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Your First Project

Everything in Scriptorium happens inside a project — one project per book, series, or piece of work.

  1. On the home screen, click New Project.
  2. Give it a name. You can rename it at any time.
  3. The project opens with two default folders ready to go: Manuscript (your actual writing) and Plot/Bible (your world-building material).

A project window has three main areas:

  • Sidebar (left) — the tree of everything in your project. Create, rename, reorder, and nest items here.
  • Editor (center) — whatever you have open: a manuscript, a note, a character sheet, a timeline…
  • Tools panel (right) — utilities like Version History, Goals, the Pomodoro timer, and Trash.

The sidebar holds different kinds of items — Scriptorium calls them attachments:

Type What it’s for
Folder Grouping and organizing anything else
Manuscript Your actual prose — chapters, scenes, articles
Entity A story element: character, location, event, item…
Notes Free-form notes with cross-references to anything else
Table A spreadsheet-style view of your entities (also viewable as Kanban cards)
Mindmap A visual canvas for connecting ideas
Timeline Events and entities on a zoomable time axis
Map A custom map image with interactive pins
File Any external file you want to keep with the project

You can nest items up to four levels deep — for example Manuscript → Act → Chapter → Scene.

Each project has configurable narrative settings: how deep your manuscript hierarchy goes and what each level is called. A novelist might use Act / Chapter / Scene, while an academic might prefer Part / Section. Change these in Project Settings → Narrative.

  • Drag and drop items to reorder or move them into folders.
  • Recently opened items appear in a Recents list so you can jump back to where you were.
  • Right-click (or use the item’s action menu) to rename, export, or delete.

Open Project Settings to configure:

  • Narrative — hierarchy depth and level names
  • Bible — your entity templates (character, location, event…)
  • Relationshipsrelationship types between items
  • Calendar — the calendar system your story uses, including custom fantasy calendars
  • AI Plugins — optional on-device AI tools
  • Language — used for grammar checking and export hyphenation