Guides, How-Tos and Documentation
A quick tour of the essentials: the controls you'll use day to day, and where they live.
WriteLite has four areas, each serving their own purpose:
The toolbar above your page has two parts:
The tab rail keeps your sidebar clean.
Every WriteLite document is mostly markdown underneath with some HTML to support it. You'll rarely need to type it by hand — the toolbar does it for you — but it's useful to know if you're pasting text in, writing on the fly, or opening a .wlite file in another editor.
Here's the part most writing apps keep hidden: where your work actually goes. WriteLite makes everything simple — your files are real files on your computer, and they stay that way. This section explains how it all fits together, and why you never have to wonder where your writing went.
A project is just a folder on your computer. You choose where it goes — your Documents, a writing drive, anywhere. Inside are your documents and any folders you make to organise them.
What makes a folder a WriteLite project is a single invisible file that WriteLite tucks inside it. You'll rarely see it, and you can leave it alone — it's what lets WriteLite recognise the folder and remember the project's name, sort order, and which folders you had open.
A project can't live inside another project — keep them as separate top-level folders. Within a project, though, nest as many folders as you like.
Because a project is an ordinary folder, you can move or rename it like anything else. One ask: don't rename or delete that hidden file outside the app. If it does go missing, your writing is never stranded — your documents are separate files, and WriteLite can recover the project by pointing it back at the folder, rebuilding the hidden file as it goes. The most you'd lose is the project's name and saved layout. Never your writing. Only you can delete that.
Your projects are ordinary folders, so backing them up is ordinary too. Put a project folder in a cloud drive — Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive — or copy it to a USB stick, and it's backed up. No export step, no special format.
If you keep your projects in a cloud folder, just point WriteLite at them, and you can carry on from any computer running WriteLite.
Every document you write is saved as a .wlite file. Underneath, it's a plain markdown — readable text — and HTML for select settings like fonts.
At the very end of the file, WriteLite adds a small block that starts with <!-- .wlite:meta. That's an HTML comment holding a few per-document settings, like line spacing and heading styles. Because it's a comment, other editors treat it as invisible and skip past it. You'll never see it while you write — it's only there so your document opens looking the way you left it.
Best to leave it alone. It isn't meant to be edited by hand, and if WriteLite can't make sense of it — because it's been altered or damaged — it won't try to guess. It simply replaces it with default settings the next time you save the document.
When you set a particular font or size for some words, WriteLite saves that choice inline — as a small <span> tag wrapped around those words, right in the text. It's a standard way to mark styling in a markdown file, and it keeps each choice attached to the exact words it applies to, so your formatting stays put wherever the document goes.
Want to open a document somewhere else? Rename it from .wlite to .md and it opens in any markdown editor — Obsidian, Typora, VS Code, or plain Notepad. Nothing is locked away.
Renaming changes nothing inside the file, so the font <span> tags and the .wlite:meta comment come along with it. A markdown editor keeps the comment hidden and renders the fonts as styling; a plain text editor will show you the underlying tags. However, some formatting options like text alignment will display the HTML. Either way nothing is lost and opening the file in WriteLite again restores it exactly.
Want a clean text or markdown file? Use the export options for .txt or .md respecivly; but be aware that this will strip different formatting options depending on the file type you choose. For example, .txt files will lose all formatting, while .md files will only lose alignment, font size and font family.
WriteLite keeps a short list of where your projects are. When you open the app, it reads that list and shows your projects in the sidebar — it doesn't move them or copy them in, it just remembers where you put them.
Under the hood: the registry list is a small file called writelite.json, stored in your computer's application-data folder. It holds your project locations, a few preferences, and which project you had open last. It's WriteLite's own bookkeeping — your documents are never kept in here.