ConTexture — User Manual

A writing app that keeps your work in plain Markdown files you own.

What ConTexture is

ConTexture is a writing app for Mac, iPad and iPhone built on one idea: your writing should outlive the app you wrote it in.

Every note is a plain Markdown file in a folder you can open in Finder. There is no proprietary database, no export step to get your work out, and nothing that stops you opening the same folder in Obsidian, iA Writer, or TextEdit. If ConTexture disappeared tomorrow, your writing would be exactly where you left it.

What it adds on top of those files is structure — a distinction between the manuscript and the material, between today and the archive, between a book and the shelf it sits on.

Who it's for

People who write long things and keep notes while doing it. Novelists who need a series bible that three books can share. Journallers who want their days, calendar and tasks in one place. Researchers who collect sources and want them next to the writing rather than in a separate app.

Where your files live

Everything lives in one folder, either in iCloud Drive or on your device (Settings → General → Storage Location).

Documents/
  Creative/         your projects, one folder per project
  Journal/          daily notes, inbox, archive, photos, templates
  Library/          material that outlives any single project
  projects.json     which projects exist
  links.json        which Library documents belong to which projects

On a Mac, iCloud storage puts this at:

~/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~com~timpfrey~ConText/Documents/

You can edit these files anywhere. Change a note in another editor, add a .md file from Finder, rename a folder — ConTexture picks it up. The filesystem is the source of truth, not a copy of it.

Choosing where files live

Settings → General → Storage Location offers iCloud Drive or local storage. iCloud keeps every device in step; local storage keeps everything on one machine. Switching is safe — files move rather than disappear.

Getting around: the three contexts

ConTexture has three places to work, and one of them is always where you start. The bar at the bottom switches between them; Home returns to the overview.

The difference matters. Creative is organised by what you're writing, Journal by when, Library by what it's about. A character sheet used by three books belongs in the Library. A chapter belongs to its project. Tuesday belongs to Tuesday.

Drawing Board is not a fourth context — it's a feature you reach from inside Creative or Journal. See [Drawing Board](#drawing-board).

Home

Home is where you choose, or pick up where you were.

• The three contexts, side by side on Mac and iPad, stacked on iPhone
• Capture, under the title — get something down without choosing first
• Recent — a strip of the last things you opened, with a preview of each: the opening lines of a page, the first page of a PDF, the day's agenda for a daily note. Four on Mac, three on iPhone. It hides itself when there's nothing to show
• Inbox lives in the toolbar as a pill with a count, beside Settings. It's status, not a destination — grey when empty, badged when something's waiting

Switching

• Bottom bar — Creative, Journal, Library, and Capture
• Mac menu — Navigate, with ⌘1/⌘2/⌘3
• The bar can hide itself (Settings → General); tap or hover the bottom edge to bring it back

Journal

Journal is time-first. Its spine is the daily note, named yyyy-MM-dd.md.

The daily note

One note per day, created when you first write in it. On a wide screen it sits beside a month calendar; on iPhone it fills the screen.

A daily note holds three things:

1. Events — from Apple Calendar and Google Calendar, collapsible, each able to hold its own notes
2. Tasks — reminders due that day, tickable in place
3. Notes — free writing, the main body

Events and tasks are stored as HTML comments, invisible in any other Markdown editor:

<!-- event:ABC123 -->
## Team Standup
What we agreed
<!-- /event -->

<!-- notes -->
The day's writing.
<!-- /notes -->

Journal folders

• Daily Journal — the dated notes
• Inbox — default landing place for captures
• Events & Meeting Notes — full notes attached to a calendar event
• Photos — images, filed by date
• Templates — fourteen starters (Meeting Notes, Weekly Review, Decision Log, Retro, and more)
• Archive — things you're done with

You can create your own folders alongside these.

Calendar and tasks

Grant access and events appear automatically. Settings → Journal controls which calendars and reminder lists are included, and whether events, tasks, overdue items and week numbers show at all.

Ticking a task in a daily note completes the underlying reminder, and completing it in Reminders updates the note. It's a two-way mirror, not a copy.

In Focus

A working set of notes you're actively using — closer to a pinboard than to a folder. Notes are never moved; focus is a flag plus an ordering, so a note keeps its home folder no matter what.

Ways in: press ⌘⇧F in any Journal note, use the note's ⋯ menu, or drag a note onto the In Focus panel (the bar under Today in the calendar pane swaps between Events & Tasks and In Focus). Assign a loose date with ⌘⇧D — it's stored invisibly inside the note, so it survives editing in any other app.

The set follows you: it syncs between Mac, iPhone and iPad, and it's one of the pages on the Apple Watch app, so your working set is a wrist-glance away. Removing a note from focus never touches the note itself.

