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Escriba

A writing app for Mac, iPhone and iPad, for long texts, novels and poems, in Spanish and English.

I built Escriba because I love to write in Spanish, and I felt like no app was meeting my needs.

iA Writer has the writing surface: one column, typewriter scrolling, focus. Scrivener has the tools for a long project: a binder, a corkboard, compile. Neither treats Spanish as a first language, and I write in both.

Escriba in focus mode: one lit sentence at mid-window, the paragraphs around it dimmed, word counts in the footer.Escriba in focus mode: one lit sentence at mid-window, the paragraphs around it dimmed, word counts in the footer.
Focus and typewriter mode. The sentence being written stays lit at mid-window; the paragraphs around it, an English quote among them, are dimmed.

The writing surface

Electron and Tauri were ruled out, because typewriter scrolling and focus need exact control of the layout and the caret. The text is Markdown, lightly styled, with its signs hidden. Typing in a 55,000-word document went from 100 ms a key to under 4 ms.

Spanish first

Spell check catches Spanish and English in the same document. Synonyms come bundled and offline, from open data. The style rules are written for Spanish: the dialogue dash, a missing ¿ or ¡, pleonasms, calques like “en base a“, chains of “que“. “Mientras más” is standard in Ecuador, so Escriba leaves it alone.

A chapter with nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in colour, spelling underlines in both languages, and the inspector with style findings, a dictionary entry and synonyms.A chapter with nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in colour, spelling underlines in both languages, and the inspector with style findings, a dictionary entry and synonyms.
Part-of-speech colour, spelling in both languages, and the inspector: readability, style findings with their fixes, the dictionary and synonyms.

A project is a folder

One Markdown file per document and a project.json, readable without the app. Around it, the tools of a long text: binder, corkboard, outliner, snapshots, word targets, and compile to Markdown, RTF, DOCX, PDF and EPUB.

The binder with two parts open beside the corkboard of the first part: index cards with a synopsis, status, label colour and word count.The binder with two parts open beside the corkboard of the first part: index cards with a synopsis, status, label colour and word count.
The binder beside the corkboard: index cards with a synopsis, a status, a label and a word count.

Verse

A document is prose or verse. Verse gets its own layout and métrica: syllables counted with sinalefa, metre and strophe names, rhyme, in Spanish and English. The counts are estimates, and the app says so.

Where it stands

Built with Claude agents working in Operator lanes. It runs on my Mac and my phone; the iPhone and iPad app is behind the Mac. The App Store submission is prepared and not sent. No accounts, no network requests, no AI writing.