Writer's Codex

Anyone writing something long eventually needs somewhere to put the parts that aren’t the manuscript: who this person is, when that happened, which thread is still unresolved in chapter nine. The usual answers are a wiki you stop updating, a folder of documents you stop finding things in, or a subscription service that owns your world and can stop existing.

Writer’s Codex is the fourth answer. It’s a progressive web app that runs in your browser, stores everything locally on your own machine, and works with the network switched off entirely.

The constraints it was built under

Local-first, genuinely. No backend, no account, no cloud. Your world lives in your browser’s storage, on your device. Nothing to sign up for and nobody to trust.

An empty canvas, not a template. It doesn’t have opinions about how many act breaks your story needs. Structure your world the way your world is structured.

Portable in and out. There’s an import guide for turning existing notes into something it can read, and a bundled public-domain Sherlock Holmes world so you can poke at a populated example before committing your own.

Why it’s here

The same discipline as everything else on this shelf: it was built to solve a problem in the making of the work — in this case, keeping Cosmos coherent — and it’s public because the problem isn’t unique to me.

Open source under the AGPL, so it can’t be taken away and any redistributed version stays open.

Using it

You don’t need GitHub, an account, or anything installed.

Just looking? Take the tour. It’s the real app running in your browser, loaded with a public-domain Sherlock Holmes world so there’s something to actually read — thirteen characters, five books, a timeline, a relationship web, drafted prose. Every view works. Nothing can be edited or saved, so you can click through the whole thing without signing up for anything or leaving a trace behind.

Want to use it properly? Open the real one. Same app with the writing switched on. It ships empty on purpose — start blank and it’s your world, or load that same Sherlock Holmes example and pull it apart to see how a populated one is put together.

Everything you write lives in your own browser’s storage on your own device. There’s nothing to sign up for and no copy of your work on anyone’s server. Once it’s open, your browser will offer to install it to your desktop or phone — after that it works with the network switched off entirely, and an export button gives you a file you own for backup.

The source is on GitHub under the AGPL if you’d rather run your own copy.