Installing on Windows#

As of release 2.5.2, the novelWriter installer for Windows is signed by the SignPath Foundation. Earlier versions were not, and will warn that the installers are not signed.

However, even if the installer is signed, your browser may issue a warning that the application isn’t commonly downloaded. In for instance Edge, you can click the three dots next to the download and select “Keep”. You may have to also click “Show more” and “Keep anyway.”

../_images/help_win11_dl.png

If you use another browser, you may see a similar warning.

Knowing where you download software from is important, so make sure you only download the installer from either here on the novelwriter.io website, or directly from the project’s GitHub Releases page. All download links on this website also point to the GitHub Releases page. It is the only official source of downloads for Windows.

Tip

You can verify that you received the correct installer by checking the SHA256 sum. A SHA sum is a long number that is unique for a given file. It will only be identical for an identical copy of the file. The correct value is listed nearby where you downloaded the installer, either on the Home page or the Downloads page. You can also download the .sha256 file on the GitHub Releases page alongside the installer.

What’s in the Installer File?#

The installed files for novelWriter are usually located in:

C:\Program Files\novelWriter

Since novelWriter is written in pure Python, there is no executable binary file (.exe file). Instead, novelWriter comes with the official Python executable included. This executable is called python.exe, and is signed by the “Python Software Foundation”. Most of the other files in the main folder are also for Python. They are included in the installer from the Python Website when it is created.

The start script for novelWriter is called novelWriter.pyw, and all of the code for it is in the novelwriter folder. The app code is in a number of .py files, and they are all readable in for instance Notepad. There are also a number of .pyc files, which are performance enhanced versions of the .py files, generated by Python. If you delete them, they will be created again the next time you run the app.

In addition to its own code, novelWriter depends on a few libraries. They are located in the lib folder:

  • PyQt5 is the framework that novelWriter is built upon. It is a Python wrapper library for the Qt Framework.

  • enchant is a spell checker library that provides spell checking capabilities for novelWriter.

That’s all.

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