On your very first launch, Tsukue asks you to choose a language: English or Deutsch. This choice affects both the interface language and the analysis engine — readability formulas, style rules, scenario names, feedback strings. You can change it later in Settings, but it is best to pick the language of the manuscript you are about to write and leave it.
If you choose English, Tsukue then asks whether you want American or British spelling conventions.
That is the entire first-launch flow. Tsukue does not request any system permissions, does not check for updates over the network, and does not reach out to anywhere. It opens to a default book containing a default folder and a default stack, and you can start writing immediately.
Tsukue organizes your writing into three nested levels:
Don't just stare at the blank page. Follow these steps and you will understand the core concepts before your tea is cold.
Step 1: Write. You are on the Main Desk with an empty stack. Write a short paragraph — two or three sentences, anything that comes to mind. The paper is finite, like a real sheet in a typewriter; when you fill it you will need to finalize.
Step 2: Finalize. Press Shift+Enter. The page slides onto the stack to your left and a fresh sheet rolls into place. This is how progress works on the Main Desk: written → finalized → next page.
Step 3: Add another stack. Open the Binder (folder icon in the toolbar). You will see your first stack in the list. Right-click and create a new stack. Write something there too. Repeat once more so you have three stacks.
Step 4: Give each stack a role. Still in the Binder, right-click a stack and choose Change Category. Try Chapter, Scene, and one without a category. Categories control how each stack is rendered when you compile your book.
Step 5: Visit the Editor Desk. Press Cmd+Ctrl+→ to slide right. Click the Analyse button. Even with a few sentences, Tsukue produces readability scores, a heatmap, a style profile, and a Lektor report. Click through the tabs to see what is on offer.
Step 6: Look around. Cmd+Ctrl+← to the Pinboard, an idea canvas. Cmd+Ctrl+↑ to the Timeline, where you arrange scenes in chronological order and where your book's lexicon and names live. Cmd+Ctrl+↓ back to the Main Desk.
That is it. You now know stacks, categories, the Binder, the Editor Desk, the Pinboard, and the Timeline. Everything else in this manual builds on these basics.
macOS 15.6 or later. Apple Silicon recommended — Tsukue runs on Intel Macs supported by recent macOS versions, but the desk-sliding animations, Exposé transitions, and page-finalize effects are designed for Apple Silicon performance. Intel users should turn on the Reduced Visual Effects setting (Settings, near the bottom) for a smoother experience.
iPadOS 26 or later. Tsukue on iPad has full feature parity with the Mac version, with one exception: DOCX export is macOS-only (an AppKit system API limitation). On iPad you can compile to PDF and Markdown.
Tsukue on iPhone is a companion device — for capture, light editing, and reading on the go. The Mac and iPad versions are where the full workspace lives.
macOS 26 or iPadOS 26 on a device that supports Apple Intelligence, with Apple Intelligence enabled in System Settings. Without it, Tsukue's deterministic engines (OpenThesaurus, WordNet, the rule-based Namefinder, the Lektor, the Profile, every chart and metric) provide complete primary analysis. Apple Intelligence supplements where dictionaries fall short and offers entity-clustering hints — see Apple Intelligence.
Mac App Store. One purchase covers Tsukue on Mac, iPad, and iPhone via Apple's universal-purchase model.
Tsukue's workspace is a spatial arrangement of four desks. Think of them as physical desks in a room — you slide your chair between them.
| Position | Desk | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Centre | Main Desk | Writing — your primary workspace |
| Right | Editor Desk | Manuscript analysis and revision |
| Left | Pinboard | Free-form idea board |
| Top | Timeline | Story chronology, plus the Lexicon and Names sidebar |
| Below | In-Tray | iCloud sync hub — visible only when sync is enabled |
Three ways to move between desks:
Within a session, the desks remember their state. Slide away from the Editor Desk with a particular stack loaded, scrolled to paragraph twelve, with the Profile tab open and a specific suggestion selected — slide back, everything is exactly as you left it. This is what "persistently rendered" means in practice.
When you quit Tsukue, view state resets. Your work is saved (every keystroke, within half a second), but the next launch starts you fresh on each desk. Per-book desk state is not preserved either — the workspace remembers what you were doing in this session, not which view you preferred for which book.
No desk is ever disabled. If a desk has nothing to show — Timeline before any scenes are added, Editor Desk before any analysis has run — it renders an empty state with a hint about what to do, rather than greying out the navigation.
The Main Desk is where you write. It shows a sheet of virtual paper on a desk surface, with a pile of finalized pages to the left.
A stack is a sequence of finalized pages plus the current draft page you are typing on.
The action bar includes a Trash button that deletes the current draft page only. The use case is clear: you wrote a page, you hate it, you throw it out before it pollutes the stack. Finalized pages are not affected.
