Getting started

FoxQuill is a writing app for one person and one computer. It keeps your book, your notes, and your Library in one folder on your own disk. Your writing stays there unless you share it or turn on AI.

The top bar#

The bar along the top of every screen, except in focus mode, has the book’s title on the left, five tabs in the middle, and a few buttons on the right. While you type, it fades almost to nothing so the page has the room. See A calm page.

The title opens the book menu. It switches to another book, renames this one, starts a new book, and opens the Trash once something is in it. The menu also has All books, and the feather beside the title does the same. Both go back to the book list.

The five tabs:

• Write is where the book lives. A sidebar of sections on the left, the text in the middle.
• Plan is a board for what happens, before it is written.
• Library is where people, places, and things live, one card each.
• Statistics shows what you have written and how you are doing against your goals.
• Help is these pages. Under the list of pages, Contact has email, Discord, and a button that copies the email address, for when something is wrong.

On the right, in order:

• The chat button opens a chat with the AI. It shows only when AI is on, and not on Write, where the AI tab in the side panel does the same job.
• Share makes a link to the whole book that someone can open in a browser. It shows once a book has a share link or Show more tools is on. See Sharing.
• Theme, a palette, switches between the four themes. See Themes.
• Settings, a gear. Everything about the book itself lives there: the cover, the title, the author, and the details a shop or an e-reader asks for.

Your first page#

The first time you open FoxQuill, two short steps ask for the things new books start with. The first asks for your name, for the title page, and whether new books open on the page or on the Plan. The second shows a short sample paragraph and asks for a font, a paragraph style, and a drop cap. Skip leaves them as they are, and Start writing saves your answers. FoxQuill does not ask again. You can change every answer under Settings > This app > New books. Start writing also opens the empty starter book, My Book, on the page or the plan as you chose, with your name and look already in it. A copy of FoxQuill that already had books in it skips these steps.

A new install has two books: Little Women, a sample book to look around in (the opening of the 1868 novel, planned the way a writer might plan it, with period pictures on most of its cards and its 1868 title page as the cover), and My Book, which has one chapter and one empty scene. FoxQuill opens on Your books. Each book on it shows its cover, its word count, and when you last wrote in it. A book with no cover picture gets one drawn from its title. The New book tile at the end of the shelf turns into a title field: type a name and press Enter. Open My Book, click into the text, and start typing. A new book opens on Chapter One, ready to type in. When the AI is on, a new book asks what genre it is, once. FoxQuill saves as you go, and again when you click away.

A calm page#

Once you start typing in a scene, the top bar, the sidebar, the side panel, the bottom bar, and the controls above the scene fade to almost nothing. Move the mouse and they come back. So does tabbing to one of them with the keyboard. Nothing moves when they fade, so the page stays where it is. With reduced motion turned on in your system, they change at once.

A sidebar or side panel that you have closed slides in when the mouse reaches that edge of the window, and slides away when the mouse leaves. Opening it with its button docks it. Tabbing to a closed panel brings it in too. In a window narrower than 1200 pixels the side panel starts closed. Focus mode keeps all of this out of the way. See Focus mode and sprints.

The bar at the bottom#

The bar at the bottom of the writing view sits under the text and stays there while you scroll. It is centered on the page, whichever panels are open. It holds:

• Write and Focus, which switch between the normal view and the bare one.
• The sprint timer.
• Today’s goal, if you have set one.
• In the last three days of the free trial, how many days are left. Settings > This app > License always shows it.
• The running word count, at the end of the bar. It is the open section’s count, and a click on it switches to the whole book’s (“12,400 words in book”). FoxQuill remembers which you chose. While you have words selected it shows how many are selected instead. It reads Saving… while a change is on its way, and a warning in red if one did not save.

Each section’s word count is on its row in the sidebar. A scene’s count shows under the scene when you point at it. The bar shows the same count in focus mode.

Keyboard shortcuts#

On a Mac, use Cmd wherever this says Ctrl.