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Meet the Bindery

• bookmoth has a new working environment: cleaner, calmer and built to feel like a place where books are made. Instrument Serif leads the headings, Newsreader carries the manuscript, and a proofreader's red gives Ink and paper its accent.
• Every room has been redrawn around the work in front of you. Surfaces are quieter, actions are clearer, and the whole app now shares one visual language from first idea to final page.

The Brief, distilled

• The Brief is now three clear cards: the book itself, your voice, and where the work stands. Project details, series context, writing examples, the full profile and progress open in focused sheets when you need them.
• Progress is part of the desk now: words against target, chapters with prose, the last thirty days of writing and the shape of the manuscript at a glance.

A Plan you can read

• Story Plan is now simply Plan. Chapter cards show their opening scenes, chapter selection brings the summary, actions and Editor into one rail, and Undo and Redo sit where the work happens.
• + Add chapter is always visible. Generate scenes and Draft all chapters live together under the title, so shaping the book takes fewer detours.

Point of view, chapter by chapter

• Choose a Codex character as the viewpoint for any chapter, in first person or close third. The drafter holds that perspective across the chapter and sees everyone else from the outside.
• Characters can now carry their own narrative Voice: what they notice, how they tell a story, and what they leave unsaid. It layers over your writing profile rather than replacing it.

Research for non-fiction

• Memoirs and other non-fiction books now have a dedicated Research room alongside the Notebook.
• Your supplied sources and imported manuscript can inform the initial brief, chapter and section plans, drafting, the Editor and direct revisions. Non-fiction tools are explicitly told to preserve supplied facts and flag missing detail instead of filling gaps, giving you a clearer place to verify and complete the record.

One Settings home

• Connection, Appearance, Text, Backups and sync, Licence, and Help and tour now live in one Settings window. The connection button takes you straight there.
• Routing says exactly what runs where, Advanced model routing opens and closes as one control, and Claude Opus 5 and Sonnet 5 are available as per-tier choices alongside bookmoth's recommended defaults.

Writing examples, on the page

• Writing examples have a permanent home beside your profile. Supported PDFs are extracted and previewed as readable prose, just like DOCX, TXT and Markdown, so you can see what bookmoth will analyse before it builds your voice.

Progressions throughout

• Manuscript import recognises more real-world heading styles, keeps front and back matter in their proper place, and separates a successful import from its optional chapter summaries.
• Writing profiles stay attached to the selected samples, with generated quotations checked against the uploaded prose.
• Chat, Stop and retry recover more cleanly across providers, and replies stay with the project and thread that asked for them.
• Focus mode, version undo, chapter reordering, snapshots and library backups are sturdier around long books and interrupted work.
• Exports retain the typography you can see while removing characters you cannot, and prologues, epilogues and other book matter keep their own names and numbering.

Focus mode gets out of your way

• Start typing and the header fades out, leaving the page and nothing else. It comes back the moment you pause, move the mouse, or reach for the top of the screen. If you have reduced motion on, it stays put.
• The chapter title up there now takes your theme's accent, so you always know where you are without looking for it.

Nothing invisible in your exports

• Prose that has been near a language model can carry characters you cannot see: zero-width spaces, word joiners, soft hyphens, odd variants of the ordinary space. They are invisible on the page and unmistakable to anything looking for a machine's fingerprint. Every export now strips them: .docx, .md, .txt, .html, the shortform piece and the typeset PDF.
• Your visible typography is untouched. Curly quotes, dashes and ellipses come through exactly as written, and nothing in the app itself is rewritten. Only the copy that leaves.

Opus 5 and Sonnet 5

• Both are now in the model picker, so you can point any tier at them. The picker had been capped at 4.6, which meant no way to choose anything newer.

Mark a chapter done without opening it

• Chapter status is now a control on the chapter bar itself, not a label you have to open the chapter to change. Done is a state of its own and it sticks: the word count can no longer quietly demote a chapter you have declared finished.

Acts that still make sense collapsed

• A collapsed act now shows a chevron and how many chapters are folded inside it, and looks clearly different from an open one. Scene view's act dividers match the chapter view's. The Place menu for unsorted beats scrolls instead of running off the screen.