Trash has its own Exposé — a gallery of discarded drafts where you can restore something you've rethought. The trash is per book and capped at 20 pages; when full, the trash button stops working until you manually delete something from it. This is a deliberate friction. Trash is for recent regret, not archival storage. If something matters, finalize it; if it really matters, take a snapshot.
Trash does not sync between devices.
Press Shift+Cmd+F or click Focus Mode. The window goes near-black and a single sheet of paper floats in the centre, glowing softly. The toolbar, action bar, side stack, and everything else disappears.
The only visible controls in Focus Mode are a close button and the Exposé icon. To finalize: Shift+Enter, with a bright flash. To exit: click the close button or the dark border.
Focus Mode is purely visual. Sound, auto-save, and finalize all behave identically — Tsukue does not pause or change anything based on focus state.
Top right of the Main Desk:
Every keystroke produces a typewriter sound. The Typewriter set is self-recorded from an actual typewriter: letter keys play a single sound that is slightly pitch-varied between presses, so the rhythm of typing never sounds mechanically identical. The spacebar has its own thump. Shift+Enter — the finalize gesture — gets a spatial sound that matches the page-slide animation. The Apple System set (Pop, Tink, Glass, Bottle, Funk) is the alternative for users who want a sound but not the typewriter aesthetic. Mute is one keystroke away: Shift+Cmd+M.
Open the Binder with the folder icon in the Main Desk toolbar. It is a full-screen overlay with two columns.
Right-click a stack for the context menu: rename, delete, create child stack, move to another folder, change category, edit synopsis, toggle "Include in Manuscript," duplicate, plus scene metadata (below).
Scene metadata is also available from the Editor Desk left sidebar and anywhere else stacks appear in the app:
Every stack can be assigned a category via right-click → Change Category. Categories appear as coloured badges in the Binder and control how a stack is formatted when you compile your manuscript:
| Category | Effect when compiled |
|---|---|
| Chapter | Gets a chapter heading, numbered automatically if chapter numbering is enabled |
| Scene | Separated by the scene separator string (default "* * *"), no heading |
| Front Matter | Appears at the top with a title heading, followed by a divider |
| Back Matter | Gets an "Appendix" heading |
| Epigraph | Rendered as an italic block quote |
| No category | Uses the stack title as a heading, depth-based |
Tsukue protects your work in three layers. The first two are automatic; only the third is something you actively manage.
Every keystroke is saved to disk within half a second. There is no Save button because there is no need for one. If your machine crashes mid-sentence, you lose at most the last fraction of a second of typing.
A background process takes a recovery snapshot of each stack roughly every hour, but only if the stack has actually changed since the last one (Tsukue compares content hashes — there is no point snapshotting identical text). Recovery snapshots are kept for 24 hours and then pruned automatically.
Recovery snapshots are not user-facing rollback targets. They exist to protect you against data loss at the storage layer. If something goes wrong with the underlying database — a corrupted file, an interrupted write — Tsukue can heal itself transparently from the most recent recovery snapshot. You don't see them in the Snapshot Drawer, you can't restore from them manually, and they don't sync between devices.
Manual snapshots are the ones you take deliberately, with a name and a moment behind them. These are what you see in the Snapshot Drawer, what you can roll back to, and what travels with your book through the In-Tray.
Right-click any stack in the left sidebar of the Editor Desk's Text tab and choose the snapshot option. A panel slides in from the right showing all manual snapshots for that stack. There is no global "all snapshots in this book" view — snapshots are strictly per-stack, because per-book history would be a noisy aggregate that hides what you actually want.
Tsukue takes an automatic safety snapshot before two specific actions: when you accept an incoming change in the In-Tray, and (in the current implementation) before the first click-to-replace synonym substitution or click-to-delete word action on a stack. These appear in the Snapshot Drawer like any manual snapshot.
If you already have a manuscript in another tool — a Word document, a Markdown file, a plain text file from years ago — Tsukue can import it as a new book with structure detected automatically. Open the importer with Shift+Cmd+I.
Supported input formats: .txt, .rtf, .md. The importer handles a wide range of real-world manuscript quirks: hard-wrapped lines from old word processors, sentence-per-line poetry-formatted prose, ALL CAPS chapter titles, both German and English chapter conventions (Kapitel, Chapter, Teil, Part, Buch, Book, Akt, Act, Stave, Canto, Letter…), eight different scene-break glyph styles (* * *, ***, ---, ~ ~ ~, ===, ___, # ## ###, ~~~), smart quotes, non-breaking spaces hidden in pasted text, hyphenated line breaks, table-of-contents pages at the front of a manuscript (auto-stripped), and verse formatting (preserved unmodified).
Once Tsukue has analysed the file, the import view shows:
You cannot edit the text content in the import view — this is structural review only. Fix typos and prose problems after import, on the Editor Desk.
If the manuscript is too unusual for structure detection, or you simply want all the text in one place, use the Import as Single Stack button. Tsukue creates one book containing one folder containing one stack with the entire text inside.
