Plume Creator

For some time I have been looking for a good open source alternative for writing which would include drafts, characters, research, all in one. There are several solutions to combine a solution but last year I stumbled across Scrivener which released a beta version for Linux. There is still a functioning beta release, but with their other projects ongoing for Windows, Mac and the upcoming iOS version I suspect it might take a while for the Linux platform to be released. Not that I have had any problems with the beta release, it has been very stable on my laptops. Then again, I have only used it for shorter blog posts and not wrote a book in it so far. It is also not clear whether the finished release of a Linux version will be open source. Therefore I continued to search and try out different solutions.

A few weeks ago I came across the Plume Creator project, which seemed to be a good alternative to Scrivener as well as open source. The latest stable release 0.66.1 is available for Windows and Linux. The Linux version can be downloaded as deb and rpm packages or source code. There used to be a Mac version but it is not updated recently due to the developer, Cyril Jacquet, not having a mac computer available.

I downloaded the .deb package and it installed just fine on both my Ubuntu Studio 14.04 and Debian Jessie installation. I’m writing this in Plume Creator on Debian. On Debian I had to install libqt4-core beforehand though.

So far it looks quite good. I’m not an avid writer but will start to use Plume Creator for different blog writing and see how works out.

Plume Creator version 0.66 is not in active development any longer. The application is getting a complete do-over in Python and the next release will be called 1.5. It’s in early alpha stage and with a little help from Cyril I managed to get it running on my laptop installations. Not because it was hard to get it running, but because I’m not that good with Python projects and didn’t know how to start the application …

Now I only need to figure out how to Solarize my Plume Creator. And start writing stuff.