Features
Everything Bokmo does for your writing.
An editor that steps aside, a memory of your world, and the tools each form of writing calls for. Here are the details, section by section.
Organise
One project per work, one type per project.
The type you choose sets up the starting template, renames the app’s vocabulary and drives the editor’s layout.
Nine project types
Novel, screenplay, play, tale, poetry collection, song lyrics, short story collection, diary, or free-form.
A vocabulary that follows the genre
In a diary, characters become people and a story is called a notebook. A project can hold several stories: volumes, episodes, plays or albums.
A three-column library
Projects and folders, then sheets, then the editor. Search covers titles and content.
Sections your way
Notepad, annotations, labels, favourites, entries, events: each section can be hidden and reordered, project by project.
Change your mind along the way
A project’s type can change at any time, and a folder or a sheet can set its own: a screenplay scene in the middle of a novel, for instance.
A built-in trash
Deleted sheets and folders wait there, ready to restore in one move.
Write
An editor that steps aside for the text.
Markdown formats itself as you type, and each form of writing has its own moves.
Markdown styled live
Headings, bold, italic, strikethrough, quotes, lists, checkboxes, links: no preview mode, and keyboard shortcuts to go faster.
Focus mode and full screen
Focus fades everything but the current sentence or paragraph. Full screen keeps only the page and the goal indicator.
Screenplay and play layout
Scene headings, characters, dialogue, stage directions and transitions are recognised and set in standard layout, in a Courier-style font.
The Styles menu
The moves of each form: CONT’D, the last character’s line, the formulas of the tale, the date and mood of the diary, poem and song templates.
@ to call up a character
Type @: the list of characters opens at the cursor. A new name joins the bible on its own.
Annotations
Highlighting in six colours and comments, which follow the text as you edit it. Find them by sheet or across the whole project.
Links between texts
Wiki-links connect chapters, entries and notes; the Navigation panel shows outgoing links and backlinks.
The Workshop
Next to the text, the characters present in the sheet, the share of dialogue and the rhythm of the sentences. In every language, a style check also flags close repetitions, overlong sentences and adverbs; crutch words are a French list.
Editor themes
Standard, serif or monospaced font, text size, light or dark appearance, a comfortable reading width.
The project bible
The memory of your world.
Each project keeps its entries, and the editor uses them while you write.
Characters, places, entities, objects
Editable entries, with a name, role, colour and fields. Entities hold secret societies, orders or bands; objects hold relics, weapons and documents.
Your own sections
Create a section of entries, with its shared fields and its groups: spells, planets, recipes, whatever your story calls for.
Names in colour
Saved names are coloured throughout the text, and the spell checker stops underlining the names you invented.
Names spotted
Proper names that keep coming back without an entry are listed, ready to add in one click. A right-click on a name does the same.
Appearances and encounters
How many sheets each character appears in, and who meets whom, and when.
Name generator
It learns the sound of the names already invented in the project and suggests new ones that sound alike.
Events
Timeline, narration, composition.
Three views of the same events: when they happen, what role they play, where they fall in the book.
A living timeline
Create an event with a double-click or by drawing it, drag it, stretch it into a duration, make it a milestone, link two events with a labelled arrow: cause, echo…
Free, dated, or your own calendar
A relative order without dates, a real calendar whose ruler goes from years to hours, or your world’s calendar: year 1, year 2…
Places as lanes
Each place in the bible becomes a lane of the timeline, with its name and colour. Lanes fold away whenever you like.
Horizontal, vertical, story threads
In the story threads view, each character becomes a coloured line and each event a station where the lines meet.
17 narrative structures
The Hero’s Journey, three acts, Freytag’s Pyramid, the 15-beat structure, Kishōtenketsu, the Morphology of the Folktale… or your own. Events are filed stage by stage.
Composition and scenes
Parts in columns, chapters as blocks, events placed by hand; scenes group the events that share a place and a time.
Shot list
In a screenplay, each scene breaks down into numbered shots: frame size, movement, angle, focal length, duration.
Timeline export
The whole timeline as PDF or PNG, paginated in A4 or A3.
Poetry and song
Forms, songs, and the rules of French verse.
Templates for poems and songs, and for those who write in French, rhymes and synonyms from proven resources, with a syllable counter that knows the rules of French verse.
Fixed forms
Sonnet, ballade, villanelle and other templates, from the Styles menu. In French, Bokmo also checks the metre, the rhymes and the number of stanzas.
Songs
Verses, choruses, bridges, and templates for song structures.
