Drafts

Drafts are a place for alternate versions of a chapter — cut passages, rewrites, experiments, anything you want to keep but not in the main story.

Scope

Drafts are per-chapter. Each chapter has its own set of drafts, separate from every other chapter.

Opening drafts (⌘3)

Click the Drafts capsule button in the chapter toolbar, or press ⌘3. The Drafts panel opens as a resizable pane on the right side of the window. The capsule shows a count of how many drafts the chapter has.

Creating a draft

• Click the + button in the Drafts panel header
• Use Write → New Draft from the menu bar

New drafts are named “Draft N” (auto-incrementing), or Cora may suggest a name based on the first proper nouns it finds in the draft text.

Renaming a draft

Click the active draft tab a second time to edit its name inline. Or right-click → Rename.

Writing in a draft

Click a draft tab to open it. The draft editor is the same as the main story editor — plain text, same typography settings.

Sending text to drafts from the editor

When you select text in the main story editor, two actions appear in the left gutter:

• Copy to Drafts — keeps the text in the scene and copies it into a new draft
• Move to Drafts — removes the text from the scene and puts it in a new draft

You can also select one or more scene cards in the Scenes panel and use Move to Drafts from the scene card menu.

Deleting a draft

Click the trash icon in the Drafts panel header, or right-click → Delete. Note: the Trash draft (see below) cannot be manually deleted, only emptied.

The Trash draft

The Trash draft is a special, automatically managed draft that every chapter has. When you delete a scene that contains text, the text is not lost — it is moved to the Trash draft, separated from previous entries by a timestamp (--- 2026-06-24T18:30:00Z ---).

Restoring from Trash

Open the Trash draft, find the entry you want, and copy it back to the story editor or to a regular draft.

Emptying the Trash

Click the trash.slash icon in the Trash draft header → confirm “Empty Trash?”. All entries are permanently removed.

The Trash draft is always listed last in the tab strip and is shown in small caps to distinguish it.

Drafts in the Part overview

When a Part is selected in the outline, the Part overview’s Drafts tab shows all drafts across every chapter in that part, laid out in a three-column grid grouped by chapter.

Limitations

• Drafts cannot be moved between chapters
• Drafts are not included in any export format