Longhand documentation

Features

Longhand is a text editor built for professional authors and optimized for long-form writing. It provides a focused, beautifully designed writing experience with project-based organization to help you take your manuscript from first draft to final form.

Longhand organizes your work into projects. Each project keeps your manuscript chapters and research notes together in one place. Drag and drop to rearrange chapters, nest files for organization, and keep reference notes at your fingertips.

Four editor modes let you switch between writing, reviewing, reading, and fully immersive focused writing. All changes are automatically saved as you type, so you never have to worry about losing your work.

Review your chapters with comments, suggested edits, and colored highlights, all stored in the chapter files themselves. Accept or reject suggestions one at a time or all at once. See Review.

Auto-backup preserves previous versions of your files. Whenever you open a file, a snapshot of its current state is saved. You can browse and restore older versions at any time using the Version History tool.

Themes let you personalize the look of the editor. Choose from 18 themes including light, dark, and specialty options like Solarized, Nord, Dracula, and Tokyo Night. Additional settings let you customize the font, font size, line height, paragraph spacing, auto-indentation, and spell checking. Six themes are included for everyone; the rest need the Pro plan.

Projects

A project is a folder on disk that contains your manuscript, notes, and project metadata. When you create a new project (File > New Project), you select or create a folder and give the project a name.

Manuscript

The manuscript section holds the content of your book. Each chapter is a separate Markdown file. You can create new chapters from the navigator panel. New chapters start with a default heading that you can edit — when you change the heading, the file is automatically renamed to match. A new chapter is placed right after the selected one, at the same level, or at the end of the manuscript when nothing is selected.

Notes

Notes are for your research, character details, plot outlines, worldbuilding, and any other reference material. They are kept separate from the manuscript so they stay organized and out of the way. New notes are placed after the selected note, like chapters.

To keep a note in view while you write, right-click it and choose Pin to References. Pinned notes appear in the Notes Reference tool. Notes can be highlighted, but they don't hold comments or suggestions.

Organizing your project

The navigator panel on the left side of the screen shows your project structure. You can:

• Drag and drop to reorder chapters and notes. Drop before or after an item to reorder, or drop onto an item to nest it as a child.
• Collapse and expand groups using the chevron icon.
• Right-click a file to rename, delete, or pin it, or right-click an empty area to add a chapter or note.

Clicking a file in the navigator opens it in the editor. Any pending changes to the previous file are automatically saved before switching. Use Cmd+[ and Cmd+] (View > Go Back and Go Forward) to step through the files you've opened, and File > Open Recent to reopen a recent project.

Editor modes

Switch modes with the buttons at the top of the side rail on the left, the View menu, or the keyboard shortcuts below.

Editing Mode

Editing mode is the default mode. The full user interface is available: the navigator panel on the left, the tool panel on the right, and the status bar at the bottom. Markdown annotations are revealed when the cursor is on them, but otherwise stay hidden. Spellchecking is enabled, and auto-indentation applies to manuscript chapters. The status bar shows the file path and word count. The count includes only the words a reader sees: Markdown markup, link addresses, comments, and suggested replacements are left out.

Switch to editing mode with Cmd+1.

Review Mode

Review mode lets you mark up a chapter without changing its text. Typing, pasting, and formatting are turned off, but you can still add comments, suggestions, and highlights. Select some text and a small menu appears above it with the highlight colors, Comment, and Suggest. Entering Review mode opens the Review tool, where you write each comment or suggestion. Accepting or rejecting suggestions changes the text, so it happens in editing mode.

Review mode works on manuscript chapters and is part of the Pro plan. Comments, suggestions, highlights, and the Review tool are available to everyone in editing mode.

Switch to review mode with Shift+Cmd+R.

Reading Mode

Reading mode provides a unified view of your entire manuscript. All chapters are assembled into a single scrollable, read-only document with chapter headings and separators. The navigator panel is hidden so you can focus on reading. The status bar shows your chapter progress ("Chapter 1 of 5 — Title") and the total manuscript word count.

Switch to reading mode with Cmd+2.

Focused Mode

Focused mode provides the ultimate distraction-free writing experience. The app enters full screen and all UI chrome is hidden — no navigator, no tool panel, no status bar. Press ESC to exit focused mode and return to your previous mode.

Switch to focused mode with Cmd+3.

Markdown

Markdown is a lightweight markup language with plain text formatting syntax. Its design allows it to be converted to many output formats. Markdown is a modern way to create rich text documents using plain text. It is particularly well suited for distraction-free writing as inline annotations help keep you in the flow when writing.

Below is a quick reference of the supported features:

You can also mix markup as needed. ***Bold italic*** becomes Bold italic.

Colored highlights

Longhand extends the standard ==highlight== syntax with colored highlights. Place a color emoji immediately after the opening == to choose a color: yellow (🟨), green (🟩), pink (🟥), blue (🟦), orange (🟧), or purple (🟪). Without an emoji, highlights default to yellow.

The markup and color emoji are hidden when the cursor is away from the highlighted text. When you place the cursor on a highlight, a marker pen icon appears — click it to change the highlight color.

