Folio Writer

Think in pieces:
binder, corkboard & outline

Long documents fail as single files. The Scrivener insight — which Folio Writer keeps — is that a manuscript is a stack of small pieces you can see, rearrange, and finish one at a time. Three views, one structure, and the compile stitches everything in binder order.

The corkboard: sections as cards with status stamps.
The corkboard: sections as cards with status stamps.

The binder: your manuscript as a list

The sidebar holds the whole project: the draft's folders and documents, plus the special folders — Research (figures, PDFs, data; never compiled), Templates (boilerplate to stamp out via New From Template), Bibliography (.bib files), and Trash. Drag to reorder or re-nest (a guide line shows exactly where the drop lands), ⌘N for a new document, and right-click for the metadata that matters: exclude from compile, unnumbered heading, label, status.

Each item is a plain .md file on disk — the binder is structure, never a container format.

The corkboard: sections as index cards (⌘2)

Select a folder and its children become cards: title, synopsis, word count, and a rubber-stamp of the status you've set — To Do, In Progress, Revised, Final. Writing a synopsis on an empty card is planning; dragging cards is restructuring. With Pro, boards also arrange by label or status (⌘5/⌘6) — lanes that show at a glance which sections still say To Do.

The corkboard arranged by status: To Do, In Progress, and Revised columns, with a card being dragged into the In Progress lane.
Arranged by status, the corkboard becomes a kanban board — drag a card into a column to change its status.

The lanes aren't just a report — they're the control. Drag a card onto a column (or onto any card already in it) and it takes that column's status or label; the target lane highlights with a “＋” cue as you hover, and the “No Status” lane clears the value. Advancing a section from To Do to In Progress is one gesture, exactly as it would be on a kanban board — the context menu still works when you'd rather pick from a list.

The outline: the whole draft in columns (⌘3)

Every section with synopsis, label, status, section type, and a live word count — the view for auditing a draft: which chapter is bloated, which section has no status, what's left. Titles and synopses edit inline; press Return on a row to rename.

Views remember themselves. Each container keeps the view you last used it in — the planning folder opens as a corkboard, the finished chapter as text. ⌘1–⌘4 switch views per window, so two windows can show the same project differently.

Structure becomes headings

At compile, folder and document titles can become your numbered section headings ("Insert binder titles as headings") — so the binder is the outline of the finished PDF, and reorganizing the manuscript is dragging, not find-and-paste. See the 10-minute setup for the full loop.

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