Full feature list

Everything PasadoDocs does

Everything PasadoDocs does, in the writer’s own frame — the whole surface, section by section. Not a marketing tour and not a roadmap; just what’s in the app today, in plain language. A short glossary at the bottom defines the handful of names you’ll see repeatedly.

Data security

Where your words live and what we do (and don’t do) with them. Read this first — everything else on this page rests on it.

Total offline access. The whole app runs without a network. Write, save, export, share — none of it needs a connection.
Only ever GUIDs and hashes; never your name, never your words. Anything that touches a PasadoLabs server is an anonymous fingerprint — a hash and a random document ID. Your prose, your filename, your identity, your provider accounts — none of it crosses the wire.
Backups are your call. We recommend using a service like Google Drive or similar to ensure backups. Taking backups is in our roadmap, but even then, it will be to a server or service you own. We will never host anything other than anonymous hashes and GUIDs that allow us to tamper-proof the process.

The writing surface

A quiet, distraction-free page. It gets out of your way and stays out of it.

Autosave. There is no save button. Every keystroke is committed on the way through; you never lose work to a forgotten Cmd+S.
Self-updating title. The document’s title updates as you write, drawn from your first line or the name you give it — no separate title field to remember.
Subdued title bar. The document title sits quietly at the upper left, out of your eyeline while you write.
Tabs across the top. Open documents appear as tabs at the top of the window — the same shape as a browser, so nothing is hidden.
Zen mode. One key hides every panel and control. Just you and the page.
Full-screen focus. A dedicated button expands the writing surface edge-to-edge; the menu bar and dock stay out until you ask for them.
Dark mode. The whole app follows your system theme, and every panel, badge, and chart is retuned for both.

Typography & formatting

Real type control, not toy type control. The formatting your document actually needs, without a ribbon.

Font picker with your own fonts. Pick from the system list, or point the app at a font file on your machine and use it directly — no installer step.
Font-size control. Set the size for the whole document, or per selection, from the same control.
Formatting deck. Bold, italic, underline, alignment, lists, headings, quote styles — grouped together on a deck you can float, dock, or hide.
Right-click Format menu. The same formatting is one right-click away on any selection.
First-letter format-reflect. Formatting is picked up from the first character of your selection so the tool matches what your text is already doing, not what a default assumes.
Margins & tabs. Real margin and tab controls for a real page — not just a screen width.
Spellcheck, no grammar critic. Spelling is flagged; grammar is not, because grammar is a voice decision.
Ergodic typography preserved. Non-standard type — unusual glyphs, layout tricks, mixed scripts — survives round-tripping through the app without being “corrected” into normalcy.

Navigation & documents

Everything you need to move around a document, a folder, or a project — without a wall of chrome.

Find & Replace. Cmd+F opens a fast find with match count, case toggle, and full replace.
Lido deck. A stack of cards you can navigate to view, edit, and access things like headings, folder structure, recent docs, find and replace locally and globally — the Lido deck is a veritable buffet of file management tools.
Multi-document workspace. Open as many documents as you like, side by side or in tabs, in one window.
Directory tree. A recursive tree of the folder you’re working in, expandable and collapsible to whatever depth you need.
Recent documents with rename detection. If you rename a file outside the app, the Recent list follows it — no broken shortcuts.
Adaptive rails. Side panels widen on a wide screen, collapse on a narrow one, and can be hidden entirely when you want the page.
Floating decks. Any deck can be undocked and moved to a second monitor.

Revision history — The Scribble

The Scribble is PasadoDocs’ revision history — a full, persistent record of how a document became itself. Not a linear undo stack: a branching graph.

Persistent undo. Undo works across sessions, across restarts, across weeks. Close the app on Friday, come back Monday, undo Friday’s change.
Fork-based graph. Every time you undo and then type something different, The Scribble forks — both paths are kept, and you can walk back to either one.
Selection-delete capture. A paragraph you cut, even weeks ago, is still in the graph. The Scribble treats deletions as first-class history, not lost content.
Right-margin graph. The graph paints in the right margin of the document. See the shape of the revision history at a glance.
Click-to-copy from any node. Click a node in the margin graph and a small popup lets you copy that revision’s text without leaving the current version.
Retention setting. Choose how far back The Scribble keeps history, per document.
.scribble sidecar viewer. The revision history lives alongside the document as its own file, so you can open and review it independently.