An import always creates a new book — your existing books are never touched. Tsukue offers three folder strategies:
| Strategy | Result |
|---|---|
| Single Folder | One folder containing one stack per detected node |
| Folder per Top-Level | Each top-level node becomes a folder; its children become stacks inside |
| Folder per Part | Level-1 nodes become folders, everything else a stack inside the current folder; orphans land in a "General" folder |
Detected headings become stack and folder titles automatically. Scene-break markers (* * *, ---, etc.) become "Scene 1," "Scene 2," and the marker itself is stripped from the start of the stack content. Stacks are auto-paginated so the Main Desk shows proper paper pages from the moment you arrive.
Open the Compile panel via the export icon in the Main Desk toolbar. Tsukue assembles your entire book into a single document, walking the folder and stack tree in sort order.
By default every stack is included. To exclude a stack — research notes, character sketches, draft fragments you don't want in the final output — right-click it and choose Exclude from Manuscript. You can do this in several places:
Excluded stacks appear dimmed with an eye-slash icon. They are skipped during compilation and excluded from book-level analysis. To re-include, right-click again and choose Include in Manuscript.
| Feature | DOCX | Markdown | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Same content, same order | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Typography (Palatino, point sizes) | Yes | Yes | No (reader's font) |
| Page breaks between chapters | Yes | Yes | No (just --- or ##) |
| Centered scene separator | Yes | Yes | The literal string |
| Italic indented motto | Yes | Yes | Blockquote |
| First-line body indent | Yes | Yes | No |
| Available on iPad | Yes | No | Yes |
Tsukue takes a compile snapshot every time you compile — a record of each stack's state at that moment. The next compile diffs the current state against the previous snapshot, producing a per-chapter revision badge:
| Badge | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Unchanged | Essentially identical to the last compile |
| Lightly revised | Minor edits, a few word changes |
| Revised | Substantial rewriting |
| Heavily revised | Most of the chapter rewritten |
| New | Did not exist (or was excluded) at the last compile |
| Removed | Existed at the last compile but is now gone or excluded |
Classification combines three signals — word-count delta, line-level diff, and paragraph-structural diff — so a stack that looks similar by word count but has been thoroughly rewritten will still register as heavily revised.
Each compile also lets you write per-chapter writer notes, stored against that compile record. The next compile shows you what you told yourself last time. This gives you a built-in changelog for your revisions: at compile #4 you can hand a beta reader not just the manuscript but a summary saying "Chapter 7 heavily revised, Chapter 12 lightly revised, here are my notes on what I changed and why."
The revision summary lives in the Compile panel and in the per-compile records — it is not embedded in the exported manuscript. You can export it separately if you want to share it.
Export just the active stack as Markdown, plain text, Word, or PDF. Stack Export is raw text only — it does not apply chapter headings, scene separators, or compile-style typography. Use it for excerpts, quick shares, or when you need just the words. For compile-quality output of a single stack, compile a single-stack book instead.
Open with Shift+Cmd+Option+B. Backups are independent of iCloud sync — they live wherever you put them, and you decide when to take them and when to restore.
A Tsukue backup contains everything you've authored or decided. Things that are throwaway, regenerable, device-specific, or AI-generated do not travel.
| Included | Excluded |
|---|---|
| Books, folders, stacks, finalized text, draft pages | Recovery snapshots (system safety net, regenerable) |
| Stack hierarchy and metadata (synopsis, category, location, characters in scene, narrator, include/exclude state) | Sync bridge state (device-specific, would conflict on restore) |
| Manual snapshots | Settings (theme, font, sound, paper colour, desk colour) |
| Annotations | Today's Writer Journal stats |
| Timeline entries, threads, links | Analysis caches (regenerable from text) |
| Accepted names, name clusters, the Book Lexicon | AI-generated character presence classifications (regenerable) |
| Folder POV assignments | In-Tray fragments (transient sync artifacts) |
| Compile records and writer notes |
Restore a backup on any Mac and you get back your work and your decisions exactly. Run analysis again and the caches rebuild themselves.
The backup file is a JSON archive. You can optionally encrypt it with a passphrase before exporting.
Unencrypted backups are signed with a device-local key from the Keychain and can be verified only on the device that created them. Encrypted backups are signed with a passphrase-derived key and are fully portable across devices — anyone with the passphrase can verify and restore them.
Importing a backup adds its contents to your existing data; it never overwrites or deletes anything. If a book in the backup already exists on the device, you end up with both — the original and a copy with a "(Restore [date])" suffix in its title. There is no "replace all" import. To start clean before importing, use Delete All Data first.
The Preview pane shows metadata about the backup before you commit to restoring it.
The intended way to move your work between Macs is iCloud sync via the In-Tray — open the app on the new Mac and the books arrive automatically. Backup and Restore is the manual fallback for users who don't use iCloud, for archival purposes, or for recovering from a problem. The two systems are independent: a restored backup gets fresh internal IDs that won't conflict with anything sync brings in.