Writing on two machines

• Turn on folder sync on a second Mac and the books already in that folder arrive on their own, instead of waiting for you to open each one. Deleting a book for good now keeps it deleted everywhere.

A clearer chapter plan

• Adding a chapter is a plain + Add chapter at the end of the plan, always visible. The quieter controls between cards still drop a chapter exactly where you want it, and they now show themselves to keyboard users too.

Custom themes reach the page

• A colour you choose for a custom theme now applies to the writing column in the normal view, not just in focus mode.

Steadier throughout

• Focus mode holds its place: highlighting, commenting and the scene controls either side of a break all act on the chapter you are actually working in, and everything you have typed stays as you left it.
• Versions keep to themselves, so undo only ever walks back through the version you are looking at.
• The editor stays with the book you are in, even if you switch books while it is mid-reply.
• Chapter notes, dials and codex facts follow their chapter when you add, delete or reorder, and your prose keeps its card.
• Combining two codex entries now keeps both timelines, as it always said it would.
• Refreshing chapter notes keeps the ones it could not reach rather than clearing them, and tells you which.
• Reading a scene plan back out of prose you have already written works on any setup, with no model to choose by hand first.
• Licence activation no longer waits on a stalled connection, and cancelling a delete cancels it.
• Find's highlight is legible again in the Paper light theme, and saving is sturdier under a busy sync.

A different way to edit a selection

• Expand, Lengthen, Shorten, Rewrite, Grammar, and asking the editor to change something you've selected, all now open in a floating panel instead of the old diff view. Your manuscript stays visible and untouched underneath while you read the proposal, and the passage stays highlighted so you never lose your place.
• Not quite right? Add a note ("make it scarier", "shorter, quieter") and try again, as many times as you like, before you accept anything.

Your projects, always one click away

• Projects now live in a pane down the left side instead of a dropdown: grouped by series, archived ones out of the way, switch books in one click. Collapse it to a slim rail when you want the space back.
• A new Idea Inbox (Cmd+Shift+I from anywhere) catches a thought the instant it lands, before you've decided which book it belongs to. File it to any project when you're ready; it waits in that book's Unsorted beats, never read by the AI until you place it.
• Removing a scene from a chapter now banks its writing in Unsorted instead of asking you to choose between losing the prose or keeping a chapter you didn't want.

Strict outline mode

• Scene generation now maps one scene per event in your own outline or imported source, no padding, no invented scenes to fill a quota. Anything bookmoth thinks is an implied connective moment arrives clearly marked so you can keep or delete it, never silently folded in as if you wrote it. On by default, with a per-project toggle and your own project-wide "never do this" list.

Paper is now the default look

• Ink and paper, nothing else, is now what a fresh install opens to. Still yours to change in Settings.

The Codex has a timeline

• Codex entries now hold dated facts instead of one growing description. A fact only reaches the writing AI once its chapter is at or after where it happened, so an early chapter is never drafted knowing a later twist.
• "Split description into timeline facts…" reads an entry's own description and proposes splitting it into dated facts, each pinned to the chapter where it happened. You review every one before anything changes, and the description left behind still reads as whole, correctly punctuated prose.
• When a new fact would contradict or restate an existing one, you get a supersede or keep-both choice, never a silent overwrite.

The chapter strip

• Every Codex entry now shows its journey through the book at a glance: one dot per chapter, filled where the entry appears, numbered where facts landed. Click a dot to see exactly what changes for that character or place, and jump straight to the chapter.

Codex names in your prose

• Turn on Codex names in the Manuscript toolbar and every mention of a tracked name or alias highlights as you write, first names and surnames alike. Hover one for the entry at a glance and its facts as of that chapter, and step between every mention.
• When two entries could share a name, a family of Trewints, say, the mention still highlights but flags itself and asks which one you mean. Pick once and it remembers.
• An ordinary word that happens to match part of a name can now be muted for good, right from the highlight itself.

Bringing a world in from Obsidian

• Import a single Obsidian-style note and its structure comes across as it actually is: frontmatter fields carry over, [[links]] become relations, #tags stay tags. Nothing is guessed, and nothing joins your Codex until you accept it.
• Import a whole vault at once. Folder names map to sensible Codex types, filenames become entry names, and it's instant, no AI call needed to read your own notes. Re-running the same import only ever proposes what's genuinely new.

