Folder Roles: Research, Trash, Templates, Manuscript

Right-click a folder and choose Folder Role to designate it as one of four special folders. A folder with a role assigned shows a leading icon in the binder (🔍/🗑/📋/📖) instead of a text label. Research, Trash, and Templates are exclusive — at most one folder per role, project-wide — but Manuscript isn’t: several folders can hold it at once, e.g. one per book in a series.

• Trash: deleting a file or folder moves it here instead of removing it from disk. Right-click the Trash folder for Empty Trash (permanent, with confirmation), or right-click a trashed item for Restore.
• Templates: any document placed directly inside this folder (not in a subfolder of it) shows up in every other folder’s right-click “New From Template” submenu. Picking one creates a new document from a copy of it — frontmatter included, with template variables substituted — after prompting you for a name. The template itself is never modified.
• Research: currently just a marker with no behavior yet attached — reserved for future features like word-count rollups. Unlike Trash and Templates, Export does not skip a Research-role folder — right-clicking one to export it exports it like any other folder.
• Manuscript: designates a folder as your project’s primary manuscript content, mirroring Scrivener’s Draft folder. File > Export Manuscript… compiles straight from it instead of you having to right-click and find the folder yourself: if no folder has the role yet, it falls back to exporting the whole project; if exactly one does, it exports that folder directly; if more than one does, it opens a submenu to pick which one. It’s also what the Word Count panel’s “Manuscript folders only” tracking scope sums.

Template Variables

A template document can use two placeholders, substituted when a new document is created from it:

For example, a template starting with:

---
type: Scene
---
# ${{name}}

Started ${{date}}.

typed into the “New From Template” prompt as “Aria” would produce a document starting with # Aria and today’s date in place of ${{date}}.

The date format is a single format string, shared by every template — it’s a strftime pattern, the same mini-language used by date, printf, and most other tools that format dates from a code. It defaults to %Y-%m-%d (e.g. 2026-07-28) when left blank. Some common formats:

A format that isn’t a valid strftime pattern falls back to %Y-%m-%d automatically, both in a created document and in Settings’ own live preview of the format — a typo here never blocks document creation.