The Plain-Text Mirror
On Mac, Five Rooms can keep a copy of every project as ordinary text files in a folder you choose. Your words are never locked in one app, and you can keep a history in Git or back them up anywhere.
In Settings > Mirror, choose a Folder. The mirror updates whenever you save, sync or import. To update it now, choose Mirror Now there or in the Project menu. Turn Off stops mirroring; the files stay.
Each project's folder contains:
| File | Holds |
|---|---|
| fragments/*.md | Each document's text, with its title and metadata at the top |
| arrangements/*.yaml | The contents' structure |
| entities.yaml | Your characters, places, objects and motifs |
| project.yaml | The project's settings and compile presets |
Turn on One sentence per line to make Git show changes sentence by sentence rather than paragraph by paragraph.
Editing the mirror
If you edit a scene's file in another app, such as Obsidian or a text editor, nothing is lost.
- With Bring back edits made in the mirror off, the next time Five Rooms updates the mirror it saves the edited file as a note in the project's Inbox, then rewrites the file from the scene.
- With it on, your edits come back into the scene within a few seconds of saving the file, along with changes to its title and synopsis. Where the same passage changed in both places, the version in Five Rooms stays and the file's version appears as a suggestion on it, for you to accept or decline. A checkpoint named "Before merging edits from the mirror" is recorded first.
Only scenes come back this way. The files describing the contents, characters and compile formats are rewritten from the project.