Releases page on GitHub. Each release should have a “Source Code (zip)” and a “Source Code (tar.gz)” link at the bottom. Either will do.

After downloading it, extract the zip or tar file to wherever you want to keep the application. You can run novelWriter from the command line by running the novelWriter.py file, or by creating a launcher that starts it.

There are a few dependencies that need to be installed for novelWriter to work. You need at least to install the Python packages pyqt5 and lxml, and should also install pyenchant for better spell checking support. Consult your operating system’s repository for how to install these packages. Alternatively, they can be installed from PyPi with:

pip install --user -r requirements.txt

Optional Steps

You can also install novelWriter as a Python package by running the following command while in the root folder of the novelWriter source:

sudo python3 setup.py install

In addition, on Linux distributions that support it, it may be possible to set up a launcher automatically by running:

sudo python3 setup.py launcher

This at least works on Debian and Ubuntu. I haven’t tested it on other systems. Please feel free to submit improvements to the script for other Linux distros.