Launched this week
Folio Dark Muse
A local-first writing IDE for books
5 followers
A local-first writing IDE for books
5 followers
Folio is a desktop writing IDE for novelists and solo book writers. Organize parts and Markdown chapters, track draft/revised/final status, keep a codex for characters and lore, scan TODOs, restore snapshots, and export MD, TXT, DOCX, or EPUB. Muse adds manuscript-aware AI with local Gemma support, so your book stays on your disk.
I didn’t start as someone who loved reading.
At one point in my life, I got married to a wonderful person who is deeply passionate about books. She introduced me to reading, helped me find stories I enjoyed, and we often discussed them together. Over time, I discovered the genres I truly connected with.
As I read more, I began noticing small gaps in the stories I loved-details I was curious about, but never fully explored. That inspired me to try writing my own book focused specifically on those ideas.
When I started writing, I quickly ran into a problem.
The tools available felt either too complex or too limiting. Dedicated writing software often came with steep learning curves and unfamiliar concepts. On the other hand, tools like Word or Google Docs weren’t designed to manage larger creative worlds with characters, places, and evolving ideas.
As a software engineer, I decided to build a solution for myself.
At first, it was a simple writing tool. But as my project grew, so did my notes, spreadsheets, and fragmented ideas. I realized what I actually needed was not just a text editor, but a system that keeps everything connected and organized-so I could focus on writing instead of managing information.
That’s how Folio began.
The first version was rough and heavily reworked over time. I spoke with experienced writers, learned from their workflows, and gradually shaped the app into something more structured and practical.
A key turning point was introducing AI. It started as simple writing assistance-synonyms, rephrasing, small edits-but quickly evolved into something much more powerful: helping structure entire stories, extract characters and lore, and keep everything consistent through a unified codex system.
Folio was built for my own needs, but I believe there are many writers like me-people with big ideas who feel overwhelmed by tools that are either too complex or too scattered.
Book Home Page - it shows you current status, count of word in book, writing streak, latest chapter that is in draft.
Plan Tab - it is a place, where you can see the timeline of your story, beats, threads and the corkboard. Each of these sub tabs designed to track specific aspect of your book. Timeline - so you can know dates of story so there are no confussions in the order of events. Beats - allows you to select a framework, like a skeleton for you story, logically split by events. Threads - to track where each character appears, in which chapter, where they appear in the same chapter. Corkboard - quick overview board over your chapters.