Rooms

Five Rooms is arranged in five rooms, in the order you work on a book. Choose a room at the top of the window (along the bottom on iPhone), or use the View menu.

A room with more than one page shows its pages at the top, with the page's own controls beside them. Each room remembers the page you last used.

A project opens in the room you were last in on this device. A new project opens in Plan until it has some text; a project with text opens in Write.

The column

Beside each room's page is a column. In Write and Plan it's the project's contents. The tile at the top says what you're looking at — the Binder (the Manuscript, Publishing, Trash or an alternate order) or a Collection — and opens a panel to choose another (see Arrangements). The field under it filters the contents to the documents you're working on (see Filtering the Contents).

Research shows Research & Notes in the column instead, and keeps its own selection: the note you were reading stays open in Research while the scene you were writing stays open in Write. Plan's panel offers Research & Notes too, so its corkboard and outliner can lay out your notes — the Characters folder shows a card for each character.

Other pages put their own list there: Plan's story pages the people and places, Revise the checks, the comments' authors or the checkpoints, and Publish the formats. On iPhone, that list opens from the button at the top right.

On Mac, choose View > Hide Contents (⌃⌘S) for more room. On iPad, use the button at the top left.

Write

The ribbon at the top of the page grows with today's words, and is full once you reach your session target. Under the page are the words in what's open, today's progress and the words in the book. Choose either to see your statistics.

A moment after you start typing, everything but the page fades. Move the pointer, or click in the text, to bring it back. To keep the tools in view, turn off Fade the tools while typing in Settings ▸ Appearance.

The bar over the page sets the paragraph style, bold, italic, underline, small capitals, alignment, colours, line spacing and lists, and adds a block quote, a scene break, a footnote or a citation (see Prose Formatting).

At the foot of the page, Scene (⌘D) opens the Scene drawer: the synopsis, status, point of view, beat, story time, setting and tags of the scene you're in, who's in it, its notes, and everything else under All details. On Mac, View > Show Inspector (⌥⌘I) keeps the same details beside the page. Compose (⌥⌘F) opens composition mode.

The Library

Five Rooms opens on the Library, with the project you last had open selected. Choose the project's name above the column, or press ⌥⌘0, to return to it. On iPhone, choose the house above the project list. The column lists your projects with their length (or how long they've rested), and reviews shared with you. Type in the search field to find a project by title, series or pen name; the filter button beside it shows only manuscripts, screenplays or journals and, once any project has a pen name, only the projects published under one name (Published As: your own name or a pen name). Show All clears them all.

Home greets you with where you left off on this device: the chapter and the last sentence before the caret. With Apple Intelligence it says it in a line of its own, such as "You left Gary at the front door", written on your device from the passage before the caret; nothing is sent anywhere. Turn it off with Summarise where you left off in Settings ▸ Appearance. Return to… opens Write there, caret and all. Below are the book's parts against your manuscript target — for a journal, its posts by status, the last one published and the next to go (a scheduled post, else the newest draft; choose a title to open it) — this week's writing, and the year so far, in deeper ink the more you wrote. All statistics has everything else (see Statistics and Targets).

Series

To keep related projects together — a trilogy, a run of stories, the blogs you keep as journals — put them in a series. Choose + New series below the projects, name it and tick the projects it holds (a series needs at least one). To move one project, Control-click it (or touch and hold) and choose a series from Series, or New Series…; the New Project sheet has the same choice. The column lists each series' projects under its name; choose the name to fold them away. Control-click a series to start a new project in it, rename it (another series' name joins the two) or Ungroup it. A series belongs to each project in it, so it follows the project to your other devices; searching matches series names too.

Appearance

Choose Match System, Paper or Lamplight in Settings ▸ Appearance. High contrast sets black ink on white paper (white on black in Lamplight) with stronger rules; the system's Increase Contrast setting does the same by itself. Yellow on black sets yellow ink on a black page, whatever the appearance. The book pages are set in Newsreader, and the controls in Bricolage Grotesque.