Reverie

A journal that's quiet while you write, and alive when you look back.

Welcome — you're one of the first people to use Reverie. This page is everything you need to know, and it's deliberately short.

Why Reverie

Your words are yours, in the plainest sense. Reverie doesn't have a cloud, an account, or a database. Your journal is a folder you choose on your own Mac, full of ordinary Markdown files with your photos beside them. You can open them in any text editor today or in thirty years, back them up like any folder, and leave Reverie behind at any time without losing a word.

The page gets out of the way. No toolbars, no sidebars, no word counts. While you write, even the app's own chrome fades — it's just you and the page, in a typeface made for prose. Formatting is light Markdown (**bold**, *italic*, # headings, - lists, > quotes), styled softly in place as you type.

Your past comes back to you. Most journals are write-only; the words go in and never come out. Reverie is built around looking back — resurfacing what you wrote in past years (Reverie), and turning your own words into gentle prompts (Reflect).

You can watch yourself write. Reverie can record the act of writing an entry — every pause and correction — and play it back later, like watching yesterday think (Replay).

Getting started

Open Reverie and choose a folder. That folder is your journal — pick somewhere that gets backed up (iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or anywhere Time Machine sees). Reverie organises it like this:

your-folder/
  entries/2026/2026-07-11_143022_a3f9.md     ← one file per entry
  entries/2026/2026-07-11_143022_a3f9/       ← that entry's photos & replays

On first run Reverie asks whether it may record replays of your writing. Recordings are files in your folder like everything else; you can say no, or change your mind later in Settings.

Writing

Tap Write and start. There's nothing to save — Reverie saves as you type, one second behind your fingers. The date is the entry's title. Tap Done when you're finished (or just walk away).

Photos — paste one straight in with ⌘V, or use the ⋯ menu → Add photos…. Photos land in the text right at your cursor and live next to the entry on disk. HEIC from an iPhone is converted automatically, and if a photo carries its own date, Reverie offers to use it as the entry's date — handy when you're writing up yesterday's walk.

Reading and editing

Timeline lists everything, newest first. Open an entry and it's a bare page — chrome appears only when you park the pointer at the very top or bottom edge. Click any word to start editing at that word; press esc (or ⌘[) to step back out.

Deleting an entry takes two deliberate taps (⋯ menu → Delete entry → confirm). Nothing in Reverie deletes anything with one click.

Reverie

The Reverie tab is the looking-back mode: it surfaces entries from around this same date in previous years, as a slideshow. Early days — this view will grow into a proper "review of good moments" over time.

Reflect

Reflect greets you with your own past words: a line that stood out, and questions you yourself asked in past entries. Tap any of them to open the entry they came from — the line arrives briefly lit, so you see it in its home. It's a conversation with yourself, on a delay.

Replay

Open an entry's ⋯ menu → Watch it being written. The entry writes itself back onto the page, cursor and all — hesitations, deletions, the lot. Playback starts on its own; the floating controls pause it, restart it, change speed (1× / 4× / 16×), and skip the long pauses (on by default — thinking time is long).

Two honest notes:

• Replay records the original writing session — the one that happens on the Write page. Edits you make later to a saved entry are not recorded (your tidying stays private, even from future you).
• Recordings live inside your journal folder, next to the entry. Delete them any time from the entry's ⋯ menu (Delete replays), or switch recording off entirely in Settings.

Settings

Change your journal folder, switch dark mode, toggle replay recording — and import from Day One: export your Day One journal as a .zip (JSON format) and Reverie will bring your entries and photos across as ordinary Markdown files. Nothing about the import is destructive; your Day One export is only read, never modified.

The fine print

There is no fine print. No account, no telemetry, no server. If you can see your folder, you have your journal — all of it.

One ask, since you're first: when something feels even slightly off — a jitter, a hidden button, a weird cursor jump — please tell us. That's exactly the polish we care about.

Feel free to share your feedback via email to support@freeholder.dev