The Backup panel includes a Delete All Data action behind a confirmation. This wipes every book, snapshot, annotation, and curated list from this device. It is rarely the right action — to remove a single book, use the Book Library (right-click a book → Delete). Delete All Data is for situations like preparing to hand the device to someone else, or starting completely over after a corrupted state. There is no undo.
The Editor Desk sits to the right of the Main Desk (Cmd+Ctrl+→). Everything analytical happens here. The Main Desk is for writing; the Editor Desk is for reading what you wrote with fresh eyes.
The left sidebar shows your manuscript as a tree: book at the top, folders below, stacks indented underneath. Click any level to set the analysis scope:
| Click on… | Scope | Available tabs |
|---|---|---|
| A stack | Single stack | Text, Heatmap, Readability, Lektor, Profile |
| A folder | Entire folder | Readability, Lektor, Profile |
| The book | Whole book | Readability, Lektor, Profile, Characters |
The Text tab is where most actual editing work happens. It shows your manuscript text in the centre column, with a left sidebar (the manuscript tree) and a right sidebar that toggles between Suggestions and Annotations.
The Suggestions sidebar lists every detected style issue, grouped into categories. Each category is a filter chip. By default, no chips are active — your text is clean of highlights when you arrive.
When a chip is active, only that category's highlights appear in the text. Click a highlight to open its detail panel in the right sidebar.
| Category | What it surfaces |
|---|---|
| Long sentences | Sentences exceeding the engine's word threshold |
| Filler words | Empty phrases that weaken prose ("actually," "just," "somehow") |
| Weak intensifiers | Hedge words like "perhaps," "rather," "quite" |
| Modal verb density | Excessive "could," "would," "should" |
| Subjunctive overuse | (German) Excessive subjunctive II constructions |
| Adverb clusters | Dense adverb usage in close proximity |
| Nominal style | Overuse of noun-heavy constructions (abstract nominalisations) |
| Passive voice | Passive constructions that could be active |
| Phrase repetition | Repeated multi-word phrases |
| Word repetition | Same word used too close together |
| Sentence-start monotony | Sentences beginning the same way repeatedly |
| Clause nesting | Deeply nested subordinate clauses |
| Spelling | Words flagged by the system spell checker |
| Comma placement | Places where a comma is missing or superfluous |
Next to the Analyse button, a small slider icon opens the Analysis Steps panel. From here you can enable or disable each detection category individually. Disabled categories are skipped during analysis entirely — they are not just hidden chips, they are not computed at all.
Each category in the panel carries a coloured dot indicating its computational cost: green is cheap, yellow is moderate, red is heavy. A user with a long book and limited patience can disable the red and yellow categories to keep analysis snappy; a user who wants the full read enables everything.
When you act on a flag — accept a synonym, rewrite the sentence, or simply edit the text — the highlight normally clears itself. If a highlight lingers after you have addressed it, click Re-Analyse.
If you want to keep a flagged item but tell Tsukue to stop pestering you about it, the suggestion's detail panel has an Ignore button. Ignored items don't disappear; they remain visible in the text but greyed out, so you can always see what you ignored and reverse the decision later. Tsukue does not hide your decisions from you.
Spelling flags have a special quick action: Add to Lexicon. The Book Lexicon is a per-book dictionary of words Tsukue should treat as legitimate — coined names, technical terms, invented language, anything you don't want flagged as a typo. Words in the Lexicon are also excluded from LDI vocabulary calculations, so a fantasy novel doesn't score artificially high on lexical density just because of invented place names.
The Lexicon lives in the right sidebar of the Timeline desk, alongside the accepted Names list. From there you can review and remove entries.
Annotations are user-authored notes anchored to text passages: Comment, Rewrite Later, Fact Check, Continuity, Cut, or Custom. Right-click selected text in the Text tab to add one. Stacks that contain annotations show a small pill in the manuscript tree, so you can scan the sidebar and see at a glance which stacks have notes waiting.
The right sidebar toggles between Suggestions and Annotations because their highlights would clash if both were shown at once. There is no book-wide annotation index — annotations are local to the stack they belong to, where their context is.
Annotations sync between your devices via the In-Tray. They are content, not view state.
A paragraph-by-paragraph colour map of your text. Two modes via tabs at the top: Standard (TDI) for readability and Literary (LDI) for vocabulary density.
The sidebar lists every paragraph in document order with its score. Click an entry to jump to that passage. There is no sort or filter — Tsukue won't surface "the worst paragraph" because it doesn't believe there is one.
A Profile picker switches between Standard (Tsukue Index, TDI) and Literary (LD Index, LDI). Each shows:
Named bands cover the 0–100 range in evocative terms ("Bureaucracy Bunker" for impenetrable bureaucratese, "Pure Zen" for the lightest possible prose). The bands are not grades — they describe two very different kinds of writing, both of which can be exactly right or exactly wrong depending on what you are writing.