Quick facts

• Short, structured details like age or status now show as chips at the top of an entry and inline wherever the AI reads it, instead of buried in a bulleted list.

Preface and postface

• Chapters can now be tagged as front matter (Preface, Prologue, Foreword, Introduction, Author's Note) or back matter (Epilogue, Afterword, Postscript, Acknowledgements), either by hand or detected automatically when you import a manuscript that has them. A tagged chapter shows its own name everywhere instead of a number, and your real Chapter 1 always reads as Chapter 1, however many of these come before it.

macOS compatibility

• bookmoth now activates correctly on macOS 12 and earlier. If you or a reader you know were ever stuck at the licence screen with no error and no way through, update and it should go straight in.

General improvements

• Dragging a scene or chapter is steadier throughout: an interrupted drag no longer leaves things in a half-moved state, and a chapter dwell-expands as you drag over it.
• Switching projects now always waits its turn rather than racing an in-progress generation.
• Better handling throughout when two characters share a name: mentions and codex suggestions are now far less likely to guess wrong or mix them up.
• Your custom font now covers every text field consistently, not just the manuscript and editor.
• Reordering, inserting, or deleting chapters is steadier: everything tied to a chapter, including Codex facts, now follows it correctly.
• The "Scan chapters" picker now offers any chapter with real writing in it, including one you've only just started, not just longer ones.
• The onboarding tour now walks through the new timeline and chapter strip, and a general round of stability and polish across the Codex, prose editor, and highlighting.

Importing

• Importing a manuscript now brings every chapter straight in, prose first: your chapters land the moment the file is read, and the plan summaries fill in behind them.
• Re-importing the same file picks up exactly where it left off, generating only the summaries that are still missing.
• Clearer progress and completion messages throughout the import, and stopping partway now works cleanly.

Model settings

• Model fields are now proper dropdowns. bookmoth fetches the live model list from OpenRouter, Ollama, LM Studio, or your own endpoint, searchable as you type, with each model's context window shown. You can still type any model ID by hand.
• Advanced Model Routing has been redesigned as a roomier two-column panel, with a picker for each of the Heavy, Medium, and Light tiers.
• A new "what runs where" readout shows exactly which model serves each kind of task under your current routing, and settings now point it out when a routing choice needs an Anthropic key.
• Reasoning-capable models get more room to think on quick tasks across every provider, with an automatic retry when a model stops early.

Companion

• Notes captured on your phone with bookmoth companion now flow into your desktop General Notes on their own.

Story Plan

• Chapter View now shows the selected chapter's summary in the side panel, matching the other views.

General improvements

• Non-fiction drafts now follow your language and spelling settings throughout.
• bookmoth now guards against saving an incomplete or declined response as a draft, on every provider.
• Smoother brief building, steadier guided conversations with the editor, and a round of stability improvements across drafting and the codex.

Accessibility

• bookmoth now works smoothly with screen readers, VoiceOver on macOS in particular, with better keyboard navigation throughout for everyone.
• Dialogs like New Project now announce themselves to screen readers, keep your keyboard focus inside while they are open, and hand focus back to where you were when they close.
• Move between the Brief, Story Plan, Codex, and Manuscript tabs with the arrow keys, and open one with Enter or Space. A screen reader announces which tab is selected.
• On-screen elements are read in the order they appear, including the reordered workflow steps for essays and articles.
• Buttons that used to show only an icon now carry spoken labels, and the "What are you writing?" project-type picker is announced as a proper set of choices.
• A new skip link lets keyboard users jump straight past the top toolbar into their work.
• With thanks to the reader whose detailed notes prompted this. More accessibility improvements are on the way.

Writing Profile

• bookmoth now reads your writing samples more deeply, with a new register calibration that captures how ornate or plain, varied or steady your prose runs, so drafts hold your voice instead of drifting toward a generic one.
• Imported manuscripts can now power your Writing Profile directly: pick chapters and they become writing examples in one click.
• The Writing Examples card now shows how much of your prose the profile stands on, and every profile records when and how it was built.
• No samples yet? Profiles can now be built from your brief alone, clearly labelled, and upgraded the moment you add your own prose.

