Your Manuscripts Now Have Version Control — Plus a Layout Overhaul and 30 Editor Fixes

Last week we shipped public sharing, tables, and equations. This week we built something we have wanted since the beginning: a version control system designed for writers, not developers. Plus a layout overhaul, a getting started guide, and about thirty editor fixes that were quietly driving people crazy.

Your Drafts Finally Have a Safety Net

Here is the scenario every writer dreads: you rewrite the opening chapter, and two days later you realize the original was better. In most writing tools, your only option is to undo your way back through every single edit, hoping you do not overshoot. Or maybe you have been saving copies with names like Chapter 1 - v3 FINAL (real final).docx. We have all been there.

Plotiar now has a proper version system. Not a stripped-down autosave, not a list of timestamps you cannot tell apart. A real system with named snapshots, alternate drafts, and side-by-side comparison.

Snapshots are copies of your project you create whenever you want. Finished a chapter? Take a snapshot called "Chapter 7 first draft." About to do a big restructure? Take a snapshot first. Every snapshot captures the full state of your project, and you can restore to any of them instantly.

Drafts are parallel versions of your entire project. Want to try a completely different ending without touching your main manuscript? Create a draft. It is a full copy that lives alongside your main version, and you can switch between them at any time. Rename them, delete the ones that did not work out, keep the ones that did.

Compare lets you put any two versions side by side and see exactly what changed. Pick two snapshots, two drafts, or one of each, and you get a clear diff showing every addition, deletion, and modification across all your content. When you are ready to bring changes back, the merge tool combines them for you.

The snapshot tree gives you a visual map of how your drafts branch off from each other, which snapshot lives where, and what the history of your project actually looks like. It is the kind of view that makes you realize how much work you have done, even on the days when it does not feel like it.

Free accounts get two drafts. Pro accounts get unlimited.

More Room to Write

We removed the top navigation bar. Completely. Your user menu, notifications, and active collaborators now live at the bottom of the sidebar, tucked neatly out of the way. On desktop, this means your writing gets the full height of the screen. Every pixel of vertical space is yours.

On mobile, a slim header with just the essentials takes its place.

We also added a right-side panel that slides open on every page. Content details, metadata, snapshots, notes, and project information all live here now, accessible without leaving what you are working on. Previously, clicking on content details opened a modal dialog that blocked everything underneath. Now it opens in the side panel, so you can reference and edit details while keeping your document visible.

Notes and Tasks, Everywhere

Notes and tasks used to be locked inside individual projects. If you had a quick thought that did not belong to any specific project, or a task that spanned multiple manuscripts, there was nowhere natural to put it.

Both are now available from your main dashboard. Jot down a note without opening a project first. Create a task that lives at the top level. The same goes for the brainstorm chat. Everything that used to require you to navigate into a project first now meets you where you are.

A Proper Welcome

New users used to land on an empty projects page with no clear direction. Now there is a Getting Started checklist that walks you through the first five things worth doing: create a project, write in a document, organize your content, try the brainstorm chat, and import existing work.

Steps complete automatically as you use the app. The progress bar fills up, and once you have done everything, you can dismiss the checklist and it never comes back. It is a small thing, but the difference between "I do not know what to do here" and "I know exactly what to try next" is enormous for a first impression.

First-time users also see a welcome banner and redesigned quick actions that guide them toward creating their first project or exploring templates.

Cards That Make Sense

Content and project cards got a full redesign. Every card now follows the same pattern: a fixed-height layout with an icon, a title, and a hover menu with the actions you actually use. Right-click menus work everywhere. Rename, view details, and delete are always where you expect them.

The content section picked up status, color, and type filters, so if you have fifty documents in a project, you can narrow down to just the ones marked "in progress" or filter by content type. Project sections now have sticky headers and expand/collapse all buttons, which matters a lot once you have more than a handful of projects.

Thirty Fixes You Will Feel

We fixed a lot of editor bugs this week. Individually, none of them are dramatic. Together, they make the writing experience noticeably smoother.

Track changes had several issues where edits would behave unpredictably. Pressing backspace could produce strange results. Hitting Enter in the middle of a tracked change could corrupt the paragraph. Undoing a tracked change did not always remove it. All fixed. Track changes view mode and on/off state also persist properly now, so reopening a document does not reset your preferences.

Spellcheck was not running after a page refresh, and spell markers were not updating after batch operations like find-and-replace. Both fixed. Spellcheck also plays nicely with continuous scroll mode now.

Right-to-left text got a thorough pass. The cursor was staying in a fixed position instead of moving with text. Toggling between RTL and LTR was not updating the document rendering. RTL content was missing from exports. All three are resolved, and exports now properly include blockquotes, callouts, and equations too.

Scrolling — the cursor was sometimes typing off-screen, especially in typewriter scroll mode. Fixed across several edge cases.

The cursor itself had two bugs: it would disappear after typing a space and pausing, and it would jump to the start of the line after changing font size or family. Both gone.

The document changelog was producing a noisy flood of entries for minor edits. We switched to document-state diffing, which batches changes into meaningful entries instead of recording every keystroke.

And toolbar buttons for comments, bookmarks, and links now properly disable when no text is selected, instead of silently doing nothing when you click them.

One More Thing

Flowchart edges can now be reconnected by dragging them to a different node. A missing handler was preventing this from working, and if you use flowcharts heavily, you will notice the difference immediately.

What Is Next

The version system is live, but we are already thinking about what comes next for it: snapshot labels, starred snapshots, and easier ways to reference specific snapshots when collaborating. The layout changes are the foundation for a more flexible workspace, and we have ideas about customizable panel arrangements that we are not quite ready to talk about yet.

Everything in this post is live now. If something feels off, tell us. We read every piece of feedback, and it directly shapes what we build next.