Templates

+ → From Template to start a note from one of the fourteen bundled templates. Placeholders like {{title}}, {{date}} and {{weekday}} fill in when the note is created, so the template keeps its tokens and stays reusable.

Templates are plain files in Journal/Templates — edit them, delete them, add your own.

Creative

Creative is project-first. A project is usually a book.

Making a project

+ → New Project in the Creative sidebar, then choose:

• Longform — a book or script. Folders: Manuscript, Characters, Maps & Images, Culture & Languages, Timeline, Research
• Journaling — blogging or a writing diary. Folders: Events, Photos, Blogging

These folders are a starting point, not a rule. Rename them, delete them, add your own.

There are also genre templates (Drama, Mystery, Fantasy, Non-Fiction, Science Fiction, Historical) in Settings → Creative → Templates, each seeding a project with a cover page and a genre-appropriate starter note.

The binder

The sidebar is your project's structure, nested as deeply as you like. Manuscript carries a spine stripe — it's the book; everything else is material. Settings → General controls whether folders sort above notes.

Drawing Board and Templates sit together under Tools: the two things in a project that are neither manuscript nor material.

Drag and drop

It works the way Finder does:

• Drop on a folder and it goes in that folder. The folder outlines itself while you hover
• Drop anywhere else — on a page, on the Notes heading, in the space below the rows — and it goes in the project root. The whole sidebar outlines to say so

Drag within the sidebar to reorder or move between folders; drag from Finder to import.

New folders and notes

• + → New Page — a note in the current project
• + → New Folder — a folder
• + → Open File… — bring in an existing .md, .txt or .rtf
• Right-click any row to rename, duplicate, move, or delete

Only / and : are forbidden in names — everything else is allowed.

Multi-select

Click one row, then ⇧-click for a range or ⌘-click to add individual rows. Right-click acts on the whole selection. Esc clears it.

Library

The Library is the shelf that outlives any single project — and the answer to a problem most writing apps have.

The problem it solves

In most tools a project is a book. Anything shared across a series has nowhere to live, so you copy it into each project and watch the copies drift. Flat note vaults have the opposite problem: everything is equal, and nothing distinguishes what's in the book from what's about it.

The rule: link, don't move

A Library document lives in the Library and is shown in each project that links it. One glossary can appear in all three books of a series, edited once, correct everywhere. Nothing is copied, so nothing can drift.

Promotion is the flow

You write a character sheet while drafting book one, because that's when you need it. Only later does book two need the same character.

<·> menu → Move to Library… captures exactly that moment. Pick a shelf and the document moves to the Library and links back to the project it came from. It keeps appearing in that project's sidebar under FROM LIBRARY, and rows say "Also in …" so it's obvious an edit reaches more than the book you're in.

Shelves: Sources, Characters, Locations, Culture & Languages, Timeline, Research.

Summoning the Library while you write: @

Type @ in a Creative page and the Library opens right at your cursor — every shelf as a fold-out list, subfolders nested, with your project's own character and location sheets at the top under This Project.

Keep typing after the @ and the list narrows: @gac finds Gacrux wherever his sheet lives. Names match against the document's title and its @alias, so a "Zaniah, Lady of the Falling" sheet can answer to @zaniah.

Selecting inserts the name as plain text — @ is a spelling aid for the names you invented, not a link. When you want an actual link to the document, that's what [[ is for.

Because @ draws on the whole Library, a character promoted while writing book one is instantly summonable in book two — no setup, no linking first.

What this gives you

• Compile safety — a Library item is never compiled into the manuscript. A guarantee, not a checkbox you can forget
• One canonical source across books
• Cross-book consistency — which books a character appears in, and what you said about something in book one that contradicts book three

Browsing the Library

The Library isn't somewhere you write, so it doesn't look like the places you do. Open it and you get a shelf, not a file list.

• Shelves — the role shelves, one card each. The bars along the bottom of a card are its documents, sized by length, so a full shelf looks full and an empty one looks empty
• Collections — the older folders: Sources and Citations, Web Links and Bookmarks, Read Later, Code. Empty ones shrink to a text button so they stay findable without taking up a card
• Folders — anything you made yourself
• Pages — loose documents at the root, the unfiled pile

Open a shelf and every document shows as a page with its opening lines, or a PDF or image as its own first page. Under each is which projects it belongs to — one book named, several counted. That's the one thing a file browser can't show you, and it's the point of the Library.

Three ways to look, from the control beside +: Gallery (the shelf), Compact (smaller cards, for scanning a long shelf), and List (dense rows with name, date and project — for when you already know what you want). The choice is remembered.

The ‹ button or ⌘[ goes up a level. Open any document and the familiar sidebar comes back beside it.

Writing: the editor

The editor is plain Markdown with live styling — headings look like headings while staying # on disk.

