Installation

To install Darkwrite, go to our downloads page, and follow the instructions below.

Install on Windows

Download the installer .exe file, which will show up in your downloads as "Darkwrite Installer.exe". Click and run it.

Windows will try to stop you with a SmartScreen prompt. Click the “More info” option, and choose “Run anyway”.

Developer's note

This warning pops up because I’m running this project with a student budget, thus I can’t pay for the expensive EV code signing certificates. All code that runs on your device is publicly available on the Git repository.

After the installation is complete, it might take a little while for it to launch, as Windows Defender probably scans the app for malware. It’ll open relatively quickly after this initial sequence. If it doesn’t launch after a long while, restart your computer and try running again.

Install on macOS

Download the .dmg file and open it, then drag Darkwrite to your applications folder. You are good to go!

macOS builds are notarized, so there’s nothing else you need to do.

Note

If you are installing a release older than 1.1.0-beta.1, these builds are not notarized and you’ll have to manually remove the quarantine attribute with:

xattrs -rd com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Darkwrite.app

(if you ever decide to install such an old version today, please let us know why😭)

Install on Linux

We provide .deb and .AppImage files for Linux. An unofficial AUR package is also available.

AppImage users

It is strongly recommended to use something like AppManager. It handles creation of desktop files for you.

If you want to just run the AppImage directly, make it executable first:

chmod +x Darkwrite.AppImage

and run it.

Caution

Electron AppImages are known to cause issues with AppArmor on Ubuntu. This issue is tracked here. It is recommended that you use the deb package instead.

Ubuntu/Debian

Install the provided .deb file:

sudo dpkg -i Darkwrite.deb

Tip

Packages are built on Ubuntu 22.04, however we will stop supporting 22.04 late-2026/early-2027, as Canonical’s support ends in May 2027.

Caution

We don’t provide a PPA/custom repository for Debian packages yet. If there’s community interest for this, we might, so create an issue on GitHub if you want to see this happen.

Arch and derivatives

Install the unofficial darkwrite-bin AUR package. Thanks to zxp19821005 for maintaining this package for years! We really appreciate it❤️

paru

paru -S darkwrite-bin

yay

yay -S darkwrite-bin

Flatpak and Snap

Neither Flatpak nor Snap is currently not supported, and we can’t say when it will be supported either. Certain Darkwrite features like linked files probably won’t work without full filesystem access, and I have no experience packaging a Flatpak. Packaging software for a sandboxed environment creates its own edge cases we currently don’t have the time to deal with.