River Writer is a free Mac app for screenplays, stage plays and novels. You write plain text (.fountain ormd) and a live preview shows the formatted, print-ready pages beside it: Screenplay, Multi-cam, Stage Play or Manuscript. Git versioning is built in, so you can commit drafts, restore files and try an alternate ending on a branch. Outline, scratchpad and todos live as plain files in your project. No accounts, cloud, telemetry or AI; it makes no network connections. Open source (MIT).

Hey Product Hunt! 👋 I spent a couple of years working in film, including as an assistant director on a feature, and I wanted a writing tool that stayed out of the way: plain-text files I own, the formatted page right beside my words, and real version history without another subscription or account. So I built River Writer. Screenplays and stage plays are .fountain, novels are .md, and a project is just a folder, so your work opens in any editor. Drafts are versioned with Git under the hood (no setup), so you can branch off to try an alternate ending and come back. It makes no network connections: no cloud, no telemetry, no AI. It's MIT-licensed and you build it from source for now. I'd love feedback, especially from screenwriters and novelists: what would make this your daily writing app?