Inkhaven (blackInkhaven)
Inkhaven is a standalone terminal application for writing books and long-form technical documentation. It pairs a full-screen Typst editor with a local semantic index, an AI writing assistant, versioned snapshots, and a backup pipeline — so the entire writing workflow lives inside one binary, without leaving the terminal.
Your manuscript is organised as a hierarchy of .typ files
(Book → Chapter → Subchapter → Paragraph), with first-class
image (.png / .jpg / …), HJSON data (.hjson), and
Bund script (.bund) leaves alongside paragraphs. Inkhaven
stores metadata in a local DuckDB database, indexes every text
node for full-text and semantic search, keeps versioned
snapshots, embeds the Bund
scripting language for hooks + custom rules, and streams answers
from your chosen LLM provider — six are bundled (Gemini,
Claude, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Grok, Ollama) and any
model genai routes is
one HJSON line away.

Latest release · 1.2.12 — Fullscreen split view, translation workflow, polish
Read the full notes: Documentation/RELEASE_NOTES/1.2.12.md
1.2.12's headline is a four-phase rework of how inkhaven handles two-paragraph workflows — the long-deferred fullscreen split view feature. Plus a clutch of carryover polish: concordance export, HJSON-editor LLM review, per-detector underline modifiers, snapshot side-by-side.
Fullscreen split view — Shift+F4
Shift+F4 toggles a three-column layout: tree
pane on the left, primary editor in the middle,
secondary editor on the right. AI response pane
hides (the two editors need the room); AI prompt
input still spans the bottom so Ctrl+I works
from either pane. Tab swaps focus between the
two editors.
Universal Shift+Enter pin modifier. Every
paragraph picker that targets the primary slot
now also accepts Shift+Enter as a "pin to the
right pane instead" modifier. Same picker, same
filter, same selection — the modifier changes the
destination. Works from:
- Tree-pane Enter
Ctrl+V P(fuzzy paragraph picker)Ctrl+V Shift+P(recent paragraphs)Ctrl+V M(bookmarks)F6snapshot picker (pins as read-only historical view)
Sibling-book lookup — Ctrl+V Shift+B. The
translation-workflow chord. Given the open
paragraph's slug, walks the project's hierarchy
for paragraphs with the same slug under a
different top-level book. Single match →
auto-pin. Multi-match → fuzzy picker scoped to
the matches. Designed for parallel manuscripts:
from manuscript-en/chapter-3/03-rain, finds
manuscript-ru/chapter-3/03-rain and pins it.
F12 critique-compare. When the split is on
AND both panes hold distinct paragraphs, F12
fires the new critique-compare embedded prompt
— eighth named flow, five-language match
(en / ru / es / de / fr) routed through the
1.2.11 multilingual resolver. The model
compares the two paragraphs substantively: what
overlaps, what diverges, which one lands the
beat harder. Specifically covers translation
review (source vs translation: does it carry
meaning, voice, register?) and draft comparison
(snapshot vs current: which is stronger?).
The Documentation/PROPOSALS/SPLIT_VIEW.md
proposal captures the four-phase design.
Polish across the board
inkhaven export-concordanceCLI. Same data theCtrl+B Shift+Lmodal shows, written to disk for use in spreadsheets / analysis pipelines. CSV (one row per stem) and JSON (structured form with KWIC snippets, line numbers) formats;--min-countflag drops the long tail.Ctrl+RLLM review inside theCtrl+B 0HJSON editor. Mirrors the 1.2.10 prompts-editor TUI's reviewer-LLM pattern: the model critiques the project config as a piece of work, not by executing it. Asks for dotted-path-specific critique (e.g.editor.style_warnings.show_dont_tell.enabled, not "the SDT field"). Use as a "second opinion" before saving a config change.- Per-detector underline-style overrides.
Three new HJSON theme knobs
(
style_warning_*_modifier) let users dial the filter-word / repeated-phrase / show-don't-tell overlay's modifier from the hardcodedUNDERLINEDtobold/dim/reversed/italic/none/+-combined. Empty preserves the baseline. Useful on terminal palettes where the teal underline reads faint. - Build-time doc-comment extractor polish.
Option<HashMap<K, V>>,Box<T>,Arc<T>,Rc<T>wrappers all descend cleanly now; nested-map shapes preserve theis_mapflag through every recursion level.
Plus a new tutorial
(48-split-view.md);
the refreshed
INKHAVEN_CHEAT_SHEET.typ
bumps from 1.2.6 to 1.2.12 with every chord added
since.
