The Library learns @ — and other summer updates

Two months since the last post, and the app has grown in a very particular direction: making the material around your writing — characters, places, sources, the notes you're living in — reachable without leaving the page. Here's what's new.

Type @ and the Library answers

The Library is ConTexture's answer to the series problem: a character sheet lives once, and every book that needs it links to it. This summer the Library became reachable from inside a sentence.

Type @ while writing and the whole Library opens at your cursor — every shelf as a fold-out list, subfolders nested, your current project's characters and locations on top. Keep typing and it narrows: @gac finds Gacrux wherever his sheet lives, and names match aliases too, so a formal "Zaniah, Lady of the Falling" can answer to a quick @zaniah.

Choosing a name drops it in as plain text. That's deliberate — @ is a spelling aid for the names you invented, not a link. When you want the actual link, [[ still does what it always did.

In Focus: a working set that follows you

Some notes you're just in right now — the chapter, the query letter, the glossary you keep checking. In Focus is a pinboard for exactly those: press ⌘⇧F, use a note's ⋯ menu, or drag it onto the In Focus panel. Nothing moves — focus is a flag, and the note keeps its home.

The set syncs across Mac, iPhone and iPad, and you can hang a loose date on any note with ⌘⇧D — stored invisibly inside the file, so it survives editing in any other Markdown app.

ConTexture on your wrist

There's now an Apple Watch app, built around one honest constraint: the watch can't reach your files, so it pairs with your iPhone. Three pages: Capture — dictate a thought and it lands in your Inbox, queued safely even when your phone is out of range; Today — a glance at today's note; and In Focus — your working set, readable from your wrist.

Smaller, but you'll feel them

• Formatting went relative. Heading + adds a #, Heading − removes one; font size gets the same +/− pair. The same controls in the margin bar, the Mac menus, and the ⟨·⟩ menu — one vocabulary everywhere.
• Tasks are a true mirror. Tick a task in a daily note and it completes in Apple Reminders; delete the line and it stays deleted.
• The user manual grew to cover all of this — and it now lives on this site, on the Guide page, generated from the same source as the in-app docs so it can't drift.

What's next

The Library keeps growing into its role: linking one document into several projects from the Library side, PDF reading on the shelf, and snippets that surface where you cite them. And the beta marches toward release — if you'd like to help test, the community page has the details.

— Tim