Rhymes, in French
Ranked by quality (rich, sufficient, poor) with their syllable count. They come from Lexique 3.83, a psycholinguistics research database: 48,396 French word forms, with their phonetics.
Synonyms, in French
Grouped by part of speech, in the dictionary and with a right-click on a word. Over 36,000 entries from the Dictionnaire des synonymes français myThes, the French thesaurus distributed with LibreOffice.
Fusion
Where meaning meets sound: a synonym of the first word that rhymes with the second. Also available with a right-click on a word.
Syllable counter
Mute e, elisions, the diaereses of classical verse: the Workshop checks the metre line by line. On Mac, each line’s count also shows in the margin, with a count without mute e if you want one.
With the assistant
In French, on compatible devices, extra synonyms, rhymes and antonyms suggested in a separate section, and the Right word tab, which finds a word from its description.
Definitions
In every language, the Definition tab opens Apple’s dictionary: the Dictionary app on Mac, the system dictionary on iPhone and iPad. In French, the Wiktionnaire tab shows the word’s page, loaded online.
Named sources
The first time the app opens in French, Bokmo downloads its word lists from their authors, then uses them offline. Each resource is credited, with its authors and license, on the Sources and licenses screen in the app’s help. A button there saves the files and their notices, as those licenses allow.
The language tools (rhymes, synonyms, syllables) work on French, and appear when the app is set to French. The style check works in every language — only its crutch words are French. The app’s interface is available in English, French, Spanish, German and Italian.
The assistant
Help, without anything leaving the device.
The assistant features run on Apple’s language model, on the device and offline.
Summarise
A summary of a sheet, to copy or keep as a synopsis, or of the whole project, sheet by sheet.
Tips and ideas
Writing tips and ideas for the page you are on.
Entry suggestions
The assistant reads the sheet and suggests characters, places, entities and objects to add to the bible.
Breaking into scenes
It reads a chapter and suggests scenes. You review, rename, untick: nothing is created without your say-so.
These features require macOS 26 or iOS 26 and a compatible device with Apple Intelligence turned on. Everything else in Bokmo works without them.
Progress
See how far you have come.
Numbers to keep you moving, never to make you feel guilty.
Writing tracker
Words written today, a streak of consecutive days, a daily goal and a fifteen-week activity calendar. Only what you add counts, not imported text.
Goals
At least, at most or about so many words, characters or pages, with a deadline and a suggested daily pace.
Statistics
Words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, pages of 1,500 characters, reading time.
Project dashboard
Synopsis, overall goal, statistics and the word count of each folder.
Lose nothing
Your writing, safe and in your hands.
Plain files, your iCloud, and several safety nets.
Plain Markdown files
Each sheet is a .md file in a folder, readable by any software. On iPhone and iPad, the library shows up in the Files app.
iCloud sync
Through your iCloud Drive, across Mac, iPhone and iPad. When two versions of a sheet cross paths, Bokmo shows them side by side and lets you choose.
Version history
A snapshot every time you save a version, others taken automatically if you like, with preview, comparison and restore.
Action history
What the app has done, and a way to undo it.
Backup and restore
A complete archive of the project, and a restore that shows how far along it is and can be stopped.
Locking and encryption
Protect a project with a password, with Touch ID or Face ID. Its contents are then genuinely encrypted on disk.
Import and export
Move in and out without leaving anything behind.
Arrive with your manuscripts, leave with the file your publisher, your director or your e-reader expects.
Import
Markdown and plain text, whole folders, TextBundle, Ulysses, Scrivener (with its binder), Word (DOC, DOCX), RTF, ODT, HTML, Final Draft, Fountain and PDF. A Bokmo project imports back with its entries and events.
Export
Markdown, plain text, HTML, RTF, PDF, EPUB, and for screenplays, Fountain and Final Draft.
Choose what to export
The sheet, its folder, the whole project compiled into a single document, or the texts that share a label.
The documents of the trade
Role booklets and the call sheet for the theatre, the storyteller’s notes, the screenplay’s shot list, the story outline or the book’s outline.
Requirements
What you need to write with Bokmo.
- Mac
- macOS 14 Sonoma or later
- iPhone and iPad
- iOS and iPadOS 17 or later
- Assistant
- macOS 26 or iOS 26, on a compatible device with Apple Intelligence turned on
- Sync
- iCloud Drive (optional)
- Interface languages
- English, French, Spanish, German, Italian
- Language tools
- French
- Internet connection
- The first time the app opens in French, to download the word lists (about 30 MB)
- Account, ads, tracking
- None
For Mac, iPhone and iPad
Bokmo is coming soon to the App Store.
A question about a feature, or an idea to suggest? Write to us.