What Is Spleen?

Start here to understand what Spleen is, create a first project, recognise the writing workspace, and learn how projects are organised.

Spleen is a writing space for longer works. It is designed for projects that grow over time: novels, poetry collections, essays, manuals, research texts, and other substantial pieces of writing that are too large or too important to live comfortably in one loose document. Instead of treating a work as a single endless file, Spleen helps you shape it from smaller, manageable parts.

In Spleen, a project is the main container for your work. A project may be a novel, a poetry collection, a manual, a research text, or any other substantial piece of writing. Inside a project, you can organise your work into sections and documents.

A section helps group related parts of the project. It might represent a chapter group, a book part, a poetry cycle, a manual section, or any other larger division. A document is an individual piece of writing inside the project. Depending on what you are working on, a document might be a chapter, scene, poem, essay, note, fragment, or draft.

This structure makes it easier to move through a large work, rearrange its parts, and keep a clear overview of what belongs where. The goal is not to force every writer into the same system, but to provide a calm structure that can support different kinds of writing.

Spleen is built around writing without clutter. The workspace keeps the project visible, the editor focused, and the surrounding tools close enough to be useful without constantly demanding attention. Formatting options are available when needed, but they are not the centre of the experience. The main focus remains the text itself.

This is one of the ways Spleen differs from a traditional word processor. A word processor usually starts with a page: margins, layout, fonts, headers, footers, and print appearance. Spleen starts with the writing project itself. It is less concerned with making one page look finished from the beginning, and more concerned with helping a larger work stay organised while it is being drafted, revised, and prepared.

That does not mean presentation is unimportant. Spleen can export projects to formats such as PDF, EPUB, HTML, Markdown, and Spleen Archive. But the writing workspace itself is meant to stay quiet. You write, organise, review, and refine first. The final form can come later.

In short, Spleen is not a replacement for every kind of document editor. It is a focused workspace for writers who want structure without noise, flexibility without chaos, and a clear place where a larger work can slowly become itself.