wwrite

A dead-simple Markdown writing app built with Qt Quick and C++, themed from pywal.

A fork of omawrite retargeted from an Omarchy desktop to a pywal-themed one, with a file browser of its own so nothing in the app borrows another toolkit's look.

• pywal theming. Colours come from ~/.cache/wal, re-read live when wal runs. Replaces omawrite's Omarchy colors.toml integration.
• A built-in file browser. Opening and saving no longer call out to a platform dialog; the picker carries the same palette as the editor, and it can reach the whole filesystem rather than just $HOME.
• Several documents in one process. Ctrl+N opens another document in the same window rather than launching a second copy of the app, and Ctrl+T cycles between them. Upstream forked a new process per window, costing a fresh Qt runtime (~65 MB) each time.
• Save As, as a footer button as well as Ctrl+Shift+S, so an already-open document can be written elsewhere without overwriting the original.
• Markdown or plain text, chosen with a format toggle in the save view.
• Overwrite confirmation, which the platform dialog used to handle.
• Refuses to open what it cannot edit — directories, devices, huge files, binary files.
• Resizes down to 320×240 instead of omawrite's 720×520 floor.
• User-local install (bin/install) in place of the Arch PKGBUILD and the Omarchy package repository.

./bin/install

That builds the app and installs it under ~/.local:

No root, no makepkg, no extra repositories. ./bin/uninstall takes it all back out. PREFIX=/usr/local sudo -E ./bin/install installs system-wide instead.

Run ./bin/build alone to just produce build/wwrite, and ./bin/test for the test suite.

Colours come from pywal's current palette, read at startup and re-read whenever it changes — run wal -i some-wallpaper.jpg and open windows re-theme immediately, with no restart.

~/.cache/wal/colors.json is the source of truth, falling back to the plain ~/.cache/wal/colors file if your template set does not emit the JSON. The palette maps onto the app like this:

Light versus dark is decided by the luminance of the wallpaper background, so wal -l puts the app in light mode without any extra configuration.

Every dialog sets its own modal scrim. The Material style re-declares Overlay.modal per dialog with a colour that is a light wash in dark mode, so a window-level override is ignored and the page turns grey behind a dialog.

If pywal has never run, the app falls back to a built-in palette and follows the XDG desktop portal's color-scheme instead.

wwrite browses the filesystem itself rather than calling out to a platform file dialog, so the picker carries the same palette as the editor. Qt's own fallback dialog appears whenever no platform theme plugin is loaded, and it is styled by Material rather than by the wallpaper — which is the look this replaces.

The browser has a places sidebar, a clickable breadcrumb, size and modified columns, a documents/all-files toggle and a dotfiles toggle. Enter opens or descends, Backspace goes up a level, Esc cancels, and double-click does the obvious thing. The sidebar and toggles fold away in a narrow window.

Both dialogs start in ~. The one exception is Save As on a document that already lives somewhere on disk, which starts in that document's folder so saving a copy beside the original stays one step.

Save writes Markdown or plain text. The footer of the save view carries a format toggle (Markdown .md / Plain text .txt) that rewrites the extension on the name; typing an extension yourself still wins, so .org or .conf survive untouched. New documents still default to .md.

The footer of the editor has three buttons: Save, Save As and Open. Save As (also Ctrl+Shift+S) writes an already-open document to a new file, starting in that document's own folder.

Saving over an existing file asks first. The platform dialog used to do that on our behalf, so the in-app browser has to.

open() refuses anything that is not a text document — directories, devices like /dev/zero that would never finish reading, files over 64 MiB, and anything containing a NUL byte. Loading binary content would fill the editor with replacement characters and write that corruption back on the next save.

It is not confined to $HOME: the sidebar ends with a Filesystem entry for /, and the up button walks past the home directory all the way to the root, so /etc, /usr/bin and the rest are reachable. Most files outside $HOME have no Markdown extension, so flip the filter to All files to see them. wwrite opens them read-write like any other file — saving over a root-owned file will fail on permissions, as it should.

Ctrl+N adds a document, Ctrl+T moves to the next and wraps at the end, and Ctrl+W closes the current one (or the window, when it is the last). There is no tab bar: the window title and a small 2/3 beside the word count say where you are, and that counter is clickable. Each document keeps its own text, cursor, scroll position, undo history and file, so cycling away and back leaves everything as you left it.

Closing the window asks about every unsaved document in turn, not just the one on screen.

They share a single process, which was the point: upstream's Ctrl+N started a detached process per window, so five documents meant five Qt runtimes, and a window that outlived its siblings left an instance running.

• Ctrl+S saves. Unsaved documents open the built-in browser first.
• Ctrl+Shift+S saves as.
• Ctrl+O opens a file through the built-in browser.
• Ctrl+P opens the system print dialog.
• Ctrl+N opens another document in the same window.
• Ctrl+T cycles to the next document.
• Ctrl+W closes the current document, or the window when it is the last.
• Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Shift+Z, and Ctrl+Y handle undo and redo.
• Super+F toggles fullscreen. Qt maps this key as Meta+F.
• Ctrl+F searches the document. Use Enter or Ctrl+G for the next match and Shift+Enter for the previous match.
• Ctrl+H opens find and replace.
• Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I, and Ctrl+K insert bold, italic, and link Markdown.
• Ctrl+? shows the keyboard shortcut reference.

Unsaved drafts are recovered after an abnormal exit. wwrite also watches open files and warns before an external change can replace local work.

Text follows the desktop text size — GNOME's text-scaling-factor, read over the desktop portal — and re-flows without a restart. The default of 12px leaves wwrite at the size it is designed around; larger and smaller sizes scale from there.

• Qt 6: qt6-base, qt6-declarative, qt6-svg
• librsvg (optional), so the installer can rasterise PNG icon sizes

MIT, as upstream — see LICENSE, which carries both David Heinemeier Hansson's copyright for the omawrite code this is built on and mine for the changes.

The iA Writer Mono font is bundled under the SIL Open Font License 1.1; see fonts/OFL.txt. The font is copyright Information Architects Inc. and based on IBM Plex, copyright IBM Corp.