Scenes panel & inspector
The Scenes panel (⌘4)
The Scenes panel opens on the right side of the window when a chapter is selected. Toggle it with ⌘4 or the Scenes button in the top-right corner.
Each scene appears as a scene card showing:
- Scene title (or Scene N if unnamed)
- Synopsis (if added)
- Character and place chips
Click a card to scroll the editor to that scene. Drag cards to reorder scenes.
Adding a scene from the panel
Click the + button in the Scenes panel header (or press ⌘↩) to add a blank scene at the end of the chapter.
If you have text selected in the editor, an additional +from selection button appears in the panel header — it creates a new scene from the selection.
Scene card actions
Right-click or use the icons on a scene card:
- Sparkles — auto-extract title, synopsis, characters, and places from the scene text (see below)
- Paintbrush — clean up metadata formatting
- Archive / Trash — archive or delete the scene
Scene metadata
Each scene can have:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Title | Optional short title; shown in the editor margin |
| Synopsis | One or two sentence summary of what happens in the scene |
| Characters | People who appear; drawn from the project’s character roster |
| Places | Locations; drawn from the project’s place roster |
Editing metadata
Click any field on a scene card to edit it inline. Characters and places use a chip input — start typing a name, then press Enter to add it. If the name doesn’t exist yet in the project roster, it is added automatically.
The Scene Inspector (⌘I)
The Scene Inspector is a floating panel that shows the full metadata for the active scene (the one your cursor is in).
Open it with ⌘I or from the View menu.
The Inspector shows:
- Scene title preview
- SYNOPSIS
- CHARACTERS chip list
- PLACES chip list
Auto-extract (sparkles button)
The sparkles button at the top of the Inspector attempts to fill the synopsis, characters, and places automatically by analysing the scene text.
On macOS 26 and later, this uses an on-device language model (Apple Foundation Models) — no data leaves your device. On earlier macOS versions it falls back to Apple’s NaturalLanguage framework for named-entity recognition.
This feature extracts organisational metadata only — it reads your text and suggests labels, but it never generates or alters your prose.
Part view — Scenes tab
When a Part is selected in the outline, the main area switches to the Part overview. The Scenes tab shows all scenes across every chapter in that part in a four-column grid, grouped by chapter.
This is useful for:
- Seeing the shape of the part at a glance
- Moving scenes between chapters (drag scene cards across chapter groups)
- Adding a synopsis or metadata without opening each chapter individually
Each card has a preview popover — click Story Preview to read the scene text in place, or Open in chapter to navigate there.