Inkswell

Inkswell

A local-first writer's suite for longform fiction in Obsidian. Plan, draft, track, revise, and prepare to publish with Inkswell. My goal is to build the best end-to-end plugin toolkit for writers, especially those working on large series longform projects.

Why Inkswell

• You can handle nearly the entire writing process just with Inkswell. Inkswell organizes the entire arc of a novel — Plan · Write · Revise · Publish, plus a cross-cutting Codex and Track dashboard — into a single host view. Inkswell can get you from your first story ideas to a finished manuscript, with unique and powerful tools at each stage.
• Focus on UX with only the features you need. I have noticed a trend in other writing tools to add every possible feature under the sun. For some writers, this may be what they want, but my experience is that those tools often try to do too many things, and it makes it challenging to use them effectively. Inkswell is built with user experience at the forefront - I have made a huge effort to deliver the most vital features for each stage of the writing journey, in order to get the most streamlined workflows possible without being overly opinionated. (I hope!)
• Local-first. No AI. Inkswell makes no network calls, collects no telemetry, and does not generate any text. Your manuscript lives in your vault's frontmatter and the notes you write. Inkswell is built to make it easier for you to write, not do the writing for you.
• Drop-in for Longform users. I am a long time fan of the Longform plugin, so I made Inkswell compatible with that format. Inkswell reads and writes the same longform frontmatter, so existing projects load with zero migration. Inkswell-only data lives under a separate inkswell key to avoid collisions.

What's inside

Five pipeline phases — Home · Plan · Write · Revise · Publish — plus two cross-cutting tools, Codex and Track, that you reach for at any stage.

Home — organize the whole world

Projects and a nestable scene tree, an ideas inbox with quick capture, and series grouping for multi-book worlds, all behind a global project switcher.

Plan — structure before you draft

Beats (7 outline templates incl. Save the Cat!, with scene scaffolding) and a Board (Kanban by status / act / POV).

Write — draft fast, fix later

A distraction-light, Live-Preview manuscript editor with writing prompts and timed sprints. Fast-drafting placeholder tokens — [TODO: …], [RESEARCH: …], [DIALOGUE: …], [SCENE: …], [NOTE: …] — highlight as you type, so you can mark a gap and keep moving forward. Find them all later in the Revise → Todos sweep.

Revise — from draft to book

• Audit — per-scene and project revision checklists, a scene-purpose lift-out test, scene-opening variety, a character-arc grid, a side-character roster, and a style-sheet consistency scan.
• The invisible-revision Log — capture "from now on, assume X" decisions (e.g. "the inn is now called the Gilded Wren") as typed, prioritized entries and keep drafting forward instead of breaking flow to backfill earlier chapters.
• Todos — a one-click sweep of every placeholder marker ([TODO], [RESEARCH], …) across the manuscript.
• Analysis — readability, overused words, echoes, and composition mix.

Publish — manuscript to market

A configurable compile/export pipeline (Markdown & HTML built in; .docx / .pdf / .epub via pandoc when installed) with a step editor, chapter grouping, and a pre-export check. Plus a self-publishing Checklist (master checklist + book-metadata worksheet) and a Launch planner — pre-order timeline, budget, cover, marketing, and ARC trackers.

Codex — your story bible

Characters, locations, worlds, factions, items, events, and concepts, each with its own profile and linked scenes, plus mention auto-detect so your canon stays consistent as the manuscript grows. Can be scoped for single writing projects, or shared across a series.

Track — view stats, keep pace, achieve goals

Daily / weekly / monthly word goals, habit streaks, a GitHub-style heatmap, lifetime records, a writing-history chart, sprint stats, a deadline pace calculator (required daily words, ahead / on-track / behind), draft-milestone zones, and an optional daily mood.

Privacy & dependencies

• Local-first. No network calls, no telemetry, no account. Everything is stored in your vault's frontmatter and the plugin's local data.json.
• No AI. By design — Inkswell is tooling around your writing. It cannot generate any text.
• Optional pandoc. Exporting to .docx / .pdf / .epub shells out to a pandoc binary on your machine. It's feature-detected and disabled gracefully when pandoc isn't present; Markdown and HTML export need nothing extra.
• Desktop-only for now (isDesktopOnly). A focused mobile view (idea capture + read-only review) is planned for a future release.

Install

Requirements: Obsidian 1.7.2+ (pandoc optional, for .docx / .pdf / .epub).

• Community plugins: Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search Inkswell → Install → Enable.
• Manual: download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/inkswell/, then enable Inkswell in Community plugins.

Open Inkswell from the pen-tip ribbon icon or the "Open Inkswell" command.

Try it: the sample vault

examples/sample-vault/ is a complete, openable vault containing a mid-draft novel — The Lamplighter's Archive — wired up to exercise every Inkswell surface: beats, scenes, Codex, a populated Track dashboard, the revision audit, a compile recipe, and the self-publishing planner. Run npm run build:sample, then Open folder as vault on examples/sample-vault. See examples/README.md for details.

Development

npm install
npm run dev      # watch build into main.js
npm run build    # typecheck + production bundle
npm test         # unit tests (vitest)

Copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/inkswell/ to test in a real vault. Architecture, conventions, and the compile/version workflows are documented in AGENTS.md.

AI disclosure

This plugin was developed with the assistance of agentic AI coding tools and practices. I have a mandate at work to learn AI tooling, and I wanted to channel that practice into something useful for a community I love - hopefully this counts as that. Direction, architecture, scope, and review are all handled by me; much of the implementation was AI-assisted under that direction. That said, there is absolutely NO AI-generation in the plugin itself. I used agents to help build it, but the plugin itself has a strict "No AI" policy and no AI or word generation features will ever be added.

License

MIT © Daniel King