The trove handbook · v1
Your manuscript. Your hard drive.
Trove is a desktop writing app for novelists and worldbuilders. Manuscripts live as plain Markdown in a folder you own; the Manuscript Tree, Folio, Board, and Codex all open over the same files. There is no cloud and no account to sign into.
Find your way around
Section titled “Find your way around”Getting started
What Trove is, who it’s for, and how files are organised on disk. Start here.
Setup
System requirements, Trove root storage, and backups.
Concepts
Manuscripts, Scenes, Codexes, Entities, Folio, Tome — the canonical Trove vocabulary.
Workflows
Drafting, revising, snapshotting, compiling — plus the editor tools and read aloud.
Planning & worldbuilding
Arcs, Appearances, Time and Landmarks — plus relationships, family trees, maps, and canvases.
Sync & community
Encrypted multi-device sync, and the Society — Circles and Letters — over the same relay.
FAQ
Pricing, privacy, sync, and how Trove differs from the cloud-first apps.
Why local-first
Section titled “Why local-first”Trove is built around one promise: your manuscript lives on your machine in a folder you can browse with Finder. Open the files with any Markdown editor. Sync them with iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or git. Leave Trove at any point and your work goes with you, unchanged.
That’s the constraint everything else flows from. The Manuscript Tree is a view over folders and files. The Board is a view over the same files. The Folio is a view over the same files. There is no database. There is no cloud account. There is no migration path you’d ever need.