Drafting

• After each draft, bookmoth quietly notes when the prose has drifted from your writing samples (longer sentences, heavier diction, more dialogue) so one voice-check can pull it back.

Languages

• English (Canadian) is now a language option. Drafts, edits, and revisions follow Canadian spelling conventions (colour and centre, but organize and tire). Choose it when creating a project, or any time from the Brief tab.

General improvements

• Sharper guidance when choosing a model for profile building, support for the Kimi model family, and general improvements to voice matching throughout.

Writing Profile

• Building your Writing Profile is now more dependable on slower or restricted connections, and shows a live word count as it writes, so you can watch it work.

General improvements

• Clearer messages if the app ever has trouble reaching the AI service, so a connection hiccup reads as one instead of a mystery.

Look inside your backups

• Snapshots are now browsable: open any backup and see its full story plan, acts, chapters, summaries and word counts, before you decide to restore anything.
• Restore a single chapter straight from a backup. Its prose comes back as a new version next to your current ones, so nothing you have written is ever overwritten.

Story Plan

• Act sections are sturdier when you reorder chapters: dividers now always follow your acts, however much you drag things around.
• Expand or collapse the scenes under every chapter at once from the manuscript sidebar.

Editor panel

• Resize the AI editor panel on the Brief and Manuscript tabs by dragging its edge, up to 50% wider than before. Double-click the edge to reset.

Drafting

• Your word count dial is a pacing goal for the model, not a quota it pads toward: chapters land closer to their natural length instead of being stretched to hit a number.

General improvements

• Smoother handling of reasoning models on custom and OpenRouter connections, with clearer messages when a model spends its reply thinking things through.
• The editor now knows which act every chapter sits in, appearance settings restore more reliably, and support diagnostics got sharper.

Headings

• Select a sentence inside a paragraph and make it a heading: it moves onto its own line, so the heading covers exactly the words you chose. Your highlights and notes ride along untouched.

Formatting

• Paste and copy keep your bold, italics, and headings, and paste as clean Markdown into other writing apps and back.
• AI drafts render bold and italics properly instead of showing asterisks.
• Make any line a heading right from the selection toolbar.

Find your way around the manuscript

• A chapter and scene list in the manuscript's left column: expand a chapter to see its scenes, jump to any one, and the list highlights where you are as you read.
• Drag to reorder chapters and scenes right from that list, or from the chapter grid in Story Plan.
• Focus mode now flows from chapter to chapter in one continuous scroll, with headings so you always know where you are, and arrows to step by scene or by chapter.

Editing reliability

• Find and replace: see every match in context, across one chapter or the whole book, untick any you want to keep, and replace the rest in one press. Renaming a character takes seconds, and one undo per chapter reverses it.
• Bold and italic apply exactly to the text you selected, even on a repeated word or phrase.
• Highlights and notes land on the exact passage you selected too.
• Undo now steps back through a whole writing session, not just the last change or two.
• Redo (Shift-Cmd-Z) is back.
• Find resets when you switch chapter or version, and updates live as you edit.

Also in this release

• Writing an unplanned chapter now outlines its scenes and drafts each one properly.
• Add a chapter to the end of any act, right from Story Plan.
• Manuscript font size now steps by a single point at a time.

• Sync your projects to a folder of your choice (iCloud Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, or any synced folder) for use with the bookmoth companion on iPhone and iPad. Turn on in Settings.
• Chapter versions sync too; conflicting edits are kept as separate versions, never overwritten.
• New interactive welcome tour on first launch, available any time from the welcome screen.
• Minor fixes and refinements.

• Start a new Story Plan with no brief: add chapters and scenes straight away.
• New projects open with clean view settings.
• Chapter revisions stream live, with a running word count.
• Revisions hold up over slow connections; run scene by scene if a whole chapter won't go through in one pass.
• Stop button cancels a revision mid-flow.
• Debug snapshots are diagnostics only: your writing is included only if you tick a box, and nothing leaves your machine.

Versions 2.2.2 through 2.3.2 were beta builds. Everything tested in them ships here in 2.3.3.

