Quill

Long-form writing is a structure problem

Below about 3,000 words, structure takes care of itself. Above 20,000, structure is the entire job, and every general-purpose editor treats it as a side effect of your heading levels.

Quill makes the outline the primary object and the prose secondary.

What that means in practice

• Restructure by dragging. Move a section and everything under it moves, with cross-references updating automatically.
• Write out of order. Sections carry status — outline, draft, revised, done — so a half-finished manuscript is legible at a glance instead of being a wall of undifferentiated text.
• Fold to any depth. Read your 60,000-word manuscript as a one-page outline, then descend only where you need to.
• Cross-references that survive. A reference points at a section, not a page number or a heading string, so it does not break when you rewrite the heading.

Deliberately not a Notion competitor

Quill has no databases, no wikis, no team workspaces, no comments. It is a single-player tool for one long document at a time.

Every one of those omissions is load-bearing. Adding team features means adding presence, permissions and notification design, and the result would be a worse writing environment.

Export

Markdown, LaTeX, DOCX and EPUB. Your manuscript is a folder of plain files on your disk; Quill is a way of looking at them, not a place they live.