Folio Dark Muse - local-first editor for book writers
Hey everyone - I recently launched Folio Dark Muse, a desktop writing app for novelists and long-form fiction writers, and I’d love feedback from people who actually use AI in their writing process.
The idea behind Folio is that a novel is not just a document. It is chapters, revision notes, character details, worldbuilding, timelines, scene beats, threads, snapshots, and a lot of context that usually gets scattered across docs, notes apps, spreadsheets, and folders.
Folio tries to bring that into one calm desktop workspace.
What it currently includes:
- Chapter and part organization for structuring a full manuscript
- Revision tracking with statuses like draft, revised, and final
- Chapter metadata for things like POV, setting, timeline, purpose, tags, characters, tension, beats, and story threads
- Codex / worldbuilding notes for characters, places, lore, and general story references
- Planning views like timeline, beats, threads, and corkboard
- Snapshots so you can preserve and restore earlier versions of chapters
- Search and find/replace across the manuscript
- Reader mode for viewing the full book more cleanly
- Writing progress tracking
- Exports to Markdown, TXT, DOCX, and EPUB
- Muse AI, which can work with manuscript context instead of just one-off prompts + auto-extraction of data such as characters and threads
The local-first part matters to us: Folio projects live on the writer’s own disk as files, rather than being cloud-first. The goal is to make the manuscript feel like something the writer owns and controls.
For the AI side, we’re trying to avoid the “AI writes the book for you” approach. I’m more interested in AI as a manuscript-aware assistant: helping summarize a chapter, rephrase a paragraph, expand or compress a scene, fix dialogue, continue a passage, suggest synonyms, or answer questions based on the book/codex context.
Currently app is available for mac only. Meanwhile windows/linux builds are in testing.
App link: https://folio-dark-muse.com/
I’d really appreciate honest feedback, especially from people who write fiction and already have strong opinions about where AI helps vs. where it gets in the way.