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Getting Started with AugmentedQuill

AugmentedQuill is designed to be a seamless extension of your creative process. It combines a traditional writing environment with powerful AI tools that understand your story's context.

Your story belongs to you. AugmentedQuill keeps you in the driver seat: every beat, character voice, and plot decision is always yours. AI is here as a collaborator—to brainstorm, refine, and ghostwrite in ways that match your intent, not replace it.

Important Limits (As of 2026)

  • AugmentedQuill is local-first and not designed for public internet deployment without adding your own security layer.
  • No built-in user authentication or per-project access control exists. Treat the running instance as trusted local software.
  • No external editor sync is provided; project data is kept in local folders (e.g., data/projects/).
  • Accessibility support is currently not implemented (no dedicated keyboard shortcuts, ARIA, screen-reader enhancements).

Core Concepts

Before diving in, it's helpful to understand how AugmentedQuill organizes your work:

  • Projects: A project is the container for your entire short story, novel, or series. It holds everything related to that specific work.
  • Story Metadata: The overarching information about your project — the title, synopsis, style tags, and notes that guide the AI.
  • Chapters: The actual prose of your story. A short story exposes one chapter-like writing unit, a novel uses a flat chapter list, and a series stores chapters inside books.
  • Sourcebook: Your story's encyclopedia. This is where you keep track of characters, locations, lore, items, and other important details. The AI uses this to stay consistent.
  • Chat Assistant: Your AI coordinator. You can brainstorm, ask for suggestions, let it maintain metadata, or let it delegate prose writing to WRITING and prose refinement to EDITING.

The Main Interface

When you open AugmentedQuill, you'll be greeted by the main writing environment. The interface is divided into three main panels plus a persistent header bar across the top:

The main dashboard showing the three-panel layout: Left Sidebar, Editor, and Right Sidebar

  1. Left Sidebar — Your project's control center. Scroll through it to find:

    • Story Metadata: The story title, summary, style tags, and LLM-visible notes at a glance. Click the Edit icon pencil icon to open the full Metadata Editor.
    • Chapters (or Books & Chapters in a series): The navigation list for your prose. In a short story this shows the single writing unit; in other project types it shows the active chapter structure. Click any entry to open it in the editor; drag entries to reorder them where supported.
    • Sourcebook: A searchable list of every character, location, and lore entry in your world.

  2. Main Area (The Editor) — The central writing canvas. It shows the active chapter title and body, along with the AI suggestion footer at the bottom.

  3. Right Sidebar (Chat Assistant) — Your AI co-writer. Type anything here: brainstorm a scene, ask for a critique, or request the AI to take an action (like creating a Sourcebook entry or updating your story summary).

On mobile and small tablets the left sidebar slides in from the left edge and the chat panel slides in from the right, keeping the editor full-screen until you need them.

The Top Header Bar

A persistent bar runs across the top of the screen. From left to right it contains:

Left Section

Control Description
☰ menu (mobile only) Tap the hamburger icon to open the left sidebar on small screens.
AugmentedQuill logo + project title Click the logo or the application name to open the Settings dialog. The active project's name appears just below as a subtitle.
Undo (Edit icon counterclockwise arrow) Undoes the last text change in the editor. Disabled when there is nothing left to undo.
Redo (clockwise arrow) Re-applies the last undone change. Disabled when you are already at the most recent version.

Center Section

The center of the header packs in four groups of controls that help you write and interact with the AI. On smaller screens some groups collapse into dropdown menus so the header stays tidy.

View Mode — Choose how the editor displays your text:

  • Raw: Plain-text mode for clean markdown editing with a monospace look.
  • MD: Markdown-highlighted mode — syntax highlighting shows heading markers, bold, and italic without rendering them.
  • Visual: WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) — headings and bold text render as they would in a finished document.
  • WS (Pilcrow icon Pilcrow): Toggle to show invisible whitespace characters (spaces, tabs, paragraph breaks). Useful when formatting is behaving unexpectedly.

On mobile a single View dropdown (showing the current mode and a chevron) collapses these four options.

Format Toolbar — Shortcuts for common markdown formatting (visible on larger screens; available inside the Format menu on mobile):

  • B (Bold): Wraps the selected text in **bold** markers.
  • I (Italic): Wraps the selection in _italic_ markers.
  • Image: Opens the project image picker and inserts an ![alt](url) tag at the cursor.
  • H1, H2, H3: Prepend the appropriate heading level to the selected line.
  • Quote (blockquote icon): Inserts a > blockquote prefix.
  • List (bullet list icon): Starts an unordered - list.
  • Numbered List (numbered list icon): Starts an ordered 1. list.
  • Link (Link icon): Inserts a [text](url) link skeleton.
  • Footnote (hash icon): Inserts a numbered footnote reference and a matching definition block.
  • Code Block (code icon): Wraps the selection in a fenced code block ``` … ```.
  • Subscript / Superscript: Wraps the selection in ~…~ or ^…^.
  • Strikethrough: Wraps the selection in ~~…~~.

On medium screens the less common buttons collapse into a Format dropdown (the Type icon Type icon with chevron). See The Writing Interface for the full list of all supported markdown elements, including tables and inline code.

Chapter AI — Two quick actions that call the Book Open icon Violet swatch WRITING model on the current chapter:

  • Extend (Wand icon): Appends a continuation of the chapter using the story context.
  • Rewrite (File Edit icon): Regenerates the chapter body while keeping the same summary and style tags.

Model Selectors (visible on wide screens) — Three small dropdowns show which AI provider is assigned to each role. Click one to swap providers on the fly without opening Settings. See Projects and Settings for the meaning of each role.

Right Section

Control Description
Images (Image icon image icon) Opens the Project Images dialog to manage all visual assets for this project. (See Project Images.)
Settings (Settings icon) Opens the Settings dialog (same as clicking the logo).
Appearance (Type icon Type icon) Opens the Appearance popup to adjust the visual theme, font size, and line width. (See Appearance and Display.)
Debug Logs (bug icon) Opens the LLM Debug Logs overlay — a developer-focused view of all AI requests and responses. (See Appearance and Display.)
Hide / AI (panel icon) Toggles the right Chat Assistant panel open or closed. The current label flips between Hide (chevron-right) and AI (chevron-left) depending on the panel state.

Next up: Learn how to manage your Projects and Settings.