Notes and search

Two small but heavily-used surfaces.

Notes

“I have an idea I’m not ready to commit to a chapter yet, and I don’t want to lose it between now and tomorrow.”

The Notes view (Planning section in the sidebar) is a scratch-pad. Each note is a single free-form rich-text document with a title and one optional tag.

Click the Notes header in the sidebar and you land on a sortable, searchable table of every note — search across titles and tags, filter by anchor scope (story-wide / anchored to a chapter) or by tag, and click a row to open. Click a note in the sidebar tree to skip the list and jump straight to the editor.

What’s on the page

Note list in the sidebar — every note you’ve created. Click one to open.
Inline title — click in the header to rename.
Tag field — a single freeform tag with typeahead from all tags already used across your notes. Arrow keys navigate the dropdown, Enter selects, Esc closes it.
Updated timestamp — when the note was last edited.
Rich-text body — the same full editor as chapters and worldbuilding articles. Headings, lists, links, images, tables, the lot.

When to use Notes

“This isn’t a character profile, it’s not a worldbuilding article — it’s just something I need to remember while I write this act.”

A Note is the right home for anything that doesn’t fit the structured views:

Research clippings — quotes, references, links, photos
Half-baked scene ideas you’re not ready to commit to a chapter
A to-do list for the project
Cut prose — text you removed from a chapter but might want back
Brainstorming threads — “five possible endings”, “what does the antagonist actually want”
Reader / beta feedback you want to address later

If you find yourself writing free-form thoughts and they don’t belong to a Character, Location, Object, Worldbuilding article, or Architecture document, write them as a Note.

Bringing existing notes in

“I’ve been doing all my research in a folder of Markdown files. I want to pull it into the project without retyping anything.”

If you already have research, outlines, or scratch text in Word, Markdown, or plain text, the Import view’s Add notes mode pulls it straight into the project. Each heading in the file becomes one note (a flat file becomes one). You can drop multiple files at once, set a tag for the whole batch, and pin every imported note to a specific chapter or scene in one shot. See Import and export for the details.

For a quicker drop-in without the wizard, the Notes view itself has an Import files button in the header (and in the empty state). It accepts the same formats — .docx, .txt, .md, .odt, .epub — and you can multi-select. Each file becomes one note, or one note per heading if the file has them. The whole batch lands as a single undo step, so a regretted bulk import is one Ctrl/⌘ + Z away. Use this when you don’t need the wizard’s anchor / tag / scan options.

Tagging

The tag field is the only organisational tool. Pick a single short label per note and the sidebar can filter by it. A few useful tag schemes:

By status: idea, wip, done, cut
By part of the book: act-1, act-2, act-3
By topic: research, feedback, prose-cuts

The typeahead means once you’ve used a tag, you’ll reuse it consistently.

`@`-mentions work here too

Because Notes use the same rich-text editor as chapters, you can @-mention any Story Bible entity. Useful for “research on the Heliad Empire” — @Empire and the note links back into the Story Bible.

Pinning a note to a chapter or scene

“I had a thought about exactly this scene — a detail I can’t forget — and I want it to live right here where I’ll find it when I’m writing, not buried in the general Notes list.”

By default a note is story-wide — it lives in the Notes view, anchored to nothing in particular. You can pin a note to a specific chapter or scene with the anchor picker in the note header (the pin icon to the left of the tag field). The picker is a chapter-and-scene list — pick any to re-anchor, or pick “Story-wide” to unanchor.

A pinned note shows up where you’d expect to find it — in a notes panel docked beside the editor, so you never leave the scene you’re writing:

The scene strip’s Notes button opens the panel scoped to that scene: its pinned notes as cards, with a composer at the top.
The chapter editor toolbar’s Notes button opens the same panel in chapter scope — a Chapter-level section plus one section per scene, each with its own composer, covering every note anchored anywhere in the chapter.

Jot your thought in the composer and press Add note (or ⌘Enter) — the note is created already pinned to that scope, and it appears right there in the panel. Click a note’s text to edit it in place; the small trash button deletes it (a soft delete — the note moves to the Trash view, where you can restore it). To unpin a note without deleting it, use the anchor picker in the Notes view and choose “Story-wide”. The panel is a quick plain-text surface — a note with rich formatting from the Notes view keeps its formatting unless you edit it here. For everything else — renaming, tagging, re-anchoring — the panel’s Manage all notes ↗ link opens the Notes view.

If you later delete the scene a note is pinned to, the note stays with its chapter (you’ll still find it from the chapter’s Notes panel and the Notes view), and restoring the scene from Trash reunites them.

Search

“Where did I put that detail about the scar? I know I wrote it somewhere — a chapter, a character page, a note — but I can’t find it.”

The Search view (top of the Manuscript section in the sidebar) is full-text search across everything you’ve written.

Open it from the sidebar, or press Ctrl/⌘ + F from anywhere in the app.

