Writing and research
A writing and research workspace that keeps drafts connected to their source notes
Writing gets harder when the outline, source fragments, draft, and next revision live in four places. Give the work one home, then use structure only where it earns its keep.
A writing and research workspace has to do two things well: let you put words down without interruption, and let you find the useful context when it is time to revise. A perfect system that interrupts the first draft is not doing either job.
Mind Marshal brings drafts, source notes, outlines, task lists, and search into a local-first workspace. Write in a block editor, connect pages as ideas develop, and export Markdown when your next stage lives somewhere else.
Separate the kinds of work without scattering them
- Project page: the question, audience, promise, and current draft direction.
- Source notes: a page for each article, interview, book, or observation, written in your own words with the important passage or link nearby.
- Outline: a living sequence of claims, scenes, sections, or unanswered questions.
- Revision list: a small set of specific improvements so an edit session starts with a decision instead of a blank feeling.
Make connections visible enough to use
Link a draft to its source notes with page mentions and use backlinks to see where an idea is echoed. Search keeps old fragments available without forcing you to tag every sentence. When structure becomes useful, a database can track pitches, chapters, articles, or research questions as the same records in table, board, list, calendar, gallery, or timeline views.
Keep your drafts in a workspace you own
Ordinary writing, planning, search, and databases happen locally in Mind Marshal. There is no product account required. The workspace is a local SQLite file with Markdown import, Markdown export, and encrypted backups, so you have a clear way to carry your notes and drafts with you.
Use help carefully, not automatically
Optional AI can help continue a draft, examine selected text, propose a checklist, or help you research a question. It is never required for writing, and it does not replace source verification, judgment, or your own voice. If you use an external provider, you choose it; local Ollama is also available for people who want model processing on their own machine.
What writers still need elsewhere
Mind Marshal is not a publishing platform, citation manager, plagiarism checker, or substitute for an editor. It is the durable working space between research, drafting, and the next revision.
How Pro takes this further
Let the workspace do the preparation, and keep every decision
Drafting and research stay free. Pro adds help that never touches your text unless you accept it, and a run that turns a folder of source notes into a brief with the evidence shown.
- Continue, condense, question. Select a passage and ask for a continuation, a tighter version, or the questions a sceptical reader would raise. The reply sits beside the draft; you decide what enters it.
- A research brief from your notes. Scope a run to the source-notes page and ask for “a brief that weighs the evidence and names what is still open, with a table of sources”. The run reads only that scope, cites the notes it used, and chooses a table because the notes contain comparable fields.
- Pipeline stages for pitches and chapters. A pitch board’s Drafting stage can produce a first outline on each card, hold it for approval, and on approval set Word count and append the outline to the chapter page.
- Ask across the archive. “Where did I note the counter-argument about induction?” answered with citations from your own pages, scoped to the project or the whole workspace.
- It travels. Tables, charts and flowcharts the AI produces are native blocks, editable and exported faithfully to Word, PDF and Markdown.
A concrete run: Run “weigh the evidence in these nine source notes” at Propose. The rail shows which notes were read, which provider drafted, and that a table was chosen. You edit the goal to add “flag anything from a single source”; the draft and output steps redo, and you approve the write.
Everything above is optional and reviewable. Runs, stage workflows and chat use the model you connect (a ChatGPT, Claude or Kimi plan you already pay for, your own API key, or a local Ollama model), every change lands in Activity with Undo, and Free Core stays the unlimited manual workspace whether or not you ever turn Pro on. See how the AI wiring works.
Try the workflow with your own work
Give your drafts and research a shared home without handing them to a product cloud.
Try the editor, linked pages, full-text search, databases, Markdown import and export, and optional assistance with a real writing project.