Every prior release lives under
Documentation/RELEASE_NOTES/.
Why Inkhaven
- Terminal-first. Inkhaven runs over SSH, in tmux, on a tiling WM — no browser, no Electron. The TUI uses ratatui and tui-textarea.
- Your manuscript is plain files. A paragraph lives in a
.typfile on disk; the metadata database tracks hierarchy and search but the prose is text — you can read it, diff it, version-control it, and edit it with another tool any time. - Semantic search out of the box. Embeddings via fastembed and HNSW are computed locally. Search for "the moment the lighthouse fails" and find the paragraph even if it never uses those exact words.
- AI is a co-author you steer. Inferences stream live; you control the
scope (selection / paragraph / subchapter / chapter / book), the
mode (Local-only RAG vs. Full general knowledge), and the
destination (replace, insert, top, bottom, copy, grammar-apply).
Inkhaven does NOT provide inherent privacy when external providers
(Gemini / Claude / OpenAI / DeepSeek / Grok) are used — prompts
travel to their servers under their terms. For privacy, set
llm.default_provider: "ollama"and run a local model; every other inkhaven subsystem (RAG embedding, semantic search, snapshot diff) is already on-device. - Multilingual. Snowball stemmers and multilingual embeddings make Russian, German, French, Spanish, Italian and others first-class. The shipped defaults cover English and Russian.
- Help, characters, places, artefacts, scripts — built in. Nine
system books are seeded on every project:
Notes,Research,Prompts,Places,Characters,Artefacts,Typst,Scripts,Help. Mentions of names from the lexicon books light up in the editor (cyan / amber / peach / underline).Ctrl+B P/C/Y/Gquery each via RAG.F1answers questions about Inkhaven itself by RAG overHelp.Scripts(added in 1.2) holds.bundsource files auto-loaded into the embedded Bund scripting VM at project open — seeDocumentation/Bund/. - First-class images. Drop PNG / JPG / WebP / SVG into the tree;
Book assembly emits the right
wrap_image_*calls and ships the bytes into the typst tree.Ctrl+B Pinside#image("…")opens a sibling picker. Enter on an Image row pops a ratatui-image preview (kitty / sixel / iterm2 / half-block). - From buffer to PDF in two chords.
Ctrl+B Aassembles your tree into a typst-compilable directory;Ctrl+B Bcompiles it;Ctrl+B Obuilds and copies the PDF into your shell's cwd as<book>-YYYYDDMM-HHMM.pdf. Compile failures route the captured stderr into a fresh AI chat with a typst-aware system prompt.
Features at a glance
Editor
- Typst syntax highlighting via tree-sitter-typst.
- Regex find / replace with same-line current-match highlighting.
- Split-edit with versioned snapshots — see two versions of a paragraph side by side, accept either.
- Word-aware navigation and deletion shortcuts.
- Vertical block selection (Alt+arrows) with rectangular copy.
- System-clipboard cut / copy / paste, plus per-doc undo / redo.
- Live "changes since last save" bolding; grammar-correction highlights
what changed after a
gapply.
Tree
- Multi-level folding (
←/→/Z/X). - Per-kind row colours (book / chapter / subchapter / paragraph / image)
- open-paragraph marker.
- Plain-letter shortcuts for add (
B/C/V/A/S/+/P), delete (D/-), reorder (U/J). - Document status badge column — one character per row colour-
coded to the workflow stage (
n/1/2/3/F/R). - Mouse: click to focus + select; scroll wheel scrolls.
AI pane
- Streaming markdown rendering — bold / italic / headings / code / lists.
- Six scope modes (cycled by
F9): None, Selection, Paragraph, Subchapter, Chapter, Book — each prepends the matching content to the next prompt. - Two inference modes (
F10): Local (use only supplied context) and Full (augment with general knowledge). Help inferences are pinned to Local automatically. - Persistent chat history with one-key clear (
Ctrl+B C). - Full-screen AI layout (
Ctrl+B K) — AI pane + scrollable chat history + AI prompt; persisted to.inkhaven-chat.jsonbetween sessions;Ctrl+Fsearches;Ctrl+Centers a turn-selection mode. - Lexicon RAG —
Ctrl+B P/C/G/Yin the editor sweep the selection throughPlaces/Characters/Notes/Artefactsand prepend the lookup to the next AI prompt. - F1 Help-manual floating query → grounded answer over the Help book.
inkhaven import-typst-helpseeds Help with a curated typst reference. - F7 Grammar check with deterministic correction extraction (
greplaces the buffer with just the corrected text, preserving Typst markup).