Editorial collaboration

Bring an editor in without giving up authorship. Their marks are theirs, yours are yours, and the Transcript knows the difference.

Role picker. Open the app as a writer, an editor, a developer, a publisher, or a focus reader. Each role scopes what you can do and what shows up on screen.
Roles honor the sender’s grant. When you open a document that someone shared with you, your role picker is clamped to what the sender allowed. If they shared it as Comment & Suggest, Writer is unreachable — you literally cannot flip yourself into it and start rewriting their canonical text. This isn’t policy hoping to be respected; it’s a signed permission token inside the document that the recipient’s app enforces before the picker even renders.
Editor identity capture. When someone opens a document as an editor, PasadoDocs asks who they are, and every mark they leave carries that name.
Right-click Comment or Suggest. An editor selects text and leaves either a margin comment or a tracked suggestion in one gesture.
Margin bubbles. Comments and suggestions appear as bubbles in the margin, threaded and easy to follow.
Next-comment navigation. Step through every open comment in order with one key.
Writer’s show-comments toggle. The writer decides when to see comments and when to hide them — they don’t crowd your writing time.
Per-editor activity in the Transcript. The Transcript logs each editor’s touches under their own name, so you always know who did what.
Multi-editor badges. When more than one editor has touched a document, badges show each one at a glance.

Provenance & the Transcript

The Transcript is the receipt of how a document came into being. It sits on your machine, it’s yours, and it reads honestly whether you’re shipping fiction, a thesis, or a chart of your own drift over a year.

View Transcript. One click opens the Transcript for the current document — a readable, plain-English account of every event.
Event counters. The Transcript shows how many keystrokes, pastes, cuts, and edits went into the document, and when.
Forward-delete surfaced. Deletions aren’t hidden — they’re in the Transcript alongside everything else, so the record reflects what actually happened.
Intra-document cut & paste isn’t “foreign.” Moving your own words around inside a document is recognised as yours, not flagged as an outside paste.
Show-detection toggle. Turn the AI-adjacency readout on or off from the same view. You can write with the mirror up or the mirror down.
AI-adjacency readout. On demand, a passage is compared against the AI Adjacency Core and you see how close it reads to AI cadence. Hedged — a mirror, not a verdict.
Personal authorship signature. Over time, the app learns the shape of how you write — the phrasings, rhythms, and revision habits that are yours — and reads new passages against that signature. It grows with you. And when your personal core is large enough, other documents you merge in will be detected as yours. Areas where you drifted will be highlighted for you to review and remove or re-architect when you are unsure of the provenance.
Multi-tier disclosure. A one-line headline for a glance; a scorecard for a quick read; a full event log when you want to see the whole picture.

Tamper detection & recovery

A PasadoDocs document is plain text under the hood — easy to edit outside the app. The moment anything else touches it, the app notices, and the record shows it.

Red scrim & banner on external edit. If a file is changed outside PasadoDocs, the whole editor turns red the next time you open it, with a banner explaining what happened.
Banner recovery actions. The banner offers the paths forward — keep the outside change, revert to the last in-app version, or hand-merge.
Tampered state persists. A document that has been tampered stays flagged in its Transcript — the record doesn’t quietly forget.
Tamper-evident Transcripts on share. When you share a document, the Transcript is signed at share time. A recipient sees whether it’s verified, unverified, or tampered.
Tamper-evident progress ledger. If someone edits your progress record while the app is closed, we notice on next boot — and tell you.

Sharing, protection & export

When you share a document, sharing of the transcript is on your terms — it is a record that only piggybacks the document if you want it to.

