🔥 kindling v1.3.0 — A New Look, Editorial Review & Revisions
A fresh coat of paint and a much safer place to write. v1.3 reskins kindling on the Press design system, adds offline editorial review, scene revisions, find and replace, writing goals, export profiles and novelWriter support, and closes a long list of data-loss and reliability bugs.
Read the full tour on the blog: kindling v1.3: Keep Writing. Bring Your Editor Along. Downloads for every platform are at kindlingwriter.com/download.
🎨 A New Look
kindling has been reskinned on the Press design system, with light, dark and system themes. In dark mode the manuscript stays on paper, so your prose always looks the way it will on the page.
✍️ Offline Editorial Review
Send your editor a .kindling-review package and read their .kindling-feedback back in kindling. Their comments, threaded replies and tracked suggestions show up in your manuscript, and you accept or reject each suggestion. Start from File → Editorial Review…, and open a returned file with File → Open Review or Feedback File….
No accounts, no uploads, no shared cloud document. Just two files you can pass back and forth however you like.
🕰️ Scene Revisions
Save drafts of a scene, compare any two side by side, and restore an earlier one. kindling also saves automatic drafts as you go (capped per scene), and your named drafts are always kept.
🔎 Find and Replace
Search one scene or the whole project from Edit → Find and Replace… or Edit → Find and Replace in Project….
🎯 Writing Goals & Statistics
Set writing goals, track your sessions, and see your statistics over time.
📍 Pick Up Where You Left Off
- kindling remembers where you were writing in each project and takes you back there when you open it.
- See the end of the previous scene while you write, so each scene picks up where the last one ended.
📤 Export Profiles & Workspace
A new export workspace with a live preview, plus customizable export profiles you can save and reuse. The Agent submission Word profile follows Standard Manuscript Format: a running header with your surname, short title and page number, a contact block on the title page, and no indent after a heading.
📚 novelWriter Support
Import, export and prose sync with novelWriter projects, alongside Plottr, Scrivener, yWriter, Longform and Markdown.
⚙️ Settings, Shortcuts & More
- One Settings window for your preferences and project navigation (File → Settings…)
- Customizable keyboard shortcuts
- Copy references between projects
- A loading screen from the moment the app starts
💬 Send Feedback
Help → Send Feedback… sends a bug report, feature request or rating to the kindling team. It includes what you type plus the app version, operating system and language, never anything from your manuscript, and is sent only when you press Send. It is the only network request kindling makes besides the update check.
🛡️ Safer Writing
The biggest part of this release is work you should never notice: dozens of fixes that protect your words.
- Editing: fixed several ways a scene could lose text or be overwritten by an older copy: switching views, undo after changing scenes, and a failed save. Unsaved beats, synopses and titles are kept when a save fails, and export and sync save pending prose first.
- Locked scenes are protected from deletes, moves, reordering, renames and view switches.
- Backups: the first launch of a new version saves a copy of your library to
backups/in the kindling data folder before upgrading it. The newest three are kept. - Import & sync: Mac Scrivener imports keep their paragraphs, curly quotes, dashes and tabs. Longform no longer mistakes prose like
Meanwhile:: the ship sank.for a field. Plottr cards with a title but no description now import. Items added by sync take their own place in the outline. - Export: Word and EPUB no longer break on pasted control characters. A failed export leaves the previous file intact. Smart quotes curl correctly across italics. Notes, To-do and Unused scenes stay out of manuscripts.
- Keyboard & accessibility: every dialog takes focus, keeps Tab inside and closes with Escape. Sidebar menus work from the keyboard. Chapters, scenes, beats and references can be moved with Move up and Move down.
- No more silent failures: actions that fail now tell you why.
See the full changelog for every fix.
🐧 Linux: Blank White Window
We've attempted a fix for the AppImage opening to a blank white window on some GPU and compositor setups (#252). It disables WebKitGTK's DMABUF renderer at startup. We could not test this on an affected system. If you were affected, the app can't show you the update prompt, so download 1.3.0 below. If it still opens blank, please report it on #252.
📥 Installation
| Platform | File |
|---|---|
| 🍎 macOS (Apple Silicon + Intel) | Kindling_1.3.0_universal.dmg |
| 🪟 Windows | Kindling_1.3.0_x64-setup.exe or Kindling_1.3.0_x64_en-US.msi |
| 🐧 Linux (AppImage) | Kindling_1.3.0_amd64.AppImage |
| 🐧 Linux (Debian) | Kindling_1.3.0_amd64.deb |
| 🐧 Linux (RPM) | Kindling-1.3.0-1.x86_64.rpm |
macOS: signed and notarized by Apple.
Windows: if you see a SmartScreen warning, click More info, then Run anyway.
Linux: make the AppImage executable with chmod +x before running it.
⬆️ Upgrading
kindling checks for updates automatically. If you have v1.2.x installed, you'll see a prompt to restart. You can also download manually from above.
Your projects are stored separately and will be preserved, and v1.3 saves a backup of your library before upgrading it. You can go back to 1.2 afterwards, but novelWriter projects will then show as Markdown projects.
🧭 Known Issues
These are scheduled for 1.3.1 (see docs/release-triage-v1.3.md):
- Snapshots don't capture custom fields, tags or saved filters (#297). The new pre-upgrade library backup does.
- Scrivener import skips Text documents nested under other Text documents (#320). Flatten them in Scrivener before importing.
- RTF export writes emoji and other characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane incorrectly (#301). Use another export format.
- Longform beats are not included in sync (#317), Longform reference links are not imported (#299), and some documented Longform grouping layouts are rejected (#332).
- yWriter items are not imported (#316); Markdown files saved with a BOM parse differently (#319); Scrivener titles can lose entities and spaces (#313).
- Migrated custom fields can reappear after renaming or deleting them (#307); duplicating a scene or chapter doesn't copy notes or reference links (#302); AND tag filters can match too much (#311).
- Word manuscripts have a right indent on body paragraphs (#310); the one-page text treatment omits summaries of chapters outside a Part (#309).
- A chapter restored from the archive shows at the end of the sidebar until the project is reopened (#303).
- Screenplays: the time control removes slugline qualifiers after a second dash (#326), page estimates can double count (#325), and a new project ignores the chosen target length (#300).
Full Changelog: https://github.com/smith-and-web/kindling/compare/v1.2.0...v1.3.0
Thank you for using kindling! If you enjoy it, consider giving us a ⭐ on GitHub.