Preview

Toggle preview to render the note: images appear, checkboxes become tickable, and [[wiki links]] become tappable.

The Writing Bar

At the bottom of the editor: Style (bold, italic, underline), Headings (H1–H3), Lists (bullet, numbered, task), Indent, Wiki Link, and a stats toggle. Hide it in Settings → Creative.

Wiki links

Type [[ or tap the button to link to another note. Filter by name, or create a note that doesn't exist yet. In preview, links are tappable; a link to a missing note offers to create it.

Tasks

- [ ] is a task and - [x] is a done one — plain Markdown, readable anywhere. A checkbox is just a checkbox: it ticks, it counts, it exports, and nothing leaves the note unless you ask.

Reminders

To send a line to Apple Reminders, put the caret on it and press Reminder in the bar at the bottom of the note (or in the Creative Formatting panel), or ⌥⌘R — also under Writing in the Mac menu bar. The line becomes a task if it wasn't one, a reminder is created for it, and a small gold bell appears at the end of the line. That bell is the whole model made visible: a line with a bell is wired to Reminders, a line without one is just a checkbox.

From then on the two are one thing: tick it here and it completes there, complete it there and it ticks here, rename it and the reminder follows. Delete the line and the reminder ConTexture made goes with it.

A reminder you made yourself and mirrored into a note is never deleted from here — only the ones this app created.

The writing bar

Along the bottom of every note. Each button does one thing, with its name underneath: Bold, Italic, Heading (press again to step H1 → H2 → H3 → plain), List (bullet → numbered → plain), Task, Reminder, Indent, Outdent, Link. Task and Heading and List all work on a multi-line selection. Hidden in preview.

Track Changes

Settings → Creative turns on Track Changes, recording edits as CriticMarkup so revisions are visible and reversible.

Headings and sizes: relative, everywhere

Formatting works in steps rather than absolute levels. Heading + adds a # (body → H1 → … → H6) and Heading − removes one; font size has the same +/− pair (⌘+ / ⌘− on Mac). The same controls appear in the Margin Bar, the Mac menu bar, the <·> menu and the writing bar — one vocabulary, every surface, and the same nine fonts offered everywhere.

The Margin Bar

The panel beside the editor in Creative, with eight tabs:

Each tab can be hidden in Settings → Creative, and can be moved to the bottom bar instead of the margin — useful on iPhone, where width is scarce.

Snapshots

A snapshot is a copy of the document at a moment. Take one before a big revision; compare or restore later. This is version history that doesn't require you to trust a cloud.

Bookmarks and snippets

See the [Bookmarks and snippets](#bookmarks-and-snippets) section — the short version: bookmark whole pages, save selected passages as snippets, and both sync across devices.

Bookmarks and snippets

Two ways to keep what matters one tap away — a whole page, or a single passage inside one.

Bookmarks: whole pages and folders

Any note or folder can be bookmarked from its long-press or right-click menu, or from the bookmark button while a note is open. The bookmarks list opens from the toolbar and takes you straight back — a character sheet you check constantly, the chapter you're revising, the folder for the current trip.

Bookmarks sync through your files, so the set is the same on iPhone, iPad and Mac. Recents stay per-device on purpose: what you touched last on your phone isn't what you touched last at your desk.

Snippets: passages, not pages

Select text in any note and choose Bookmark Selection. That saves the passage as a snippet — literally a snippet of writing: a pointer to those lines inside their document, not a copy of them. Opening a snippet jumps to the note and highlights the passage, so a line of research, a description you want to keep consistent, or the exact paragraph you keep citing is always one tap away — without hunting through the page it lives in.

When you open a document that has snippets, they surface in a bar at the bottom — every passage you've marked in it, listed, tappable. Mark the quotable lines in a source once, and every later visit starts from them. This is the "cite the passage, not the file" half of the Library: the shelf holds the source, the snippets hold the exact sentences you took from it.

Settings → Creative controls whether snippets show their source path and a reveal action.

Images

Adding one

• Paste a screenshot straight into a daily note
• Drag an image from Finder, Photos or Files onto the note
• + button on the Images panel

All three save to Journal/Photos/<date>/ and reference the file with a relative link, so nothing breaks if the folder moves.

Seeing them

Images render inline in the note at the point you added them. They also appear as thumbnails in the Images panel beside the calendar; tap one for a full-size viewer you can pinch, drag, and double-tap to zoom.

The panel shows every image for the day whether or not the note references it — so an image added from the picker is kept even if you never write about it.

Removing one

Delete the image in the note and it leaves the panel too. The file is moved to a Removed/ folder, not deleted, so nothing is lost to a stray keystroke. Drag it back in Finder to restore it.