Storage and backup
- DuckDB metadata + Tantivy full-text + HNSW vectors via bdslib.
- Snapshots:
F5captures the buffer;F6opens the snapshot history picker. inkhaven backup --out <dir>zips the entire project.inkhaven restore <archive> --to <dir>puts it back.- Auto-backup on TUI exit when the last backup is older than
backup.max_age(humantime:7d,12h,30m, …) — splash screen with a progress bar. - Session persistence: cursor position, focus, tree-scroll, open paragraph all survive restarts. Per-paragraph cursor memory: switch around and every paragraph remembers where you were.
CLI tools
init— set up a fresh project (interactive confirmation if the directory exists).add/delete/mv/list— manage the hierarchy from a script.search "phrase"— semantic search from the shell.reindex— re-walk.typfiles into the database.export typst/export pdf— produce a single Typst manuscript or a built PDF.import-help --documents-directory <dir>— populate the Help book from a directory of markdown / text / typst files (wipes Help first).backup/restore— see above.ai "prompt"— one-shot inference from the shell (no TUI).
Configuration
A single inkhaven.hjson in each project root drives every knob:
embedding model, LLM providers, autosave cadence, sync interval, hierarchy
depth, language, snowball stemmers, the full visual theme (per-pane
backgrounds and foregrounds, all syntax colours, lexicon highlight
colours), key bindings, and backup policy.
Install
Inkhaven ships as a single static binary per platform. Three install paths:
1. cargo binstall (no compile)
If you already have cargo-binstall:
cargo-binstall reads [package.metadata.binstall] from Cargo.toml,
picks the right asset off GitHub Releases, and drops the binary into
~/.cargo/bin. Works on Linux (x86_64), macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon),
and Windows (x86_64).
2. GitHub Releases (direct download)
Grab the tarball for your platform from
Releases, unpack,
and put inkhaven somewhere on your PATH. Builds are produced by
the release.yml workflow on every
tag push.
3. cargo install --git (compile from source)
This works because every dependency (including bdslib and
tree-sitter-typst) is vendored under vendor/ — no separate registry
fetches, no GitHub auth needed. The first build takes ~10 minutes on a
modern laptop because of DuckDB + Tantivy + fastembed compilation; the
release binary above is the fast path.
Inkhaven is not published on crates.io. See
Cargo.toml'spublish = falseline and theDocumentation/notes for the rationale.
Quick start
# Build (if installing from source)
# Initialise a project (asks for confirmation if the directory exists)
# Build the hierarchy from the CLI…
# …or skip the CLI and add everything from the TUI
# Inside the TUI: B (book), C/V (chapter), A/S (subchapter), +/P (paragraph)
Use cases
- Long-form fiction. Hierarchy fits novels naturally (Book → Part → Chapter → Scene). Places / Characters / Research system books keep worldbuilding next to prose.
- Technical documentation. Each chapter is a
.typfile; the tree doubles as a table of contents. Semantic search makes "where did I document the retry policy?" a one-keystroke question. - Translation work. Multilingual embeddings + per-language Snowball stemmers let you keep source and target in two parallel books.
- Research notebooks. Snapshots track how a draft evolved; the AI pane can summarise a chapter when you come back after a week.
- Help and onboarding writing. Ship docs as a directory and let Inkhaven build a Help book your readers can query through F1.
Documentation
The full docs live under Documentation/.
Start here:
Documentation/README.md— entry point and table of contents.Documentation/FIRST_STEPS.md— compile, install, initialise.Documentation/Tutorials/— narrative walk-throughs, each focused on one workflow.
Reference:
Documentation/KEYBINDING.md— every keystroke the TUI recognises, organised by pane and overlay.Documentation/CONFIGURATION.md— the full HJSON reference.Documentation/MAINTENANCE.md— backup, restore, reindex, logs.Documentation/PROMPTS.md— the prompt library and the Prompts system book.Documentation/LOCATIONS.md— managing Places.Documentation/CHARACTERS.md— managing Characters.
Built with
- bdslib — DuckDB + Tantivy + fastembed + HNSW document store
- ratatui, tui-textarea
- tree-sitter + tree-sitter-typst
- genai — provider-neutral LLM streaming
- pulldown-cmark,
rust-stemmers,
zip,
humantime, and many others —
see
Cargo.toml.
Licence
Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE.