Welcome to Docwright

Tools of power and productivity for students, writers, and other knowledge workers

If your work is words and files, this site is for you: students, writers, researchers, and other knowledge workers. Programmers have had the tools to protect and publish their work for years, but their documentation is often written by developers for developers. Docwright explains those tools for the rest of us. Everything here runs on free software, and none of it requires you to know how to code.

Start here

If all of this is new to you, read these six in order, about half an hour all told. The times are for reading; the doing takes longer.

1. Terminal basics, 3 minutes. The one skill every other guide leans on.
2. Whys of backup, 8 minutes. Why a backup comes first, and why it stays offline.
3. Getting started with Borg, 6 minutes. Your first encrypted backup on a USB stick, and your first restore.
4. Whys of version control, 4 minutes. Keeping every draft without keeping every file.
5. Getting started with Git, 6 minutes. Your first commit, and your first old version brought back.
6. The Choosing-the-OS TL;DR, 5 minutes. The case for leaving Windows and macOS, and which Linux to pick.

If you already know you’re going to be leaving Windows or macOS, then start the move instead: read Choosing the OS and come back for the rest once you’ve landed. Just never wipe a machine before you have copies of your files; on Windows, where Borg doesn’t run, plain copies of your folder on two USB sticks will hold you until the move is done and the real backups begin.

What the site covers

Backup protects your labour when a laptop dies, a file goes missing or a machine is stolen; knowing everything can be restored also clears your head for the work itself. Version control sounds technical but mostly means keeping a history of your drafts, so you can retrieve the version you wrote last Thursday; it turns out to be much more than that. System security is the move to Linux and the hardening after it: a big move, but worth it for productivity in the long run, not just security. A local AI model runs on your own machine, so what you write doesn’t get sent off to someone else’s servers. Publishing puts your writing online as a blog, a book site like this one, or a documentation site.

Finding your way

The sidebar lists every chapter; b opens and closes it, s searches the whole site, and the left and right arrow keys move between chapters. The printer icon turns the site into a single page for printing or saving, and the pencil opens the page’s source on GitHub, so you can send a fix if you spot a mistake. Using the site has the rest of the keys and icons.