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Rebound Writer

A writing environment for structured Markdown that keeps the metadata contract visible and your files ordinary.

State
In development
Version
0.6.0-alpha.1
As of
2026-09-18

Still in development — nothing to download yet.

Every article on this site is a Markdown file with a metadata block on top: title, author, tags, a category, a tier that decides where it appears. Generic editors show me that block as raw YAML and let me get it wrong. A CMS would take my files. Writer is the third option — the files stay ordinary Markdown on my disk, and the contract around them becomes visible and pleasant instead of memorised.

What it does

  • Profiles per folder. A rebound-writer.toml beside a collection declares its fields, their labels, help text and allowed values, so the metadata dialog is a form for that collection. An unknown value is a warning, never a refusal: the site accepts it, so refusing it would be Writer lying in the other direction.
  • Rules that catch the failures I actually had — an unclosed metadata block that would break a whole reindex, a featured article with no cover image that the site silently demotes, a quoted number that never reaches the page.
  • A spelling workbench, not a red squiggle: every unknown word gets suggestions as buttons and an editable field, and replacing a word everywhere is a single undo.
  • Folding, a full-width measure, Zen mode, and a typewriter theme for when the room needs to be quieter.
  • A status bar that reports movement rather than sitting there — and good news is provably not shown in the warning colour.
  • A read-only Collection contract report, explaining profile precedence and declarations, unknown rules, dead globs, unused fields and vocabulary drift without changing the collection.

Where it actually stands

The current source version is 0.6.0-alpha.1, built and proven on 2026-09-18, not installed. My daily writing build remains 0.5.0-beta. The new collection-contract report is read-only; deriving proposals is the next step, not something this version already does.

Screenshots

Rebound Writer — screenshot 1 of 1

What’s next

  • Derive evidence-backed contract proposals from a folder's frontmatter.
  • Daily writing on the installed 0.5 beta remains its release gate.
  • Writing intelligence belongs to the later 0.7 line.