Tabularia compared with NEO

Made for writing books

NEO is a free desktop app for writing novels. It assumes from the first launch that you are writing books. The library is a bookshelf with covers and progress bars, and the writing view sets the page like a book. It costs nothing. There is no account or subscription, and the MIT license means anyone who reads JavaScript can change it.

Darlings is a tab you drag a cut passage onto, which restores it to the exact spot it left. Tabularia keeps cut text in drafts and history, but has no tray like that. Placeholders drop a sticky note into the text where you need a name or a date you don't have yet. Tabularia's point anchors do the same job without changing the spacing of the line they sit in. They hold their place through every edit around them, and a label gathers the ones still waiting into a list.

Plain files on one computer

NEO is a desktop application for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Every book is a folder of readable HTML chapters with its metadata beside them in JSON, so your work is never locked inside anything. It autosaves continuously and keeps a daily zip backup for two weeks. Getting the library onto another machine is up to you: put the folder in iCloud, or, for the early Android companion NEO Pocket, sync it with Syncthing.

Tabularia also keeps your work on your own device, and writes without a connection. The difference is reach. It runs in the browser on a Mac, a PC, a Chromebook, an iPad, or a phone, and installs there as an app, so the same manuscript opens wherever you are. The Cloud plan carries it between them and backs it up without a folder to manage.

The second draft

Chapter version history is on NEO's roadmap rather than in the app, and there is no way to hand your book to a collaborator inside it. Darlings catches what you cut, which covers a lot of revision, but not trying a whole chapter a second way.

That second attempt is where Tabularia spends most of its effort. A draft holds the other version of a scene, a chapter, or your whole book beside the original, and you merge it a difference at a time or all at once. Snapshots keep earlier states you can go back to. A collaborator you invite works in a draft of their own, and nothing of theirs reaches your text until you accept it.

A series, bound

NEO can bind a series. Right-click a shelf and bind it into one book, and the pages a published edition carries appear in place for you to fill in: copyright, dedication, epigraph, acknowledgments. The export is one EPUB, Word file, or PDF with a single table of contents.

In Tabularia a series is one manuscript from the start, each book keeping its own front and back matter and its own page numbering. The surroundings go further than a bookshelf. Sheets hold the people and places beside the page, and timelines follow a thread through every passage that carries it, across all the books at once.

Why to switch

NEO is free, open source, and deliberately small. If you write on one computer, want your chapters as files you can open in any text editor, and would rather have fewer features than more, NEO is built for that. It also runs natively on Linux and speaks ten interface languages.

Tabularia can be as simple or as powerful as you want. Turn on Focus Mode and every bar and panel steps aside, until the page and the Compass, a small disc in the corner, are all that is left on screen. The Compass is also how you bring things back, one at a time, so the sidebar returns when you need the Outline and nothing else comes with it.

Behind that quiet sits everything a long book asks for as it grows. The Outline takes you to any chapter or scene in a click. Leave an anchor on the scene you keep returning to and it stays a destination through every rewrite, and find paints its matches on the Minimap, so you can see where a name turns up across the whole book before you step through it. If you plan, a story shape lays down the acts and chapters before the first sentence. None of it slows the page down as the book gets longer, because the work of drawing it follows what is on screen rather than the length of the manuscript.

Bringing a book over from NEO

Export your book from NEO as a Word .docx and import it into Tabularia. Check the chapter breaks once it arrives; Heading 1 starts a chapter, and any heading can be changed afterwards. Darlings live in their own tab rather than the manuscript, so put back any you want before you export.