Reverie keeps one document in front of you at a time. There are no tabs and no binder to build and maintain, just the page you’re writing. Everything is a plain Markdown file (.md) on your own disk.
One document at a time is how it looks while you write, not the limit of what Reverie holds. A folder of chapters becomes one manuscript, with the word count, the structure, and the export all spanning the whole thing, as the rest of this page explains.
Moving between documents
- Open Recent, under the File menu, lists documents you’ve worked on lately.
- Quick Open (
⌘P) lets you type part of a file’s name and jump straight to it. It searches the files in your current manuscript, so switching between chapters takes a couple of keystrokes.
To move around your draft, open the structure sidebar with ⌘R. It groups every file’s scenes in manuscript order and lets you reorder both files and scenes by dragging. See Structure & Scenes.
Manuscripts
When you save a document into a folder, Reverie gathers that folder into a manuscript. Every Markdown file in it becomes part of the same manuscript, with no import step and no moving files around.
A manuscript adds a few things:
- Quick Open across all the files in the folder
- the order of your documents, arranged by dragging in the structure sidebar, and remembered between sessions
- a manuscript-wide word count, so you can see your whole draft’s length rather than just the open file
- goals that apply to the manuscript as a whole (see Goals & Progress)
- whole-manuscript export (see Exporting)
- a quiet writing history you can pull cut text back from (see History & Recovery)
- a per-manuscript spelling dictionary
A chapter becomes two. Two become a manuscript. You don’t have to plan any of it up front.
Picking up where you left off
When you reopen Reverie, it returns you to your last document at the spot you stopped, with cursor and scroll position intact. If a file changed outside Reverie since you last saw it, Reverie notices and starts you cleanly rather than dropping you in the wrong place.
Spelling
Misspelled words get an underline. Right-click one for suggestions, or choose Add to Dictionary to teach Reverie a name or term. It’s remembered for that manuscript, so character and place names stop being flagged.