Long-form writing in Obsidian.

Start a Quire project anywhere in your vault and build it up scene by scene. Arrange the scenes into a nestable outline, write across them as one continuous document, and compile the result into a finished manuscript for a reader or editor. It's made for work that outgrows a single note: a novel, a dissertation, a screenplay, and more.

What you get

Projects and scenes. A Quire project is a folder of scenes. Create one anywhere, then fill it in. Every scene you add shows up in the Quire pane as a reorderable, nestable outline. Drag to reorder, nest one scene under another, and move a parent to carry its children with it. They stay ordinary notes throughout, so the rest of Obsidian keeps working on them.

Galley. Open a scene together with its children, or hand-pick any set of scenes, and write them as one flowing document. Your edits save back into each individual scene as you type, so you get the focus of a single page without losing the outline underneath. Writers who know Scrivener will recognize the idea as Scrivenings. Galley is Quire's version, rebuilt for Obsidian.

Compile. Turn your scenes into one finished manuscript. You assemble a workflow from steps that tidy the text on the way out, dropping frontmatter, stripping the wikilinks and callouts and other Obsidian markup that shouldn't reach a reader, prepending scene titles, setting your own separators, and writing the result to any note. Scenes can sit out of a compile without being deleted, and every project keeps its own workflow, so a novel and a research paper export differently.

Drafts. Branch a copy of any scenes, or the whole book, and rework it beside the version you trust. Each draft is its own subfolder of scenes inside the project folder. Switch between them in the pane, write and compile each on its own, then merge the keepers back scene by scene, or promote a draft to become the manuscript outright. The bold rewrite stops being a risk.

Buy a license

Two ways to pay, and both unlock everything. Launch pricing runs through the end of July 2026.

• Pay once, $10
• Subscribe, $3 a month

A subscription converts to a permanent license after ten monthly payments. After conversion, the subscription keeps billing until you cancel it. If you'd like to stop there, cancel it yourself in your Link account, which your receipt and billing emails link to.

Anything past the tenth payment is patronage, plain and simple, and it goes straight into Quire's development. We're grateful if you keep it going.

Your license key arrives by email right after you buy. Keep that email and store the key somewhere safe. It's how you activate Quire, and how you reactivate after a reinstall. One license covers five activations (see Where your license works).

Install

Quire installs from GitHub rather than from Obsidian's plugin directory (the Community plugins list in Obsidian's settings), which isn't accepting new closed-source plugins for now. There are two ways in, and both finish at the same activation step.

With BRAT (recommended)

1. Install BRAT: open Settings → Community plugins → Browse, search for BRAT, then install and enable it.
2. Open Settings → BRAT and select Add beta plugin.
3. Enter Dromena-xyz/quire, then select Add plugin. BRAT installs Quire and afterward checks the repo for new releases.
4. Open Settings → Community plugins and make sure Quire is enabled.
5. Open Settings → Quire, paste the license key from your purchase email, and select Activate.

By hand (you control updates)

1. From the latest release, download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css.
2. In your vault, create the folder .obsidian/plugins/quire/ and put the three files inside it.
3. In Obsidian, open Settings → Community plugins and enable Quire (turn off Restricted mode if prompted).
4. Open Settings → Quire, paste your license key, and select Activate.

Getting started

1. Create a project. Right-click any folder and choose New Quire project, then give it a name. Quire makes a fresh project folder for it. A project can sit anywhere in your vault, but not inside another Quire project.
2. Open the Quire pane. Select the Open Quire ribbon icon, the open book. Your project and its scenes appear on the Scenes tab.
3. Add and arrange scenes. Type a title into the New scene field to add one. Drag a scene between two rows to reorder it, drop it onto another scene to nest it as a child, or drop it below the list to move it to the top level. Right-click a scene for Outdent/Indent if you'd rather move one level at a time. Select several scenes (modifier-click, or Add to selection in the menu) to move, nest, delete, or ignore them as a group, children included.
4. Write in Galley. Right-click a scene and choose Open in Galley to write it and its children together as one continuous document, or select several scenes and open those as one. Your edits save back into each scene as you go.
5. Compile. Switch to the Compile tab, choose or build a workflow, and select Compile. Quire writes the finished manuscript into your vault and tells you where it landed.

For a closer look at each feature, see the documentation.

Coming from Longform?

Quire imports your existing Longform projects. Run Import a Longform project from the command palette, or open Settings → Quire and select Import a project under "Switching from Longform." Quire finds your Longform projects and brings them in without changing or deleting anything Longform owns. You can copy a project into a new folder, or add a Quire index in place next to the Longform one. Either way Quire shows you exactly what will happen before it writes anything, and a copied project's Longform drafts come across with it, as Quire drafts inside one project.

Where your license works

One license covers five activations, where an activation is one vault on one device. For example:

• One vault synced to your laptop and desktop uses two.
• A second vault, kept apart from the first, on that laptop uses a third.
• Those two vaults on a third machine use the last two.

Quire ties an activation to a vault and a device because that's the granularity Obsidian gives a plugin for storing a license securely. The key lives in that vault's own secure storage, on the machine where you activated it, and Obsidian doesn't carry it between vaults or machines. So syncing or sharing a vault's files never spends an activation on its own. Opening that vault on a new device is what does. Done with one? Deactivate it from that vault's Quire settings to free the slot.

Requirements

Obsidian 1.11.5 or later, on macOS, Windows, or Linux desktop.

Roadmap

Quire launches lean and keeps growing. The goal behind every release is to bring what writers love about Scrivener into something fully Obsidian-native, built on notes. Some of what's ahead:

• Mobile. Write on phone and tablet once we can support it without the licensing quirks noted above.
• An account page. Manage your license and devices from the web, not only from inside the plugin.
• More compile power, and closer parity with the tools writers come from.

Lineage

None of this is a new idea, and that's a compliment to the writers and tools that arrived first. Apps like Scrivener taught a generation to work in scenes, draft them together, and compile the result. Longform brought that way of working to Obsidian and carried it for years as a free, open-source labor of love that plenty of us, this author included, wrote real words on.

Quire owes Longform a real debt. The scenes-as-files model, the index that orders them, compile as a stack of small steps: that shape is Longform's, and Quire carries it forward. The code is its own, written from scratch in Svelte 5, but the lineage isn't something to paper over.

Where Quire goes its own way: Galley, a Scrivenings-style editor that writes back to every scene at once; scenes that nest as parent and child, so structure travels on reorder; and being a paid product, which is how a tool like this stays actively maintained (a lot to ask of volunteer time alone). A few familiar touches make their own calls, too; a running word count isn't in Quire today. Real gratitude to what came before, and to the writers still using it.

Support

Found a bug or have a feature request? Open an issue on GitHub. For anything to do with your license or a payment, reply to your purchase email.

Privacy and network use

Quire is local-first. Your writing stays on your machine: it never sends scene text, file names, or any document content anywhere, and it collects no analytics, telemetry, or tracking of any kind.

It uses the network for three things only: buying or activating a license, the occasional license re-check while a subscription is active, and asking GitHub whether a new version is out. A one-time license validates once, at activation, and never again on its own. Everything else works fully offline.

A license check sends only what's needed to confirm the license, never your notes. Your license is kept in your computer's secure storage rather than inside the vault, which is why syncing or sharing a vault never shares your license along with it.

A paid license is required for full access; activation lives in the plugin's settings. The full specifics are in the privacy policy.

License

The contents of this repository, and all artifacts attached to its releases, are released under a proprietary license. Source lives in a private repository. Use of Quire is subject to the Terms of Use.