Projects
A project is your local home for one or more books. It is a normal folder you own on your disk — you can move it, back it up, and open it elsewhere. Writer Studio creates it, opens it reliably, and gets you back into writing fast.
Local ownership and offline use
Your work lives in files, not in a service account:
- You own the folder. Back it up by copying the folder; move it to another machine or to cloud storage (Dropbox, iCloud, and so on).
- It works offline. Creating, opening, and writing need no account, login, or network. Nothing cloud is ever required to write.
- It's portable. Copy or move the folder, open it, and you get the same book — the content lives in files, and the app's index is rebuilt when needed.
The app keeps a stable internal identity for each project, separate from its display name, so renaming never breaks links, appearances, or version history.
Create a project
You can start a new project from:
- The start screen — New project.
- The command palette — type New project.
- The app menu's File-shaped items.
In the dialog you set the project name, the location (the folder where it's created), the first book's name, and an optional start structure (a blank scene by default). Confirm, and you land in a writable first scene.
Open a project
Open an existing project from:
- The start screen — Open project, then choose the folder.
- Recent projects on the start screen.
- The command palette — type Open project.
Opening runs safe recovery first, so you never see a half-applied state.
Return where you left off
When you reopen the app, Writer Studio brings you back to the last book and scene you had open. This orientation is device-local — it does not travel when you copy the folder to another machine, and losing it never loses your work.
Recent projects
Writer Studio remembers projects you've opened so you can switch between them quickly. The recents list is available on the start screen and from the palette. Removing a project from recents does not delete it from disk.
Rename
You can rename both the project and the book:
- Renaming the project renames its folder on disk — what you see in your file manager matches what the app shows. If a folder with the new name already exists at that location, the app asks for a different name rather than merging or overwriting.
- Renaming the book changes display metadata only.
Either way, links, appearances, and version history survive.
Multiple books
A project can hold any number of books — create, open, and switch between them freely from the book switcher in the title bar. In this release, books in a project are independent: they share no story knowledge and no cross-book wiki. (Series linking — shared knowledge across books — is out of scope.)
Book metadata
Each book carries basic metadata such as title and author name, used when you export. See Books.
Start from existing material
If you already have a draft, you can begin a project by importing it rather than retyping — including from manuscript text, Markdown-like sources, and Scrivener. See Import.
What lives in the project folder
Your scenes, chapters, story entities, notes, and media travel with the folder. Device-level preferences (theme, locale, the recents list, your last-open position) and any AI provider keys do not live in the project folder — they stay on the device. See Settings.
For deletion, restore, version history, and backups, see Safety.