Drawing Board

A visual thinking surface — cards, connections, sketching — reached from inside a Creative project or Journal, opening full screen.

It's a feature, not a context: a board belongs to the work you're already doing, the way a corkboard belongs to a desk. You can have several per context.

Boards are stored as <context>/Drawing Board/<name>.json. Archiving moves the file to Drawing Board/Archive/, so the state is visible in Finder.

Export a board as PDF, PNG or JSON. Exports use the full content bounds, not just what's on screen.

Capture

Capture is for getting something down without deciding where it goes.

Reach it from the Capture button in the bottom bar, the widget, or Shortcuts and Siri. Pick a destination — Journal Inbox, today's daily note, a Creative project, or the Library — and it lands there.

The widget offers the same destinations from the Home Screen. The Clipper extension saves web pages and selections from Safari into the Library.

Export and sharing

A note

Export from the editor menu: Markdown, plain text, PDF, or Rich Text. Share, save to Files, or send by email.

A daily note

The share icon in the daily note exports the day, events and tasks included.

A whole project

Compile assembles a project's documents into one file — the manuscript without the material, since Library documents are never compiled.

Working with other apps

Both integrations are toggled in Settings → General → Connections, and their actions appear whether or not the app is installed on the device you're using.

DEVONthink

Share to DEVONthink sends the current document across. If DEVONthink isn't installed the text is copied to the clipboard instead, so nothing is lost.

Useful when ConTexture is where you write and DEVONthink is where you keep research long-term.

OmniFocus

Send Tasks to OmniFocus converts the note's - [ ] tasks into TaskPaper and hands them to the OmniFocus inbox, keeping heading structure so tasks arrive grouped rather than as a flat list.

Inline OmniFocus parameters pass through untouched. Write:

- [ ] Email the agent @due(friday) @flagged
- [ ] Read chapter three @defer(2pm) @estimate(30m)

…and OmniFocus parses the dates, flags and estimates on import.

Apple Calendar and Reminders

Events appear in daily notes; reminders appear as tasks and stay in step both ways. Settings → Journal chooses which calendars and lists take part.

Google Calendar

Sign in under Settings → Connections and choose which calendars appear.

Task reports

A scheduled summary of outstanding tasks across your writing — Settings → Journal → Task Report. Choose a format, and a cadence of every 12 hours, daily, weekly, or specific days.

Claude and MCP

ConTexture can connect to Claude Desktop, letting Claude read and write your notes directly — search your journal, draft into a project, file research. Set it up in Settings → Connections.

On your wrist: the Watch app

The Apple Watch app is built around one honest constraint: the watch can't reach your files (watchOS has no iCloud Drive), so it pairs with the iPhone app instead. Three pages, swiped vertically:

Capture. The reason the app exists. Tap, dictate a thought, send — it lands in your Inbox as a note, routed through the same path as the widget and Shortcuts. Out of range of your phone? The capture queues on the watch and delivers itself when you're back — the pending count is shown, and nothing is ever lost.

Today. A read-only snapshot of today's daily note — events, tasks and notes at a glance.

In Focus. Your working set, tap through to read any note.

Today and In Focus update automatically whenever the iPhone app is used and whenever your focus list changes; the last snapshot stays on the watch when your phone is elsewhere, with an "Updated…" line so you know how fresh it is. Reading on the wrist is deliberately read-only — writing happens on devices with keyboards.

Settings

Seven tabs.

General

Appearance (System, Light, Dark) · sidebar sort order · context bar auto-hide · Storage Location (iCloud Drive or on this device) · Connections, including the DEVONthink and OmniFocus toggles.

Creative

Margin Bar tabs — which appear, and whether each sits in the margin or the bottom bar · Track Changes · snippet display options · project templates · writing bar, word count and format bar.

Journal

Show events, tasks, reminders, overdue items · auto-populate the daily note · week numbers · which calendars and reminder lists sync · the Events & Meeting Notes folder · task report format and schedule.

Library

Folder visibility and behaviour for the Library context.

Drawing Board

Board defaults and appearance.

Connections

Google Calendar sign-in and per-calendar toggles · MCP setup for Claude Desktop · integration toggles.

About

Version and build · legal · and Replay the intro tour, which starts the first-run tutorial again.

Keyboard shortcuts

Mac, mostly; iPad with a keyboard supports many.

A note on file safety

ConTexture is built so that the worst case is recoverable.

• Notes are read from disk when opened, never from a cache that might be stale
• A save that loses more than half a document — or drops any task line, however small the file — writes a timestamped .bak alongside it
• Renaming a document or folder keeps its Library links and In Focus entry pointing at the new name
• Deleted images are moved, not destroyed
• Folder structure on disk mirrors what you see, so anything can be found and fixed in Finder

Your writing is a folder of text files. That's the whole point.