The Lektor classifies your text into one of seven scenarios based on TDI and LDI together, then produces a structured feedback report. Choose one of three voices: Mentor (encouraging), Editor (professional), Cynic (sharp).
| Scenario | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Sweet Spot | Balanced craft and accessibility |
| Literary & Accessible | Rich vocabulary, easy to read — the ideal |
| Hermetic | Rich vocabulary, hard to read |
| Boulevard | Easy to read, vocabulary is thin |
| Workbench | Middle ground — most texts land here |
| Blocked | Low on both axes — may indicate writer's block |
| Monotony | Sentence lengths too uniform regardless of vocabulary |
Every Lektor report uses the same scaffold, regardless of voice:
Switching voices is free. The underlying analysis is computed once and cached; only the commentary text re-renders. Try all three on the same text to hear the same diagnosis spoken three different ways.
A detailed portrait of your writing style. At stack scope:
At folder and book scope, Profile expands to include per-chapter views: Chapter Rhythm, Lexical Depth per Chapter, Dialogue Ratio per Chapter, Paragraph Length per Chapter, Pacing per Chapter, and the Chapter Profile Map. At book scope you also get Structural Balance, Style Consistency, Vocabulary Arc, and Category Composition.
Available when analysing the whole book, this tab requires accepted entities from the Namefinder or names you have added directly. A toggle switches between Scene and Chapter resolution. Sections include:
The Characters tab is the closest Tsukue gets to making structural judgements, and they are earned: red cells in the matrix flag never-met pairs, severity numbers flag long absences, warning text flags first-appearance clusters. These are observations a careful re-reader would make.
Open from the Binder. The Namefinder scans your entire manuscript for character names, place names, and other proper nouns — locally, on-device.
On devices with Apple Intelligence, the Namefinder gains an AI Refine button. The on-device language model:
AI-refined entities get small sparkle indicators:
You always have the final say — the AI suggests, you accept or reject. Apple Intelligence never writes names into your accepted list on its own.
The Character Sheet groups name variants belonging to the same character (e.g. "Anna," "Anna Müller," "Frau Müller") into clusters.
Every feature in Tsukue works from day one. If you never accept any names:
Nothing blocks you. Add names when you need them, in whichever surface you are already working in.
POV tagging in Tsukue exists to solve one specific analytical problem.
For third-person narratives, POV is largely optional — the protagonist's name appears regularly anyway, and the Characters tab will count them correctly without help.
Right-click a folder in the Binder and choose Set POV Character. A submenu lists all accepted characters from the Namefinder. The chosen character appears as a purple indicator on the folder row. Every stack inside that folder inherits this POV.
Right-click a stack and choose Set Scene POV to override the folder's POV for that specific scene. Useful for chapters that switch perspective mid-way — for example, the embedded narrative where Frankenstein's monster speaks for himself.
Stack POV wins over Folder POV. If a stack has no POV set, it inherits from its folder. If neither is set, the stack has no POV — and that is fine for third-person narratives where it doesn't matter.
Navigate left from the Main Desk (Cmd+Ctrl+←). The Pinboard is a free-form thinking space: a canvas for the active book.
The toolbar at the top of the canvas lets you create three kinds of items:
The Connect button enables connection mode. Click two cards to draw a line between them. Connections are physical objects on the canvas — they follow cards when you drag them, and they can be selected and deleted.
Each book can have multiple boards. Switch between them from the toolbar menu. Create a new board with the + button; rename via the toolbar context menu.
Boards are isolated islands. There is no copy-paste between them. If you want something on another board, you recreate it. This reinforces the idea that each board is its own focused thinking space, not a shared whiteboard.
Each board holds 25 items maximum, where items include cards of any type, images, and name cards equally. When you reach the cap, item creation is blocked until you remove something.
Navigate up from the Main Desk (Cmd+Ctrl+↑). The Timeline desk holds your book's reference data: a chronology canvas in the centre, and Lexicon and Names panels in the right sidebar.
Enable Story Map via the map button in the toolbar. Instead of a single spine, events are arranged into location lanes — horizontal bands across the canvas, one per location, colour-coded. Concurrent events in the same location stack vertically within their lane rather than overlapping.
Toggle in the toolbar:
Two views you switch between in the right sidebar of the Timeline desk:
Lists all accepted entities from the Namefinder, plus any names you've added through the Pinboard's Name cards or directly here. Click a name to highlight every timeline card and scene that references that character. Click multiple names to see overlap.
The Book Lexicon — invented words, coined names, technical terms, anything you don't want flagged as a typo. Lexicon entries are populated primarily by the Add to Lexicon action on Spelling flags in the Editor Desk. From the Timeline sidebar you can review the Lexicon and remove entries.
Like names, lexicon entries are interactive: click a coined word to see every scene where it appears on the canvas.
