Sortdraft

Sort your scenes, draft your story.

Sortdraft is a desktop novel-writing app I made for myself. I wanted a corkboard for shuffling scenes, a plain editor for drafting, and files I could keep on disk without a cloud account. I am sharing it in case that workflow suits someone else. It is not a full writing studio, and I am not trying to replace yours.

Work is organised as projects → books → chapters → scenes. Each chapter is a corkboard of index cards. Drag cards to reorder a chapter, or drop a card onto another chapter in the sidebar (including across books). Click a card to write. When a book is ready, export it as a single .txt file in corkboard order: left to right, top to bottom.

Scenes are plain text files on disk. Notes and coloured tags stay in the project for planning and are not included in the export.

Features

• Multiple books per project, each in its own folder
• Corkboard planning with draggable scene cards
• Move scenes between chapters and books by dragging
• Scene editor with optional typewriter mode and focus mode
• Project notes and coloured scene tags (not exported)
• Export a book to one .txt file in scene order
• Light, dark, and custom themes; adjustable fonts and page width
• Everything stored locally as folders, JSON metadata, and .txt files

Platforms

macOS (Apple Silicon), Windows, and Linux (x86_64 and ARM64, including 64-bit Raspberry Pi). Please note the Windows release is untested.

Who this is for

If you outline in scenes, like rearranging index cards, and want a simple local app rather than a subscription, this may be useful. If you need collaboration, rich formatting, or a polished all-in-one writing suite, this is probably not it.

I use it for my own novels and change it when I need something. Expect rough edges, and no promise that it will grow into a product.

AI usage

I was looking for a simple text editor, where I could sort my text in a visual way. There are soms options out there, but they are either expensive, overkill, online only or tied to a specific eco-system. 

So why not make my own tool? I work in IT, but I am not a developer. However, I do know enough to guide an AI agent to create what I want, and create it fast. You might not like the use of AI, but I have used it to create something specific for me.