macOS · Windows · Linux — local first

The whole story, within reach
of the sentence you are writing.

Linetta is a calm writing studio for novels and web fiction. Outline, characters, places, relationships, plot threads and research live beside the manuscript — in a SQLite file on your own disk, with no account and no mandatory cloud.

Get Linetta Source on GitHub

No account, no subscription
The manuscript stays on your disk
Korean, English, Japanese

The Linetta workspace: an outline rail, a serif editor holding the opening of a scene, and a right-hand panel with the scene’s character count, targets and synopsis.

§ 01 — What it is

Writing is not project management.

A long story accumulates state. By episode forty, a promise made in chapter three, a debt, and the colour of somebody’s coat are all load-bearing — and none of it is in the paragraph on screen.

Most tools answer that with more ceremony: boards, tags, statuses, a second app to keep current. Linetta answers it by putting the story’s memory beside the sentence — one keystroke away, never in the way.

So the editor stays a quiet serif page. Everything else — outline, characters, plot spine, research, history — is a rail or a panel you open when the sentence needs it, and close when it does not.

§ 02 — The workspace

One room for the whole work.

Every panel is built around the same question: what does this scene need to be consistent with?

The page

A serif page, the outline beside it, and the scene’s own record.

Write scene by scene with the outline within reach and the count where you can ignore it. The right rail holds what you check without leaving the sentence — characters written today, the episode target, the synopsis, the entities this scene mentions.

Parts and chapters, or arcs and episodes — Linetta numbers the tree in the language of the interface
Per-scene length targets with a live count, beside the work total
ZEN empties the room down to the text and a counter

The workspace: an outline rail on the left, a serif editor in the middle, and a right panel showing 442 characters, an episode target and a project overview.

Also in the room

Contextual Edit

Fix a fact everywhere

Change a character, place or relationship once, and Linetta finds the scenes that still carry the old version and walks you through them. No language model involved.

Plot

Threads on a spine

Storylines and beats placed across the outline, so a promise you opened in episode 3 is something you can see rather than something you remember late.

History

Snapshots per scene

Manual and automatic snapshots, restorable. Manual ones, and the ones taken before an agent writes, are kept indefinitely.

Record

Writing pace

A seven-day average and the number of episodes per week it implies. No streaks, no guilt.

§ 03 — Agents

Bring your own agent, or your own key.

Linetta ships no model and no subscription of its own. Connect an agent you already run — Claude Code, Claude Desktop — over MCP, using the subscription you already pay for and no credential to Linetta at all. Or turn on the built-in agent below and give it a provider of your own.

A generic filesystem MCP server can already read and write Markdown. What it cannot assemble is the brief for one scene: where that scene sits in the outline, the summaries above it, the previous scene’s summary, character and relationship briefs, the plot spine, fact cards, memories, and your style and length targets.

That brief is what Linetta hands over, and it is the reason a draft written outside the app comes back without contradicting episode fourteen. The writer keeps the desk, the filing cabinet, and the veto.

Claude Code — one line in your terminal

claude mcp add --transport http linetta http://127.0.0.1:7391/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer <token>"

Claude Desktop connects through the linetta-mcp stdio bridge, which some builds ship and others do not — Settings says which, and where to get it otherwise. The token is generated when you turn MCP on and can be regenerated or revoked from Settings.

Access

Off

The default. Nothing listens, and nothing is exposed.

Read only

Ten read tools. The write tools are never registered, so they do not appear in tools/list and cannot be called.

Full

All twenty-five. A scene write is snapshotted first, and an outline restructuring can be undone in one call.

Twenty-five tools, not a hundred RPCs

A client’s tool budget is finite and selection accuracy falls as the list grows, so the engine’s RPC surface is not exposed one-to-one. Access can also be pinned to a single work.

linetta_get_story_context The curated brief for one scene — the core tool
linetta_read_scene Scene text with its content version
linetta_get_outline The tree with labels, kinds, status and length
linetta_search_manuscript Full-text search across the work
linetta_list_works Works, titles, status, scene counts
linetta_list_characters Characters, places, objects, concepts
linetta_where_does_appear Every scene an entity appears in
linetta_get_plot Storylines and beats
linetta_get_fact_cards Research notes with their sources
linetta_get_character_visuals Character designs and reference images
linetta_set_character_visuals Save character designs
linetta_set_art_style Save illustration style
linetta_add_reference_image Attach reference image
linetta_delete_reference_image Remove reference image
linetta_build_illustration_prompt Illustration and four-panel prompts
linetta_read_skill Open one recorded how-to in full — the brief lists only names and descriptions

