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What is Trove?

Trove is a desktop app for long-form writers. It opens, edits, and organises your manuscript — but the manuscript itself never leaves your machine. Every chapter is a plain Markdown file in a folder you can open with Finder, sync with iCloud Drive, version with git, or hand to another app.

That’s the only promise. Everything else follows from it.

trove · The Circus · Chapter Four
Trove editor with Manuscript binder on the left and writing view in the centre

What’s in the box

Section titled “What’s in the box”
  • Manuscript binder — the left-hand tree of Folders and Documents that makes up one Project. Reorder with drag, nest with drop, rename in place.
  • Editor — Tiptap-based rich-text surface saving as Markdown. Headings, lists, blockquotes, images, footnotes; no proprietary block format.
  • Folio — open a whole Folder as one continuous scroll. Each Document still lives in its own file; the Folio just stitches them together for reading-through and revision.
  • Corkboard — a card view of the Manuscript with index-card synopses. Drag to reorder; group cards into Acts.
  • Entities — characters, locations, factions, items, or any custom type. Highlight references inline; link from a Document with [[Name]].
  • Worlds — a separate library of Entities that can be shared across multiple Projects. One World per setting, many Projects per World.
  • Tome — a user-wide notes graph (Obsidian-style backlinks) that sits beside your Projects. Daily notes, wikilinks, free-form Markdown.
  • Sprints — start a timed session with a word goal; finish, see the delta, log it to a Session.
  • Compile — export the Manuscript to .docx, .epub, plain Markdown, or a zipped bundle. No round-trip through a cloud service.

Who Trove is for

Section titled “Who Trove is for”

Long-form fiction writers and worldbuilders who’ve outgrown a single Markdown file but resent the assumption that the next step is a cloud notebook. If you want your manuscript to remain something you can tar -czf and walk away with, Trove is the middle ground.

Who Trove is not for

Section titled “Who Trove is not for”
  • Real-time multi-user collaboration. (Trove is single-user. Federated writing groups are on the roadmap, but the manuscript stays yours.)
  • Cloud-only workflows. (There is no cloud. Sync is your job — pick the tool that fits your trust model.)
  • Note-taking as the primary use case. The Tome handles freeform notes, but Trove’s centre of gravity is the Manuscript.

How files live on disk

Section titled “How files live on disk”

Pick a Trove root — usually ~/Documents/trove/ — and everything Trove writes lives under it. The layout is stable and documented:

~/Documents/trove/
  projects/{slug}/
    manifest.toml             # status, word target, world link
    manuscript/               # the writable Document tree
      chapter-01.md
      chapter-02.md
      ...
    entities/{type}/          # per-Project Entities
    .snapshots/               # Drafts of Documents
    .trash/                   # soft-deleted items
  worlds/{slug}/
    manifest.toml
    entities/{type}/          # per-World Entities
  tome/                       # user-wide notes (graph)

A Project’s manifest can point at a World via worldPath = "../../worlds/<slug>". That’s how Entity sharing happens — no database, no fancy linking, just relative paths.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”