Glossary
Annotation
A private remark attached to a selected passage of text. The remark appears in the context panel and the passage receives a quiet highlight in the editor.
Archive
A name used in three related ways. The Archive bin under Out of the project holds sections and documents that should stay in the project but outside the book. A Spleen Archive is an export format used to preserve and later import a project’s structure and editing data. An archived project is a whole project kept out of the active project list.
Atmosphere
A desktop project-header control for playing a quiet background stream while you write.
Context panel
The panel on the right that contains Notes, Annotations, and Snapshots for the open document.
Document
An individual piece of writing inside a project. A document might be a chapter, scene, poem, essay, fragment, appendix, or draft.
Export
A file created from a project for reading, sharing, publishing, backup, or use in another tool.
Grid view
A visual project overview where each project is shown as a card.
Help Center
Spleen’s public help site. It contains this guide, troubleshooting information, and reference material outside the writing app.
Manuscript
A general writing and publishing term for a larger work or draft. Spleen’s interface mainly uses project instead, so this guide avoids manuscript as a UI term.
Notes
Freeform reminders or working thoughts attached to a document. Notes are not pinned to a specific passage.
Preferences
Settings that change the appearance, behaviour, and writing environment of Spleen.
Project
The complete writing work inside Spleen. A project contains its active book, Archive and Trash bins, and related working material.
Project sidebar
The sidebar inside the writing workspace that shows the writing and research trees, together with Archive and Trash when either bin contains something.
Project switcher
A workspace control for searching your active projects by title and moving quickly from one project to another.
Project type
An optional label describing the form of a project. The choices are No type, Novel, Short story, Poetry, Essay, Non-fiction, Journal, and Other. A type does not determine the project’s structure.
Reorder mode
A dedicated workspace for dragging sections and documents or moving them with the keyboard. Writing and research are reordered separately, and each successful move is saved immediately.
Research area
A separate project tree for supporting material that should stay near the work but outside normal PDF, EPUB, HTML, and Markdown exports.
Section
A grouping inside a project used to organise related documents. A section can hold subsections, one level deep.
Share link
An unlisted link that lets someone read one writing document or all writing in a project without making changes. Anyone with the link can read the shared writing without a Spleen account until the writer stops sharing it.
Snapshot
An automatic checkpoint of a document that can be previewed or restored.
Spleen
The name of the application. It is borrowed from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857), where four poems each carry the title Spleen: a mood of heavy, low-skied melancholy. The word once named the organ that older medicine blamed for that humour.
Spleen Archive
Spleen’s own backup format. It preserves writing and research structure, documents, notes, annotations, snapshots, and selected project details for later import. It does not include the book cover, share links, or paragraph indentation setting.
Status
A project label that describes where the project stands: No status, Draft, Paused, or Finished.
Table view
A project overview where projects are shown in rows, useful for details, sorting, and bulk actions.
Template
A reusable project structure used when creating a new project.
Theme
A remembered visual style for Spleen’s interface. The available themes are Zen, Retro, Nature, and Cobalt, and each can be used in Light or Dark mode.
Trash
The bin under Out of the project for sections and documents you consider a mistake or no longer want. Its contents can be read, restored, or deleted for good.
Zen Mode
A focused writing view that hides much of the surrounding interface so the current document has more space. It is separate from the Zen appearance theme.