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Getting Around

A project holds a lot: a manuscript, a cast of characters, boards, timelines, maps and notes. Scriptorium keeps them all reachable without burying the page you are actually writing.

There is also a guided tour of all of this in the app — click the graduation cap in the title bar and pick Getting around.

The strip along the title bar works like a code editor’s. Each tab remembers the view it is on and its split configuration, so one tab can be split while the next is a single pane.

Action How
New tab the + button in the title bar
Open a sidebar item in a new tab Ctrl + click it
Close a tab middle-click it, or its
Reorder drag it along the strip
Split / unsplit the split button on the tab, or Mod+Shift+S
Back hover a tab — its icon becomes a back arrow — or Mod+Alt+

Mod is ⌘ Cmd on macOS and Ctrl on Windows/Linux.

Back is per tab. Each tab remembers its own trail, so going back in one tab never drags you into what you were doing in another.

Your tabs are saved with the project. Close Scriptorium with six views open and six views are waiting when you come back — with their splits intact, not just the one you had in front.

Everything in the project, as a tree. Press Mod+B to show or hide it.

  • Click to open, or to fold a folder
  • Shift + click to select a range, Alt/Option + click to add or remove one item
  • Right-click for the context menu, drag to move things
  • Drag the divider to resize it — or focus it and use / , and double-click to reset

Press Mod+J, or use the toolbar button. The icons down its outer edge switch between everything Scriptorium knows about the page you are on:

  • Details — properties, links and relationships
  • Goals — the target for this manuscript, and how today is going
  • Statisticssize, provenance and habits
  • Version historyevery saved version
  • Block styles — the typography rules for this document
  • Read aloud and the AI assistant, when you have them set up

The panel pushes your page aside rather than covering it, and it drills: open a character from a manuscript’s Details and the panel goes one level deeper, with a back chevron to return — to exactly the tab you left it on.

Notes, entities, map pins and timelines each offer their own set of icons here. The panel follows whatever you are looking at.

Press Mod+K, or click the magnifier in the title bar.

It searches names and content across every view in the project — manuscripts, notes, entities, tables — so it finds the scene you can only remember a line from.

The full list of chords and gestures lives in the app: Settings › Shortcuts. It shows them with your platform’s real modifier keys, so there is nothing to translate.