A Quiet Page, and a Way Back to It Tomorrow

Focus mode, step by step

Focus mode lives in the View menu, as "Focus mode", and the same menu item reads "Exit focus mode" once you are in it. The first time, a hint appears for a few seconds: "Press Esc to exit Focus mode". After that the screen is the chapter you are writing and not much else.

The View menu also has "Fullscreen", a switch to show or hide the Table of Contents, and "Show full ribbon" for the times you want every formatting control on screen. The default ribbon is the short one.

How much of Robin you see

Robin, your story partner, sits in a panel beside the page. Under View, "Robin panel" offers four layouts: Balanced gives the page and Robin equal room, Write gives the page more room and keeps Robin compact, Robin gives the conversation more room, and Solo hides Robin completely. You can also drag the edge of the panel to any width you like.

Hiding the panel does not switch anything off. It just takes the conversation off the screen until you want it again. By default Robin gives advice only, and nothing it suggests changes your text until you accept it.

The session goal and the wrap-up card

The session goal ring is a small floating card that starts in the bottom-right corner. You can drag it wherever it bothers you least, and it remembers the spot. A new writer sees a "Starter goal". After that the goal adjusts to how you actually write, so it asks for a stretch rather than a number someone else picked. You can hide it from View with "Show session goal".

When you have written for a while (at least 75 words, or three minutes of active writing) and then stop, a wrap-up card slides in. It shows the words from this session and the Ink you earned, and gives you one box: "Leave a thread for next time". Type a sentence about where the scene is going, press "Save & close", and you are done. "Skip" is right there if you would rather not.

The next time you open the book, a "Welcome back" banner shows how many days you wrote this week and the note you left. It closes by itself as soon as you start typing.

Making the page yours

The editor comes in Light and Dark, with two more themes, Midnight Parchment and Typewriter, available from the Ink store. Fonts include Garamond, Baskerville, Merriweather, Courier and OpenDyslexic, and you can upload your own. The accessibility settings add high contrast, reduced motion, a screen reader mode, text size from 12 to 24 pixels and line spacing from 1.2 to 2.0.

The usual keyboard shortcuts work: Cmd+B, Cmd+I and Cmd+U for bold, italic and underline, Cmd+Option+1 to 6 for headings, Cmd+S to save and Cmd+F to find.