Scene

The Manuscript Tree is the writable structure inside a Manuscript. It lives at <manuscript>/scenes/. The pieces:

• Folders group Scenes and other Folders.
• Scenes are the Markdown leaves you actually write in.
• Drafts are read-only snapshots of a Scene at a point in time.

Folder

A Folder is a group with an ordered set of children. It can carry an optional title and colour. On disk: a real directory.

You might use Folders for:

• Acts — Act One, Act Two, Act Three (three top-level Folders, chapters under each).
• Parts — Part I, Part II, Part III.
• Sections — Prologue / Body / Epilogue.
• Working areas — cut-scenes/, archive/.

Folders are also navigable as a Folio — Trove can stitch a Folder’s Scenes into one continuous scroll for end-to-end reading.

Scene

A single Markdown file is one Scene. Scenes have:

• Status — todo, draft, active, or done. Sets the colour-coded dot you see in the Manuscript Tree.
• POV — optional point-of-view label.
• Story-time — optional in-fiction time stamp (“the day before the trial”). If the Manuscript has a Time system, story-times become comparable dates on the Timeline.
• Location — optional pointer to a Location Entity from your Codex.
• Synopsis and word goal — the card face on the Board and the per-Scene target.
• Drafts — zero or more snapshots.

On disk, that’s:

scenes/
  act-one/
    chapter-01.md
    chapter-02.md
    chapter-03.md
  act-two/
    ...

Each .md is plain Markdown. Frontmatter (the colon-separated block at the top) carries status, POV, and the other structured fields. Open the file in any other Markdown editor and it Just Works.

Status

A Scene’s status drives more than colour:

• todo — placeholder. You know this scene needs to exist but you haven’t started.
• draft — actively being written; the bulk of your work-in-progress.
• active — current focus.
• done — finished for this pass.

Status is a workflow signal, not a snapshot. To capture “this version of the text”, use a Draft.

Draft (the snapshot, not the status)

A Draft is a read-only point-in-time copy of a Scene. Right-click a Scene → Snapshot draft to capture one. They live under .snapshots/ with a filename like chapter-03.draft-2026-07-11.md.

Use them when you’re about to make a major change and want a safety net — restructuring a chapter, cutting a scene, trying a different POV. You can compare the Draft to the current Scene or restore from it. See Drafts and snapshots.

Tip

Drafts are not version control. They are coarse snapshots you take deliberately. If you want fine-grained history, put your Trove root in a git repo and let git track every edit.

Editor

The editor is Tiptap-based (ProseMirror under the hood) and saves Markdown directly. Headings, lists, blockquotes, links, footnotes — all standard CommonMark plus a few sensible extensions.

trove · The Circus · Brotherhood - Ordinances

Inline shortcuts work as you type:

• # → H1
• ## → H2
• > → blockquote
• - → bulleted list
• **bold**, *italic*, `code`

The editor surfaces:

• Word count for the Scene and the Sprint.
• Sticky Notes — small typed, coloured notes pinned to the Scene.
• Comments — inline annotations on a text range.
• Attachments — reference files (PDFs, images, audio) bound to the Scene.
• References — [[ ]] links out of the Scene and every record that links back in.
• Editor Outline — the headings of this Scene, for in-Scene navigation.

There’s more in the editor than fits here — see Drafting and Editor tools.

On disk, again

The recurring point: every Folder is a real directory, every Scene is a real .md file, every Draft is a real .md snapshot. There is no database. If Trove went away tomorrow your Manuscript would still be a folder of Markdown files you can read with anything.