Write 9

linetta_create_work Start a new work with its first scene ready to draft
linetta_write_scene Requires the expected content version
linetta_revise_scene Partial revision without resending the scene
linetta_apply_story_ops Structured story changes as one batch
linetta_write_summary Scene, container and synopsis summaries
linetta_create_checkpoint A labelled restore point before a big rewrite
linetta_undo_last_change Undo a batch in one call
linetta_edit_memory Record what it has learned — the writer profile, which applies to every work, or this work’s notes
linetta_edit_skill Write a how-to as a SKILL.md file — global, or tied to one work. No approval step; the writer gets attribution, history and an off switch

What keeps it safe

01 Bound to 127.0.0.1 only, with an Origin check against DNS rebinding. No LAN binding and no tunnel, at any setting.
02 A 32-byte bearer token, held in the operating system’s secret store where there is one and in a 0600 file otherwise, regenerable and revocable from Settings.
03 Optimistic version checks: if you are typing in the scene an agent is rewriting, the write is refused rather than silently applied.
04 A snapshot before every scene write, and an outline capture before every structural change.
05 An activity log of every call — time, tool, work, target, result — shown in Settings.
06 A cap of 120 tool calls a minute, so a runaway agent loop hits a wall instead of forty rewritten scenes.

Or, the built-in agent

Rather write with a panel inside Linetta than switch to a separate app? Turn on the built-in agent and connect a provider of your own.

ChatGPT (Codex) Sign in with your ChatGPT account — no key to hold
Anthropic By API key
Google Gemini By API key
OpenAI-compatible By API key, any compatible endpoint — including one on your own machine

01 Consent is per provider, and it gates even the connection test
02 An API key goes into your OS’s secure store; Linux has none, so only the ChatGPT sign-in works there
03 Open it with Cmd/Ctrl+J — it reaches Linetta’s tools through the same MCP layer an external client uses
04 Every call lands in the same activity log, marked with which agent made it
05 A structural change gets an Undo button on its line — the last eight, and only while the app stays open; a scene-prose rewrite has no one-click undo yet, but the previous text is kept as a restorable version
06 It reads two short memories at the start of every turn — a writer profile and this work’s notes — and writes to them itself. The profile is global: it is not scoped to the work you have open. Both are yours to rewrite in Settings → Memory
07 It also keeps skills — how-to documents about method, as plain SKILL.md files under your data directory, which you can edit in any editor or point your own Claude Code at. A skill can apply to every work or to one. It writes them without asking; you get the author badge, the version history and an off switch, in Settings → Skills
08 After a turn that ran eight or more tool calls, and once your reply has gone, it asks the same provider and model one more time whether that turn taught it a skill — an extra call your provider meters, on by default, switched off under Settings → Skills
09 The daily backup is the database only. It carries every skill’s version history and not the skills folder itself

§ 04 — Your data

The manuscript is a file you own.

Linetta has no account and no mandatory cloud. Everything below is on your own disk, in formats you can read without it.

Where it lives

macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/com.devlikebear.linetta
Linux: ${XDG_DATA_HOME:-~/.local/share}/com.devlikebear.linetta
Windows: %APPDATA%\com.devlikebear.linetta

library.db

One SQLite library

Projects, scenes, outline, entities, relationships, plot, version snapshots, the memories an agent reads, and every skill’s version history, in a single database file.

Snapshots

History that thins, not disappears

Manual snapshots are kept indefinitely. Autosave snapshots go from every save on the first day to daily after thirty.

backups/

Verified daily backups

A daily backup and a pre-migration backup, kept fourteen days, with restore controls at startup. It copies the database and nothing beside it — the skills folder included.

Markdown

In and out, freely

Import an existing manuscript, export scenes as Markdown into a folder, and optionally let Git carry that folder somewhere else.

§ 05 — Get it

Free on the Mac App Store. Signed builds everywhere else.

The direct macOS build is Developer ID signed and notarised by Apple. Windows and Linux installers are published on every GitHub release.

Current release v1.3.0

Mac App Store

Free. The simplest way onto an Apple Silicon Mac.

Open the App Store

Homebrew — Apple Silicon

Signed and notarised, updated with the tap.

brew install --cask devlikebear/tap/linetta

Windows

NSIS and MSI installers on every release.

Latest release

Linux

AppImage, .deb and .rpm packages on every release.