Story Plan and Scene View

• Chapter plan becomes Story Plan: chapter cards, act dividers you can rename, and insert buttons.
• Scene View: drag to reorder scenes, move them between chapters, or drag whole chapters. Beats, prose, and notes travel with them.
• Select several scenes or chapters and drag the block as one undo step.
• Edit beat, goal, conflict, and turn inline; set scene status from a pill on the row.
• Add or delete scenes from the row; chapters read as Drafted once they have prose.
• One undo reverses any move, and the view stays where you left it.

Watch a draft as it's written

• A live activity panel shows the stage, an elapsed timer, a running log, and prose arriving as it's written.
• Drag it aside or pause it to read the draft so far while writing carries on.
• Stop a draft at any point.
• Per-scene word targets when you write only some scenes of a chapter, with a running total.
• Writing over existing prose: overwrite in place, or keep both as a new version.
• A clear note when a stalled local model finishes on the cloud.

Non-fiction and shortform

• Non-fiction books get a Notebook codex built around real people, places, sources, and events; add a source from a link.
• Footnotes that cite your sources, approved one by one, numbered into a sources appendix, with an optional foot-of-page layout on print PDFs.
• Context rails: argument shape on the Outline tab, source coverage on Research (wide screens).

Pasting and the editor

• Pasted prose keeps its exact line spacing, scene counts update as it lands, and one undo reverses a whole paste.
• Editor chat reads imported chapters and follows your request through chapter loads, with live progress on long waits.
• Pick a separate model for the editor, with a warning when it's underpowered.
• Bold, italic, and indent controls, scene tools, and multi-select in the codex.
• Codex suggestions from chat go through the review window before saving; changes are named chapter by chapter.
• The editor carries context across the Brief, Manuscript, and Research tabs.

Codex

• Import your own notes or a bookmoth export, matched by name and alias so nothing is overwritten.
• Merge duplicates, group entries and drag between groups, and export to another project.
• Tag entries, get type-aware tag suggestions, and filter by tag.

Make it yours

• One settings hub for appearance, text size, and models.
• Custom theme builder: name it, set background, text, accent, and highlight, and see it live.
• Each custom theme holds a light and a dark look; the toggle flips between them.
• Your chosen colours are kept as you set them.
• Line spacing controls for the manuscript and editor chat.
• Load and use your own fonts, and a roomier editor that grows as you type.

Save points

• Snapshot a project at any moment and browse its history.
• Restore in place, with an automatic "before restore" snapshot taken first.

Lower running costs

• Background steps (the brief interview, the deep editorial read) moved to a lighter model; your drafting model is unchanged.
• Repeat reads within a session are reused for up to an hour.
• Voice check and codex scan are opt-in, off by default.

Writing quality

• Bold and italics survive export.
• Curly quotes as you write; em dashes kept out of generated English prose.
• Guards against common AI tells on the voice-profile path, deferring to your profile rather than flattening it.
• Drafts land closer to the length you asked for.

Also in this release

• Your theme and settings persist across launches.
• Focus mode tidied, with scene markers you can toggle.
• A rebuilt macOS app icon that fills the tile cleanly.

• New project types: essay and article.
• Research tab: fetch a link for clean article text, per-source summaries, tags, and filters.
• Outline tab with drag-to-reorder; write-first flow builds the brief from your draft.
• Export to clipboard, Markdown, Word, or plain text.

• Print-ready export gains front matter: title, copyright, and dedication pages.
• Prompt caching makes chat and drafting faster and cheaper.
• Voice check and codex scan are now opt-in.

• Codex Workbench: entries with aliases, details, tags, and relations.
• Auto-scan for codex candidates, all through a review queue.
• Relevant codex entries feed drafting, with per-entry visibility.
• Manuscript chat beside your prose, with streaming replies.

• Focus mode keeps your scroll position.
• Duplicate a project from the list.
• Small label and dialog fixes.

• Scene-tracked manuscripts: prose and plan stay in sync both ways.
• Paste your own outline and bookmoth maps it to chapters and scenes.
• Chapter detail redesign with collapsible scene cards.
• Automatic migration from 1.x, with a backup taken first.