Lettera brings the feel of a typewriter to your Mac or Windows computer — not as a novelty, but as a serious writing tool for people who write every day.
There's a reason writers kept using typewriters long after word processors arrived. The resistance of the keys, the impossibility of perfect erasure, the physical movement of the carriage — these weren't limitations. They were part of how writing felt. Lettera brings that feeling to your screen without pretending it's 1962.
Most "typewriter apps" add a font and a sound effect. Lettera does something different. The mechanics of a typewriter — the carriage, the inability to perfectly erase, the sense that each keystroke matters — are woven into how the entire application works.
As you type, the page moves left. When you reach the end of a line and press Enter, it snaps back — like a carriage return. Your eyes stay in one place. The page comes to you.
The screen looks like paper. Choose from warm parchment, clean newsprint, soft ivory, or others. The page has grain and warmth. It feels less like software and more like a surface.
Turn it on and backspace stops deleting. Instead, it strikes through — a line through the words, the way a typewriter would. Your mistakes stay on the page. Your momentum doesn't break. You learn to write forward.
A typewriter can't manage chapters. Lettera can. A typewriter can't track your daily writing goals. Lettera does — Paper Trail shows you a calendar of every day you sat down and wrote. A typewriter can't keep notes beside your manuscript. Lettera keeps them in the Drawer, one per chapter, always close but never in the way.
Lettera is named after the Olivetti Lettera — the portable typewriter used by Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath, and Cormac McCarthy. It carries that legacy forward: the physicality of typing, the discipline of writing without a safety net, the quiet focus of a machine that does one thing and does it well.
No AI. Lettera won't write for you, suggest what comes next, or rewrite your sentences. No cloud sync. Your files live on your computer, not on someone else's server. No account. Download it, open it, start typing. No collaboration features. This is a tool for the hours you spend alone with your draft, before anyone else reads a word.
Novelists, essayists, memoirists, poets, screenwriters, and anyone who sits down regularly to write long-form prose. Writers who've tried every distraction-free app and found that a blank white screen is its own kind of distraction. Writers who remember what it felt like to type on something that pushed back. Writers who want a dedicated space for drafting — not a workspace, not a note-taking app, not a document editor. A writing desk.
14-day free trial for macOS and Windows. $29 after that, once, forever. No account required.
Lettera — a quiet place to write.