Quire
I started writing in Scrivener, like most people with a long project to wrangle. Then I moved into Obsidian and didn’t want to leave it for the writing. Longform made that possible: scenes as plain files, an index that orders them, compile to assemble the result. I wrote real words on it.
In 2023 I asked it for one thing: let a scene nest under another, so moving a parent carries its children. The request sat. Two years later a different issue appeared on the same repo. The maintainer was stepping away; he had gone back to Scrivener and no longer used it.
So I built the successor. Quire is long-form writing in Obsidian, written from scratch in Svelte 5. I went after the things that keep writers in Scrivener and make them reluctant to leave: editing many scenes as one continuous document, an outline whose structure moves when you move a scene, compiling the pieces into a clean manuscript, and branching a draft to rework it without risking the original. Those now live in Obsidian, on plain files you own. It is a local-first paid plugin that also offers a converting subscription. It’s the tool I use now.