Click the chart icon in the Main Desk toolbar to open the Writer Journal as a full-screen overlay. The desk stays in the background; click outside or press Escape to dismiss.
Today's writing activity, reset at midnight (device-local time):
All stats are global across your books, not per-book. Tsukue is recording your writing day, not your output per project.
A month-view calendar where days with meaningful writing are marked with a red X. The threshold is 20 words — a day below that stays blank. Days that earn their mark stay marked permanently; the calendar tracks meaningful writing, not app launches.
Navigate between months with arrow buttons. Click "Today" to jump back.
Tsukue can sync your books between your Mac, iPad, and iPhone via iCloud. The feature is called the In-Tray, and it is opt-in — Tsukue does not touch iCloud unless you turn it on.
When the In-Tray is enabled, Tsukue does not sync your working database directly. A separate bridge database sits alongside it, and the bridge is what travels through iCloud. This protects the data you are actively writing into from any sync hiccup.
Sync is split into two paths:
The same threshold applies in both directions. If you delete half a chapter on your Mac, your iPad will surface that change in the In-Tray for you to confirm before the deletion lands.
When the In-Tray is enabled, it lives directly below the Main Desk in the workspace, reachable by sliding down. When there are pending changes to review, the panel lists each affected stack.
Open one and you get a side-by-side diff view: green for additions, red for deletions. From there you can:
Open Settings (gear icon in the Main Desk toolbar), scroll to the bottom, and toggle the In-Tray on. There is no per-book selection — once enabled, all your books sync. This keeps the system simple and the bridge cheap (most of what travels is text, which compresses well).
| Syncs | Stays local |
|---|---|
| Books, folders, stacks, finalized text, draft pages | The trash (per book, capped at 20 pages) |
| Manual snapshots | Recovery snapshots (background safety copies) |
| Annotations | Today's Writer Journal stats |
| Scene metadata: location, characters in scene, narrator, place in timeline | Settings (theme, font, sound, paper colour, desk colour) |
| Accepted names, name clusters, the Book Lexicon | Sync bridge state itself (device-specific) |
| Timeline entries, threads, and links | Analysis caches (regenerable from text) |
| Compile records and writer notes |
Deleting an entire book is not held for review. If you delete a book on your Mac with the In-Tray enabled, the deletion propagates to your other devices immediately, with no acknowledgement step. The In-Tray reviews edits within stacks; it does not mediate whole-book lifecycle decisions, because the alternative — phantom books living on one device after deletion on another — has no clean recovery path.
Open with the gear icon in the Main Desk toolbar. Settings is one scrollable pane; the items below appear in roughly the order you'll find them.
English or Deutsch. Affects UI and all analysis engines (readability formulas, style rules, scenario names, feedback strings). When English is selected, choose between American and British.
Dark or Light. Light mode offers five theme bundles — Standard, Quiet Alloy, Rose Haze, Citron Linen, Slate Ink — coordinated palettes named after Apple's macOS-Neo aesthetic vocabulary. A bundle sets the desk colour scheme as a package, but Paper Color (below) remains independently adjustable.
Dark mode has no bundles — just the desk colour, plus the universal paper, font, and sound choices.
A curated selection of typewriter and serif fonts. A live preview shows each one. The exact list is visible in-app and may evolve.
Six options: Classic, White, Cream, Antique, Rose, Light Blue. Adjustable independently of the theme bundle.
Six options per theme. Dark: Midnight, Anthracite, Dark Brown, Forest, Navy, Black. Light: Ivory, Pearl Grey, Sand, Sage, Mist Blue, Porcelain.
A toggle to scale down visual richness — sliding desk animations, page-finalize flash, Exposé transitions, gradients. Aimed at Intel Macs that still get current macOS versions but can't render the full effects without performance loss. Apple Silicon Macs don't need this.
The final item in Settings: a toggle to enable iCloud sync. See The In-Tray for the full sync model.
Tsukue uses a window-per-book model on the Mac, similar to Xcode. Each window shows one book with its full desk workspace (Main Desk, Editor Desk, Pinboard, Timeline, plus In-Tray when sync is on). Multiple books can be open side by side. Switching books means switching windows.
File > New Book (Shift+Cmd+N). Tsukue creates a new book with a default folder and stack, and opens it in a new window so you can start writing immediately.
Open via File > Open Book (Shift+Cmd+O). Books appear as cards in a grid, each showing title, language (DE/EN), folder and stack count, word count, and last-modified date.
From the Book Library you can:
On launch, the last-active book opens automatically.
Right-click → Delete prompts a confirmation: "Delete book 'X'? This will permanently delete all folders, stacks, and content in this book." There is no trash, no undo, no archive.
If the In-Tray is enabled, the deletion propagates to your other devices immediately, with no acknowledgement step. The In-Tray mediates edits within stacks; whole-book deletions go through directly because holding them back would leave devices in inconsistent states forever.