What it searches

Every text surface in the project:

Chapter prose (including each scene’s body)
Character profiles and Backstory
Location descriptions
Object descriptions
Notes
Groups
Narrative strand notes
Worldbuilding articles
Architecture documents

What you see

A search bar that auto-focuses when you open the view. Partial words work, and the search is case-insensitive.
Kind filter chips — one chip per content type (Chapters, Characters, Locations, Objects, Notes, Groups, Strands, Worldbuilding, Architecture). Each chip shows a live result count for the current query. Chips with no matches are dimmed. Selecting chips narrows results to those types (multi-select). “All” resets.
Grouped results — matches are grouped by content type, in a canonical order, with a count per group.
Result rows — each shows the document title, an optional sub-label (e.g. part + chapter), and a snippet of the matching prose with the matched terms highlighted in your accent colour. Click any row to navigate to that document.
Result count in the header (“N results”).
Replace button — opens the project-wide Find & Replace panel pre-filled with the current query.
Esc clears the query and all kind filters.

When to use Search

“I mentioned something about the lighthouse in chapter three, or maybe chapter seven — I just need to find it fast and jump there.”

Search is the fastest way to answer questions like:

“Where did I mention the lighthouse?”
“Which note has my research on Victorian poisons?”
“Where does the protagonist say ‘I’ll never go back’?”
“Which chapter introduces the Empire?”

The kind filter is essential when looking for a name. Without it, searching for “Aria” returns chapters (every line of dialogue she has), her character page, every scene she’s linked to, every note that mentions her, and probably a few worldbuilding articles. Filter to Chapters to see only the prose, or to Characters to jump straight to her file.

Project-wide find and replace

“I’ve decided the character’s name is Maren, not Maya — and I used ‘Maya’ about three hundred times across twenty chapters.”

The Replace button in the Search header opens a project-wide replace dialog — useful when you decide to rename a character across the entire book, or fix a typo you made consistently.

Shortcut: Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + F opens replace directly.

Replace shows you a preview of every match before committing. You can apply selectively or all at once.

Why a writer would use it. Renaming a character is the obvious case. Less obvious uses: changing tense in a chapter you’ve decided was wrong, fixing a place name you misspelled for half the book, or systematically cutting a verbal tic you noticed in revision (“I just realised I’ve used ‘just’ 240 times”).

The “Ask the book” chat

“I don’t want to search for a word — I want to ask ‘does Aria know about her father’s debt by the end of act two?’ and have the book answer me.”

A different feature in the same neighbourhood: the Ask the book chat panel (Manuscript section, or Ctrl/⌘ + J) lets you ask natural-language questions about your manuscript and get answers that cite the chapters they came from. This is a separate feature from Search — Search finds exact matches, Ask the book reasons over the whole text.

Both the keyboard shortcut and the sidebar item toggle the panel — press once to open, again to close. Clicking outside the panel also closes it.

The answers know your story bible, not just your prose. Every character, location, object, group, worldbuilding article, note, plot strand, and architecture doc is part of the searchable index as a “Story Bible” entry. Name an entity in your question — “who is Maren?” — and her entry is pinned into the answer’s sources (marked pinned in the citations), so the model always sees your own notes about her, not just a guess from scenes; follow-ups like “what does she want?” keep the pin. Clicking a Story Bible citation opens that entity’s page; scene citations open the chapter. Scene excerpts also carry their linked characters, location, objects, and point of view, so the answer stays grounded even in scenes where the prose never names them — which is also why keeping scene links tidy pays off (the Link scenes button on the Analysis page proposes any missing ones from your prose, no AI involved).

Ask the book requires an AI provider and an embedding model. See AI providers for setup.

A practical workflow

When you’re trying to find something:

Press Ctrl/⌘ + F.
Type a partial word — “lighth” finds “lighthouse” and “lighthouses”.
Filter by kind if the results are noisy.
Click a result to jump there.

When you want to rename across the whole book:

Press Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + F.
Type the old name and the new name.
Review the preview.
Apply.

When you want to ask a question about your book:

Press Ctrl/⌘ + J.
Type your question — “Where does Aria first realise her father is lying?”
Read the answer and the citations.

Chat history

Ask-the-book conversations are saved per project as a list of sessions. “New chat” starts a fresh one; a session auto-titles itself from your first question (rename it and your name sticks); delete removes it. Switching scope between the book and a character resumes that scope’s most recent conversation. Empty sessions are never saved, so experiments don’t litter the list. Sessions are storage only — they don’t change what a question costs.

The manuscript index

Ask-the-book reads from an index of your prose and story bible. Build / Refresh index (in the chat panel) shows per-scene rows and offers an incremental update (only changed scenes re-embed) or a full rebuild, plus Clear index. Auto-rebuild (AI Settings → Writing AI) quietly re-embeds about a minute after your last edit — it only starts working after your first manual build, and it fails silently by design (no toast spam mid-writing). One recorded limit: if you change an embedding template on the AI page, run a manual Refresh — the auto-rebuild can’t detect template changes.

The command palette (⌘P)

Not just search — three kinds of results: navigation (over twenty destinations), your entities (chapters, characters, locations, objects, groups, notes, worldbuilding, strands — jump straight to one), and actions (New chapter/part/character/location/object/note/strand/article, Find & replace, Save chapter version, Toggle sidebar, Undo/Redo, Shortcuts, Help).