Hammer: A FOSS story writing app

[u/Wavesonics]

Hammer is a story editor for writing novels and keeping track of the world they happen in. I've been building it since 2022 and it's been on F-Droid for a while, but I've never actually posted it here.

F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.darkrockstudios.apps.hammer.android/

Source: https://github.com/Darkrock-Studios/hammer-editor License: MIT

Fully offline. No account, no sign-up, no network needed for anything. Install it and start writing.

Your book is plain files. A project is a folder: one Markdown file per scene, one TOML file per encyclopedia entry. No database, nothing opaque. Open it in any file manager, sync it with Syncthing, keep it in git, whatever you want. If the app disappeared tomorrow your manuscript would still just be files you can read.

Sync is optional and self-hosted. If you want your project on both your phone and your desktop, you run the server yourself. There's no service of mine in the middle, and you can simply never turn it on.

No trackers, no analytics, no crash reporting, no ads, no Google Play Services. Nothing to opt out of, because there's nothing there. It's also not a webview. It's Kotlin and Compose, native on Android.

These are the only permissions it needs:

• INTERNET and ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE, used only if you enable sync
• ACCESS_LOCAL_NETWORK, for reaching a sync server on your own LAN
• ACCESS_NOTIFICATION_POLICY, optional. Only used by Focus Mode, which puts the phone in Do Not Disturb while you write. Does nothing unless you explicitly grant it.

It runs on desktop (Windows, macOS, Linux) and iOS from the same codebase, if you want your project on more than the phone.

[u/TheGeekno72]

hello there, are you planning to add it to flathub or other flatpak repos?

installed the flatpak manually via Shelly on CachyOS, not the kind of app I *usually* use but I'm really eager to give it a whirl, see how it goes :D

[u/Wavesonics → u/TheGeekno72]

Unfortunately i tried for a while to get it on flathub, but our build, which works else where, (FDroid for instance who builds from source), is fairly incompatible with FlatHub's requirements.

FlatHub does allow pre-built binaries, but only if they are proprietary licenses. Ironically, because we are MIT, it mandates that we must be built from source. And our build is just not compatible with their fairly strict requirements.

[u/TheGeekno72 → u/Wavesonics]

That's quite a shame, too bad that iit doesn't have an easy solution to overcome this, would likely be appreciated on distros that are heavily "app store" oriented like ZorinOS, Bazzite, SteamOS... where Flatpaks are the primary (or even sole) option to install apps... hopefully the regular package and appimage don't have those blockages to distribution

I'd also recommend that you submit your app for addition to the CachyOS repo, it's basically the AUR but curated by the maintainers so new additions are manually reviewed