A writing app for the writer who wants to write but isn’t writing.
I’m a developer by trade. I’ve been one for over twenty years. But I’ve also been a writer, on and off, for as long as I can remember. The kind of writer who has half-finished essays in folders, ideas in notebooks, the feeling of “I should be writing more” that never quite turns into writing more.
A few years ago I noticed something specific. I’d open Scrivener, see the binder, the corkboard, the inspector, the project structure, and close it. I’d renew Ulysses for another year and barely write in it. I’d open a Google Doc and feel nothing. The cursor blinking on a flat white expanse about as inviting as a spreadsheet.
The tools were excellent. They were not the problem. The problem was that every time I sat down to write, the interface was asking me to do something other than write. Plan a structure. Pick a folder. Set up a project. Choose between fifteen formatting options. Decide where this paragraph “belongs.”
And on the days I did get past that, when I actually started typing, something else would pull me out within minutes. A notification. A spell-check underline. A sudden urge to adjust margins. The cursor blinking on a clinical surface that broke the spell every time my eye landed on it.
I wanted a page that asked nothing of me except that I write on it. And once I started, kept me there.
So I built one.
What Reverie is
Reverie is a writing app where the page feels alive. The cursor glows softly. The scroll settles with weight. Formatting animates into place. The page warms when you’re in flow and cools when you pause, all below the threshold of conscious attention. You don’t notice these things directly. You notice that writing in Reverie is different from writing in anything else.
What you type is what you see. A heading looks like a heading. Bold looks like bold. There are no asterisks, no hashes, no syntax to learn or hide. Just text, rendered as text.
Your writing is saved as Markdown, the most common format in writing tools today. Open your files in any other app, on any other machine, in twenty years’ time. They’re yours. There’s no database, no proprietary format, no cloud account, no lock-in.
What Reverie is not
There’s no binder and no corkboard, no structure you have to build before you write. When the work gets longer, save your files to a folder and Reverie treats them as a manuscript. Switch between documents with a keystroke. Word count rolls up across everything. No setup, and nothing on the page but your words.
It’s not Ulysses. No subscription. Pay once, own it. No account required.
It’s not a Notes app. It’s built for chapters and long-form work, not lists and shopping reminders.
It has no AI. No plugins. No themes store. No collaboration.
These are choices, not omissions. Every “no” is something I actively decided not to build.
Why now
I’ve been making things feel right on screen since I started shipping games twenty-five years ago. Most of that work is invisible: the weight of a scroll, the way light sits on a surface, the gap between an animation that feels alive and one that feels like a tech demo. Games teach you that feel is engineering. Nobody calls it that, but it is.
Writing apps have never done this work. They give you a white rectangle, a blinking cursor, and nothing else. Reverie is what happens when you bring that attention to a page.
No investors, no co-founders, no roadmap committee. A craft project that became a product because enough early readers said “I would pay for this.”
The bet I’m making is that if five minutes in Reverie makes every other writing app feel dead, writers will stay. The page is the product. Everything else is in service of getting out of its way.
Coming soon
Reverie isn’t ready yet. When it is, I’ll announce it here and email everyone on the homepage list.
If you write, or want to, I hope it gives you a page worth opening.
— Mark