Common Markdown has some special requirements, like separating paragraphs with two newlines. Longhand works differently: the editor displays text like a print book, continuous and without requiring extra blank lines. At the same time, when saved to a file, Longhand will convert this to the common Markdown syntax to maintain compatibility.

Review

Longhand lets you review a manuscript the way an editor marks up a printed page. Add review items from the Review menu, the context menu, or the floating menu in Review mode. Comments and suggestions belong to manuscript chapters; notes support highlights only.

Comments

Select some text and choose Review > Comments > Add Comment. The comment opens in the Review tool so you can type it. In the editor, commented text is marked and the comment itself stays out of the way. A comment covers text within one paragraph, and comments can't overlap.

Suggestions

A suggestion proposes a change to the text. Select the text you want to replace and choose Review > Suggestions > Add Suggestion, then type the replacement in the Review tool. Leave the replacement empty to suggest deleting the text, or add a suggestion with nothing selected to suggest an insertion. Like comments, a suggestion stays within one paragraph, and suggestions can't overlap.

Accept a suggestion to apply it, or reject it to keep the original text. Accept All Suggestions and Reject All Suggestions resolve every suggestion in the chapter at once.

Highlights

Highlights work as described in Colored highlights. The Review > Highlights menu applies each color and removes one highlight or all of them.

How review items are saved

Review items are stored as plain text in the chapter's Markdown file, next to the text they refer to:

(:comment "Can we show this instead?": She was afraid.:)
(:suggestion "terrified": afraid:)

Because they live in the file, comments and suggestions travel with the chapter when you copy, back up, or sync your project.

Tools

The tool panel on the right side of the screen hosts auxiliary tools that assist your writing. Its header shows the current tool; click it to open the tool list, type to filter, and choose a tool. You can also pick any tool from the Tools menu. Tools that don't work in the current mode are dimmed with the reason. Grammar Checker and Version History are available in editing mode only.

Minimap

The minimap shows a scaled-down view of the entire document, giving you a bird's-eye view of its structure. A viewport indicator shows your current scroll position. Click anywhere on the minimap to jump to that section, or drag the viewport indicator to scroll through the document.

Table of Contents

The Table of Contents shows a hierarchical outline of headings in your document. In editing mode, it lists headings from the current file, nested by heading level (H2 under H1, H3 under H2, etc.). In reading mode, it reflects the navigator's manuscript hierarchy — if Chapter 1 is nested under Part 1 in the navigator, it appears the same way in the table of contents, with sub-headings nested within each chapter.

Click any heading to jump to it. The currently visible heading is highlighted and the status bar shows your position as a breadcrumb path (e.g., “Part 1 — Chapter 3 — Section 2”).

Search

Search across your entire project (Shift+Cmd+F). In editing mode, search finds matches across all manuscript files and notes, showing each result with surrounding context. Click a result to open that file and jump to the match. In reading mode, search finds matches within the assembled manuscript. Use the scope filters to narrow results to manuscript only or notes only. Search looks at the text a reader sees, so it skips comment text and suggested replacements.

Review

The Review tool lists the chapter's comments, suggestions, and highlights in the order they appear. Click an item to jump to it. Write and edit comments and suggested replacements directly in their cards. In editing mode, suggestion cards have Accept and Reject buttons, highlight cards let you change the color, and every card can be removed. The Review tool is available for chapters in editing and review mode.

Notes Reference

Notes Reference keeps your research beside the manuscript. Pinned notes appear as cards you can read while you write; expand or collapse each card, and drag its bottom edge to resize it (double-click the edge to fit the content). Search your notes by title, tag, or text, and pin or unpin from the results. The open button on a card opens the note in the editor. Pins are saved with the project.

For more room, turn on the reference layout with the widen button in the tool, or Option+Cmd+R (View > Reference Layout). It hides the navigator and widens the reference pane. Drag the divider between the editor and the pane to resize it.

Grammar Checker

The grammar checker analyzes your text and surfaces issues grouped by category: grammar, style, punctuation, capitalization, and readability. Each issue shows the problem in context along with suggested fixes. Click an issue to jump to it in the editor, or click a suggestion to apply the fix.

Export

Export your documents to PDF, Word (DOCX), Markdown, or HTML. Select your format from the dropdown and click Export to save the file. The file is named after the chapter, or after the project when you export the whole manuscript. In editing mode, the current file is exported. In reading mode, the entire assembled manuscript is exported as a single document. Line separators (--- and ***) become page breaks in the exported file.

Version History

Version history shows saved snapshots of the current file. Longhand automatically creates a snapshot whenever you open a file, so previous versions are always preserved.

Click a snapshot to preview it without changing your working copy. From any snapshot, you can restore it (which saves your current version as a snapshot first, so nothing is lost) or delete it. Click "Current Version" to return to your working copy.

Clipboard

An important note on how Longhand leverages the clipboard: copying text in Longhand will put both text and HTML on the clipboard. If you then paste in a plain text editor, you will see the Markdown content, including markup characters like *. On the other hand, if you paste this in a rich text editor like Word, you will get rich text, already formatted.

Similarly, if you paste formatted HTML from the clipboard, Longhand will convert this to Markdown and try to match the formatting of the clipboard content.