If you are on a device without Apple Intelligence, you get the same primary analysis everyone else gets. You just don't get the supplements.
macOS 26 or iPadOS 26 on a device that supports Apple Intelligence, with Apple Intelligence enabled in System Settings. When the on-device model is not available, Tsukue's AI-enhanced features gracefully degrade — the app remains fully functional without them.
| Feature | Where | What the AI does |
|---|---|---|
| Synonym Suggestions | Editor Desk → Text → suggestion detail | Adds context-aware synonyms when the dictionary returns fewer than three results |
| Entity Refinement | Namefinder | Suggests entity kinds (Character / Place / Other), validates borderline candidates |
| Alias Clustering | Character Sheet | Suggests which name variants belong to the same character |
| True Presence | Editor Desk → Characters tab (book scope) | Classifies whether characters are physically present or merely mentioned, as a separate analytical view |
When you click a style suggestion (e.g. a word repetition) in the Editor Desk, the detail panel shows synonym suggestions:
Without Apple Intelligence, both languages use their dictionary alone. The dictionaries are the primary source either way; Apple Intelligence fills gaps when they appear.
On the Editor Desk's Characters tab (book scope), AI Refine classifies each character's presence per scene as physically present or merely mentioned. After running it, a toggle appears between All Mentions and True Presence mode. The frequency curve, co-presence matrix, and other analyses then reflect either every name occurrence or actual presence — revealing patterns like "Anna is discussed constantly but rarely appears in person."
Crucially: True Presence is a separate analytical view, not a write-back. Your manually-tagged Characters in Scene picker (in the Binder) remains the canonical source of truth. AI classifications never modify it.
All Apple Intelligence features work on both Mac and iPad with Apple Intelligence enabled. Some unrelated subsystems differ between platforms — grammar checking is slightly richer on macOS due to a more capable system API, and AI-powered punctuation falls back to a rule-based engine on iPad — but the AI-enhanced features in this chapter behave the same on both.
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| Cmd+Ctrl+← | Go to Pinboard (left) |
| Cmd+Ctrl+→ | Go to Editor Desk (right) |
| Cmd+Ctrl+↑ | Go to Timeline (top) |
| Cmd+Ctrl+↓ | Go to Main Desk (centre) |
| Cmd+Ctrl+E | Toggle Desk Exposé |
| Shift+Cmd+F | Toggle Focus Mode |
| Shift+Cmd+N | New Book |
| Shift+Cmd+O | Open Book Library |
| Shift+Cmd+I | Import Manuscript |
| Shift+Cmd+Option+B | Backup & Restore |
| Shift+Cmd+M | Toggle Mute |
| Cmd++ | Scale desk up |
| Cmd+- | Scale desk down |
| Cmd+0 | Reset desk scale to 100% |
| Shift+Enter | Finalize current page |
A short list of deliberate boundaries. Each is a design choice, not a missing feature.
No AI-generated text. The Lektor produces analysis and feedback in three voices, but every word in your manuscript is yours. Apple Intelligence supplements synonyms and clusters entities; it never composes sentences.
It surfaces patterns — long sentences, passive voice, repetitions, nesting depth — and lets you decide what to do with them. It uses the system spell checker for typos and OpenThesaurus / WordNet for synonyms. It does not auto-correct, does not enforce style guides, does not impose rules.
All analysis runs on your device. Apple Intelligence runs on-device. The In-Tray uses iCloud (CloudKit) only if you enable it, only for syncing your books between your own devices, and even then through a bridge architecture that protects your working data. Nothing is ever sent to a server we operate. No analytics. No telemetry.
It is a writer's tool, not a team tool. There are no shared cursors, no comment-on-someone-else's-draft, no track-changes-across-multiple-authors. Annotations are yours; they don't sync to other accounts because there are no other accounts.
Compile produces PDF, DOCX, and Markdown files for you to do with as you wish. There is no built-in submission, no formatting templates for specific publishers, no e-book export.
Categories control compile formatting. The Pinboard captures ideas. The Timeline maps chronology. There are no tasks, no deadlines, no goals, no productivity nudges. The Writer Journal records what happened, not what should happen.
One purchase, no monthly fee, no feature paywall, no upsells.
Tsukue stores your books, snapshots, annotations, names, lexicon, timeline data, and settings inside its sandboxed App Store container on your device — ~/Library/Containers/de.tsukue.…/ on Mac, the equivalent sandboxed location on iPad. There is no alternative storage path. Tsukue does not write to iCloud Drive folders, your Documents folder, or anywhere else you didn't ask it to.
Nothing, by default. Tsukue does not phone home, does not send analytics, does not report crashes to a server, does not check for updates over the network. The app simply runs.
If you opt in to iCloud sync via the In-Tray (Settings, near the bottom), your books travel between your own devices through Apple's CloudKit infrastructure. The data is in your iCloud account, encrypted in transit, and synced through a bridge architecture that protects your working database from sync conflicts. Apple sees the encrypted blobs; nobody else does.
