September 9, 2026
Scriptri 0.5 makes large projects easier to organize and reference with custom entity types, scalable entity selectors, a floating read-only reference workspace, direct manuscript-to-Lore links, and thread-based Entity Notes.
Scriptri 0.5 is a release about connection rather than addition.
0.4 gave story knowledge a better home. Lore Pages held longer reference material, Entity Profiles grew into a real workspace, Glossary definitions became formatted, and continuity threads gained topics. Each of those lived somewhat on its own. 0.5 is the work of tying them together, so that consulting what you know about a character, a place, or a piece of worldbuilding does not mean leaving the scene you are writing.
The organizing idea for this release is simple. As a project grows, the tools meant to help you keep track of it should not become another thing you have to manage. Entity lists should stay searchable. Notes should stay readable. Reference material should be one glance away, not one navigation away.
Most of 0.5 is connective tissue between the manuscript, Entities, Lore, and continuity history.
You can define the kinds of entities your story actually uses. You can find any entity quickly once there are hundreds of them. You can open a complete, read-only reference while you write and follow it wherever it leads. You can link a phrase in your manuscript straight to the Lore Page that explains it. And you can read an entity's notes either in manuscript order or as continuing threads of thought.
None of this changes how drafting works. The scene editor is still the center of the app. These features sit around it and stay out of the way until you reach for them.
The six built-in categories (Character, Place, Thing, Faction, Concept, Other) are no longer the only vocabulary a project has. You can create your own types: Factions, Artifacts, Species, Buildings, Plants, Cities, or whatever your story needs.
A custom type is a real part of the project, not a text label. You can:
Built-in types keep their system identity. You can change their display order, color, and icon, but their names and their underlying capabilities are protected, so a project can always rely on Place meaning Place.
Two details are worth stating plainly. The icon you pick for a type represents the type itself in type-level places such as the type manager, badges, and the type menu. Individual entities still choose their own icons; a type icon is not pushed onto every entity of that type. And 0.5 does not recolor existing projects. New blank projects pick up the updated type-color defaults, while every entity color you can already see today stays exactly as it is.
The capability set is deliberately small. A custom type can participate as a location and can be preferred for POV. It is not a plugin system, and it does not let a type define arbitrary new behavior.
Custom Entity Types make projects more varied. This is the change that keeps them navigable.
Entity selection controls that used to be long, flat menus are now built on one shared selector. Wherever you pick an entity, you get the same behavior:
In this scene where they make sense.
This selector now backs State Notes, relationships, the Timeline, Time Queries, Investigations, Locations, promoted notes, and the other general entity-selection surfaces. The point is not the list of migrated screens. It is that a large entity collection is now something you search, rather than something each feature has to invent its own dropdown for.
A few specialized surfaces keep their own controls on purpose, including manuscript entity tagging, workspace navigation and filters, and the compact POV pill in the editor toolbar.
The Floating Reference Viewer is the change I expect to matter most day to day.
You can open an Entity or a Lore Page as a read-only floating workspace, read it, follow references inside it, and return to writing without disturbing the workspace you were in.
The Entity reference is not a trimmed profile preview. It is the compact, read-only version of the Entity workspace, with the same five views you get in the full workspace:
The full Entity workspace and the floating version share the same content surface on purpose. That keeps the floating reference faithful to what you see in the full workspace, instead of drifting into a second, reduced version of it.
One point about the panel. There is a single Floating Reference Viewer. Scriptri's floating-panel system can coordinate other floating tools, such as Word Finder and the Continuity Checklist, alongside it, but that does not mean you can open several independent Reference Viewer windows at once. Opening a new target replaces what the one viewer is showing and adds it to that viewer's history.
You can now select existing manuscript prose and link it directly to a Lore Page, or to a specific heading within that page. The prose does not change. A faint amber dotted underline is the only visible sign that the text carries a link.
Clicking a linked phrase, or reaching it with the keyboard, opens the same popover pattern used elsewhere in 0.5. From it you can:
The value runs both ways. A Lore Page's backlinks now include the manuscript scenes that link to it, so you can see where a piece of worldbuilding actually appears in the story. Manuscript prose links out to Lore; Lore shows read-only backlinks in.
For Scrivener-synced scenes, the behavior is conservative. When synced text is unchanged, or the linked passage maps cleanly onto the new text, Scriptri keeps the link. When the passage changed enough that keeping the link is uncertain, the sync review tells you what will happen before you accept the update. Scriptri does not guess where a link belongs after a substantial rewrite.
This is manuscript-to-Lore linking specifically. It is not a general wiki-link syntax, it does not detect links automatically, it does not generate its own labels, and it links to Lore Pages and headings, not to every kind of project record.
An entity's Notes tab now offers two readings of the same continuity history.
A thread shows its topic, its category, its current state, the earlier history behind that state, the scenes each entry came from, any closure or resolution details, and the relationship counterpart when the thread is a relationship. Search works across both current and historical entries, and expands the matching history so you can see why a thread was kept.
The purpose is to let you answer "what happened with this fact over time?" without rebuilding the story from scattered scene notes. A continuity concern that was resolved stays visibly resolved, even after the thread later picks up an ordinary update.
Both views use the same shared Entity surface, so this same read-only thread view is available when you open an entity in the Floating Reference Viewer.
Project Pulse is part progress recognition, part quiet tour of Scriptri's workflows. In 0.5 it reaches further into a project's life rather than stopping at first-use achievements.
New milestones recognize manuscript imports, larger word and scene counts, profiled entities, entity mentions, State Notes, closed threads, Lore Pages, and glossary mappings. There are now 42 milestones across eight groups, 11 of them new in this release. A few examples: 50,000 and 90,000 manuscript words, 25 scenes, 30 State Notes, and closing your first thread.
Milestone delivery was also hardened. Development-mode double rendering no longer produces duplicate toasts, and a large import that satisfies several milestones at once resolves into one readable summary instead of a stack of notifications.
A few fixes that do not need their own sections:
Ctrl+Shift+F on Windows and Linux, Cmd+Shift+F on macOS.The boundaries from earlier releases still hold.
0.5 adds no accounts, no cloud project storage, no collaborative editing, and no AI manuscript analysis.
0.5 leaves behind reusable foundations: a shared reference viewer, project-specific structure through custom types and a scalable selector, and a first real link from manuscript prose into Lore.
The next work can build on those without forcing every kind of story information back into the same shape. For now, 0.5 makes a large project easier to hold in your head while you write.