A writing app that keeps the page empty.

Written is a local-first writing app that keeps the page almost empty. The measure is 66 characters, set in the iA Writer family. I built it because the writing apps I tried competed on features, and what I needed was fewer things on the screen.

What survived: sentence and paragraph focus, search that stays on the page, a preview that understands math, tables and wiki links, exports in the formats editors ask for. Everything else was refused.

Underneath the quiet page sits a ledger. Written records how each piece of text entered the document: typed, pasted, or placed by a tool. That record is the part that outlives the app. Authorship is becoming a question people answer with evidence. A student showing a draft is theirs. An editor checking what a contributor's tools inserted. A document that carries its own provenance answers without trusting anyone's say-so.

Booksum mode does something stranger. Give it a source text and it keeps a ledger of the surface words. On Tab it lends you n-gram completions from that source, with same-part-of-speech rescues from a bundled WordNet. The analysis runs on your machine. Optional AI review sends only the passage you ask about, through a gateway you control.

Sync runs through a small Express and SQLite service with signed guest sessions and an offline outbox. On conflict it makes a copy, because losing a sentence is the one thing a writing app cannot do. It is live at written.exe.xyz and still a beta. The honest gap: the iOS client is spec'd against the same data model and does not exist, so the sync layer is built for a second device I have not shipped.