If you export a Backup, the resulting file goes wherever you put it. If you encrypt it, the passphrase is yours alone — Tsukue does not store it and cannot recover it.
Apple Intelligence runs entirely on-device when you have it enabled. The on-device language model never sends your text to the cloud.
Tsukue is a one-time purchase via the Mac App Store. The current price is shown on the App Store listing and on tsukue.de.
Apple's universal-purchase model means one purchase covers Tsukue on Mac, iPad, and iPhone — buy it once on any of your Apple ID's devices, install it on the others at no additional cost.
There is no subscription, no monthly fee, no feature paywall, no upsell. Updates are free. Tsukue is built first and foremost for the developer's own use; the goal is a tool that lasts, not a billing relationship.
Questions, bug reports, feedback, feature requests — all go to info@tsukue.de.
Tsukue is built and supported by one person, so replies may take a day or two. Please include your Tsukue version (visible in the App Store, or in the app's about information) and a brief description of what you were doing when something went wrong. If a screenshot or a short export of the relevant book helps explain the issue, attach it — your data isn't sent anywhere automatically, so you decide what to share.
Canonical term pairs in English and German. Where a term has a specific Tsukue meaning, the meaning is given.
| English | German | Meaning in Tsukue |
|---|---|---|
| Book | Buch | Top-level container; one book per window on the Mac. |
| Folder | Ordner | A group of stacks within a book. |
| Stack | Stapel | A single writing unit — typically one scene of one to several pages. Stacks hold your text. Nestable up to three levels deep. |
| Page | Seite | A finite virtual sheet of paper. When full, you must finalize before continuing. |
| Finalize | Finalisieren | The action that promotes the current draft page onto the stack. Shift+Enter or the Finalize button. |
| Desk | Tisch / Schreibtisch | One of four spatial workspaces (Main, Editor, Pinboard, Timeline). Persistently rendered; you slide between them. |
| Main Desk | Hauptschreibtisch | The centre desk. Writing only. Words and paper. |
| Editor Desk | Editor | Right of Main. All analysis and revision work. |
| Pinboard | Pinnwand | Left of Main. Free-form idea canvas with cards, images, name cards, and connections. |
| Timeline | Zeitstrahl | Above Main. Chronology canvas, plus the Lexicon and Names sidebar. |
| In-Tray | In-Tray | Below Main when sync is enabled. iCloud sync hub for hand-off between devices. |
| Scope | Bereich | The unit of analysis on the Editor Desk: stack, folder, or book. |
| Lektor | Lektor | The structured feedback engine. Seven scenarios, three voices, one self-explaining report format. |
| Lexicon (Book Lexicon) | Lexikon (Buchlexikon) | Per-book dictionary of accepted invented words. Excluded from spell-check flags and from LDI calculation. |
| Snapshot (manual) | Snapshot (manuell) | A user-created point-in-time copy of a stack. Persists until deleted; syncs via the In-Tray. |
| Recovery snapshot | Wiederherstellungs-Snapshot | Background safety copy taken hourly per changed stack, kept for 24 hours. Not user-facing. |
| Compile | Kompilieren | Assembling your book into PDF, DOCX, or Markdown for export. |
| Annotation | Annotation | A user-authored note anchored to a text passage. Local to its stack; syncs via the In-Tray. |
| Chip (filter chip) | Chip (Filter-Chip) | A toggle for one detection category in the Editor Desk Suggestions sidebar. None active by default. |
| TDI (Tsukue Index) | TDI (Tsukue-Index) | Readability score, 0–100, with a named band. Lens, not verdict. |
| LDI (LD Index) | LDI (LD-Index) | Lexical density / vocabulary depth score, 0–100, with a named band. |
| Chekhov Check | Tschechow-Check | Editor Desk Characters analysis: characters mentioned only briefly. Distinguishes Mentioned Once from One Scene, Multiple Mentions. |
| Directness | Direktheit | Profile radar axis: few nominalisations, few subjunctives — clear active style. Outer = stronger, not better. |
| Co-Presence | Ko-Präsenz | Co-presence matrix on the Characters tab. |
| Run-On | Endlossatz | Run-on rhythm pattern: 3+ consecutive sentences over 35 words. |
| Namefinder | Namenssuche | The Namefinder workflow. Reached from the Binder. |
| Character Sheet | Figurenbogen | Groups name variants belonging to the same character. |
| Hand-off | Übergabe | The In-Tray's design model: one device at a time, not concurrent editing. |
| Analysis Steps | Analyseschritte | The Editor Desk panel for enabling/disabling individual detection categories before analysis runs. |
| True Presence | Echte Anwesenheit | An Apple Intelligence–powered analytical view in the Editor Desk Characters tab. Distinguishes physical presence from mere mention. |