Search and Navigation
As your book grows, you should spend less time hunting through files, notes, and memory. Writer Studio is story-aware: you can jump to anything, search across the book, follow a character to every scene they appear in, and get back to where you were working. Search and navigation are read-only and deterministic — they never change your text.
Quick jump
Open the command field in the title bar (or its shortcut) and start typing a name or title. The quick jump takes you straight to any scene, chapter, part, character, location, plotline, or note — no browsing the tree by hand.
Search the book
Open the Search panel from the activity bar and type a query. Search covers the active book:
| Searched | Examples |
|---|---|
| Manuscript text | A phrase or sentence inside any scene |
| Titles | Scene, chapter, and part titles |
| Synopses | Scene and chapter synopses |
| Notes | The text of your notes |
| Story entities | Characters, locations, plotlines |
Results show matches with context. Click a result to jump to the scene or entity. Search is scoped to the active book — books in a project are separate, so the command is "Find in book." To search only the editor tab you have open, use "Find in editor" (see Editor).
Toggle Match case and Regex next to the query field to narrow how it matches. The field also keeps a Recent searches dropdown — step through it with the arrow keys, remove a single entry, or clear the whole history.
Trashed items never appear in search or as a jump target (see Safety).
Find all mentions of an entry
Right-click a character, location, or other wiki entry and choose Find All Mentions to search the whole manuscript for every occurrence of its name and aliases. Results open in the Search panel, grouped by chapter, with a badge showing which entry you're searching for.
Appearances — "Appears in"
Open a character or location and you see its appearances: every scene where it appears, each one a jump. From the other side, open a scene to see which entities appear in it.
Appearances are the trusted, story-aware link. They are built from appearances you confirmed, not from raw text matches, so the list stays accurate. See Characters for how appearances are confirmed on a card.
Confirm mentions while writing
While you write, names and aliases of your story entities are highlighted inline as mentions. A mention is only a soft signal — a candidate, never counted as an appearance on its own.
When a highlighted mention is real, confirm it in one click and it becomes an appearance, so the wiki stays current as you write. A character can be mentioned without appearing, so nothing is promoted automatically — you decide.
Find your way back
You never lose your place:
- Recent items bring you back to scenes and entities you were just working on.
- Breadcrumbs show where you are in the book's structure and let you step back up.
- Bookmarks let you mark a specific place and return to it on demand. Use the command palette to set a bookmark, jump to one, rename it, or remove it.
Tags
A tag is a marker — a name plus a color, always both. Tags are the single marker mechanism in Writer Studio: there is no separate item-color system, so the colors you see in the tree are tag colors. Use tags for cross-cutting groups that structure and the wiki don't give you: "all flashbacks," "the revenge thread," "come back to these."
One project-wide namespace covers scenes, chapters, parts, characters, locations, and plotlines (and notes). The same tag means the same thing everywhere.
| What | How |
|---|---|
| Assign a tag | Right-click an item in the tree (assignment is a couple of clicks), or use the tags field in Properties or on a card. Click an assigned tag again to remove it. |
| Create a tag | Type a new word in any tags field — it is created with a color from the palette. A new project also ships a starter set of color-named tags you can rename into meaning. |
| See tags | Tag colors show on tagged items in the Explorer tree, and as chips in Properties and on cards. |
| Filter by a tag | Click a tag anywhere — a chip, or the tag list in the Search panel — to see everything carrying it (scenes, containers, entities), each one a jump. Color and name are the same filter. |
Tags are labels, not statuses. They never carry "done" or "needs work" meaning — tracking what needs attention is the job of the Revision workflow.