We’ve written a lot here about how Inkwell is built. The Typst PDF engine, the Tauri internals, the security model. We’ve written almost nothing about what it’s actually like to use. That’s a strange gap for a build journal about a writing tool, so this post closes it.
The timing is deliberate. v1.5 was the release where Inkwell stopped feeling like a side project and started feeling like something we’d be maintaining for years. Underneath the workspace, we replaced the browser’s localStorage with a real SQLite persistence layer. No more 5 MB cap, no more silent eviction when the browser decides to reclaim space, your files and history and themes all living in an actual database in the app data directory. That kind of plumbing is invisible by design. You only notice it when it fails, and the whole point is that it stops failing. But it’s also the kind of plumbing you only bother to build for software you intend to keep. So here is the tour of everything that sits on top of it.
The surface you write on
Open Inkwell and you get a single window with no operating-system chrome. We draw our own title bar, so the app looks the same whether you’re on Windows, macOS, or Linux, instead of inheriting three different sets of window buttons. The default view is a split editor with a live preview pane: Markdown source on the left, rendered output on the right, the two scrolling in step so the paragraph you’re editing stays lined up with the paragraph you’re reading. You can collapse to editor-only when you just want to write, or preview-only when you just want to read, and there’s a focus mode that dims everything except the line you’re on.
There are four built-in themes, two light and two dark, tuned so the editor and the preview share one type scale instead of fighting each other over font sizes. We spent an unreasonable amount of time on the typography, because a Markdown editor is a surface you stare at for hours, and small ugliness compounds. A heading that’s slightly too large, a code block whose monospace clashes with the body font, a line-height that’s a hair too tight. None of it matters for five minutes. All of it matters across a week.
Opening a folder, not just a file
Most of the time you aren’t editing one file. You’re living inside a project full of them. So Inkwell lets you open a folder as a workspace: a sidebar file tree of every Markdown document in the directory, click any one to open it in a tab, with the active file highlighted and the whole layout persisted across sessions so you reopen exactly where you left off.
This is the feature that pulled us off VS Code for note-heavy work in the first place. We were drowning in Markdown files scattered across a dozen project folders, and an editor extension never quite fit. It always wanted to be a code editor first and a writing tool second. The workspace tree is deliberately flat and Markdown-only. It isn’t trying to be a file manager. It’s trying to be the shortest path between a folder of notes and the note you actually want.
Diagrams and math, rendered inline
Two features exist purely because we kept reaching for them and resenting their absence in other editors.
The first: fenced mermaid code blocks render as live diagrams in the preview. Flowcharts, sequence diagrams, the rest of the Mermaid vocabulary, drawn as you type. The second: inline $...$ and display $$...$$ LaTeX math typeset with KaTeX. Math is the feature most likely to go subtly wrong, so there’s a protection pipeline behind it that pulls code blocks and math out of the document before anything else parses them, which is why writing $50 in an ordinary sentence doesn’t suddenly try to become an equation.
Both of these render in the preview and, just as importantly, both survive into the exported PDF. Getting Mermaid diagrams and KaTeX math to come out of a Rust typesetting engine instead of a browser was a genuine project in its own right, which the earlier post on the Typst PDF engine gets into in detail. The short version is that the diagram you see in the preview is the diagram you get in the export, which is the entire reason a preview is worth having.
The small things
A writing tool lives or dies on the small things, so a few of them.
Inkwell keeps a quiet version history. It snapshots your document every few minutes and on focus changes, holds the last ten, and gives you a diff viewer to compare any two of them. It has saved us from our own deletions more than once. Find and Replace is a floating bar on Ctrl+F that highlights matches in the preview and operates on the source. Typewriter mode keeps the line you’re writing vertically centered instead of letting it drift to the bottom of the screen. Recent files remembers where you’ve been and quietly grays out anything that’s moved or been deleted.
None of these are headline features. Nobody chooses an editor because of its diff viewer. But they’re the difference between a tool you tolerate and a tool you forget you’re using, which is about the highest compliment a writing tool can earn.
Making it yours
If the four built-in themes aren’t enough, you can write your own theme: a set of color tokens that Inkwell stores and applies live, with no restart. People have built genuinely better-looking themes than the ones we shipped, which is exactly the outcome we wanted. A theme system that only produces variations on the author’s taste isn’t really a theme system.
And to move through all of it quickly, there’s a command palette on Ctrl+Shift+P. Fuzzy-search every action, run it from the keyboard, never go hunting through a menu bar. It’s the one piece of UI that, once it exists, makes everything else feel slow without it. We added it late and then immediately wondered how we’d shipped three versions without it.
The shape of it
A portable editor that opens folders, renders diagrams and math, exports real PDFs, and otherwise gets out of your way. Free to use, with the export layer funding the work. No account, no cloud, no telemetry.
What’s free, what isn’t
The editor, the workspace, the themes, Mermaid, math, version history, the command palette. All free. The only thing behind the Pro license is PDF and HTML export. That line hasn’t moved since launch and it isn’t going to. Everything in the free version stays free, and the gate exists to fund development rather than to ransom features back to the people using them.
That’s Inkwell at v1.5.
More soon.
QED ∎