Draftline

A local-first Markdown writing app for macOS, built around a constraint: the AI in it cannot write for you. Lens, the editorial layer, is read-only. It questions, critiques, and offers options. The prose stays yours.

Part of the Mac suite · in private beta — ask for a build

macOS. The one app in the suite built on Electron rather than native Swift.

What it does

• Your folder, your files. Point it at any local folder as a vault. Notes stay ordinary .md files — Draftline never creates a proprietary database inside your vault.
• An editor that gets out of the way. Live, Raw and Preview modes (⌘1, ⌘2, ⌘3), focus mode (⌘⇧F), autosave, file search and renaming, and export.
• Lens, read-only by construction. It has no filesystem, shell, web, or draft-editing tools. It cannot silently rewrite a paragraph, because it has no way to.
• Two depths of review. A single fast pass for the guided flow and free-form chat; a deeper loop — parallel diagnosis, then an adversarial read, then synthesis — for explicit review skills. The review skills themselves are editable.
• A guided flow. Talk, Discover, Tighten, Hear: four steps for getting from a vague idea to a draft that survives being read aloud.
• Memory you can read. Continuous learning lives in two plain Markdown files in your vault — .marginalia/MEMORY.md for durable preferences and project facts, .marginalia/LEARNING.md for dated observations. The Observer proposes updates; nothing else can write to them. Inspect, edit, disable or clear either one in Settings.
• Bring your own model. Add an OpenRouter key in Settings and pick any configured model. Advanced users can point Draftline at a separate local Hermes API server instead.

Privacy

Your vault is a folder on your disk, in a format any other editor can open. API keys are encrypted with Electron's safeStorage and never reach the renderer process. Nothing is uploaded except the text you send to the model you chose.