Share button. When you’re ready to hand a document off — to an editor, a beta reader, a co-author — the Share button walks you through the choices before it packages anything. Does the transcript go along, or does it stay on your machine? Can the recipient edit, or only read? You decide, and PasadoDocs prepares the file to match.
Continuously thumbprinted. The transcript is continuously thumbprinted and stored with a generic doc GUID on a server owned by PasadoLabs. It is also stored at the time of the share so that the recipient can ensure authenticity.
Transcript-travels toggle. The transcript doesn’t have to travel with the document if you don’t want it to. If you’re sharing a chapter with a critique partner and you’d rather they not see every backspace and abandoned line, leave the transcript at home. If you’re sharing with an editor who needs the full record of what happened, send it along.
Protected documents. When you share a document you’ve marked as protected, it opens in the recipient’s copy of PasadoDocs as read-only — greyed out, no caret, no accidental edits. They can read it and copy from it, but they cannot overwrite what you sent.
You decide what the recipient can do. The Share dialog asks: read-only, comment and suggest, format only, or take an independent copy? Your choice travels with the document as a signed token that the recipient’s app enforces. If you want a real co-author, hand them an Independent Copy — their fork gets a fresh document ID and its own signature chain, so their edits are theirs and your original stays yours. If you want an editor, they get comment and suggest but can never become Writer. If you want a formatter, they get typography controls and nothing else. You’re not asking your recipient to play by the rules; the document itself enforces them.
Export a copy. Any time a document is open, you can export a plain copy of it — Markdown, .docx, or PDF — to a location you choose. Your writing is never trapped inside PasadoDocs; it stays yours to take anywhere.
Export to PDF. Export directly to a print-ready PDF, with your margins, your typography, and your equations rendered exactly as they appear on screen. No round-trip through a browser or a separate print dialog.
Mass export. When you need every document out of PasadoDocs at once — for a backup, for a manuscript submission, for a change of tools — a single mass-export writes them all to a folder you pick. This is a promise, not a feature: your writing is always exportable, always yours, always on the way out if that’s where you want to go.
The .pasadoDoc container. This container bundles your document, its transcript, and its revision history into one file. When you share, that’s one attachment — not a folder full of sidecars — so the recipient gets the whole record in one email, one drop, one drag.

Migration

When you’re moving away from another editor, PasadoDocs brings your existing work with you — without losing what makes it itself.

Google Docs. Import a Google Doc with footnotes, tables, lists, and equation placeholders preserved.
.docx. Import Word documents, including the unusual typography and layout most tools quietly flatten.
Scrivener projects. Import a .scriv project as a folder of documents you can keep working with.

Statistics & writing telemetry

Honest numbers about your writing session — visible when you want them, out of the way when you don’t.

Subdued status bar. A quiet band along the bottom shows word count, session length, and current position, without shouting.
Statistics panel. The full readout — totals, rates, and breakdowns — opens on request.
Honest words-per-minute. Pasting a paragraph no longer inflates your WPM; only writing counts as writing.
Real-time keystrokes-per-minute (KSPM). A running readout of your keystrokes-per-minute rate, useful when you want to see your actual typing tempo separate from your composition tempo.
Unicode word-boundary detection. Word counts respect the full range of Unicode whitespace, so multi-script and non-Latin writing is counted correctly.
Writing-milestone badges. Quiet acknowledgements when a document crosses a milestone — a first thousand words, a chapter complete.

Math & symbols

Real math without an equation editor that fights you.

Insert Equation dialog. A dedicated dialog for building an equation, with a preview that updates as you type.
Symbol cards. Groups of symbols — Greek, mathematical, phonetic, arrows — on data-driven cards you can pin to the sidebar.
Equation tip sheet. A one-page reference for the syntax the app understands, always one click away.
Clean pandoc math. Equations round-trip through Pandoc cleanly — the same math reads correctly whether you export to PDF, HTML, or LaTeX.

AI assistants (bring your own)

If you want an assistant in the sidebar, bring your own — the app doesn’t ship a house model and doesn’t send your writing to one you didn’t choose.

Provider row. Point the app at a provider you have an account with, and it appears in the assistant deck.
GitHub Models provider. First-class support for GitHub Models as an assistant source.
Hide the assistant entirely. If you don’t want an assistant in view, the whole deck folds away and stays there.

Setup, first run & updates

The path from download to writing, kept short and readable.

Installer with a real EULA page. The license lives on its own page during install, in plain English, so you can actually read it.
First-run EULA re-prompt on major changes. When the terms change materially, you see the new version and confirm before continuing.
Beta badge in the chrome. A quiet Beta marker in the app so you always know what build you’re on.
Idle self-update. New versions install themselves when you close the app or leave it alone long enough — no nag dialogs.

Feedback & defect reporting

When something goes wrong, tell us — and if you’re offline, the app remembers.

Report-a-problem dialog. A dedicated dialog for describing what went wrong, from any screen.
Report-a-defect pill. A visible, always-available pill in the chrome that opens the report dialog with the current state pre-filled.
Offline defect queue with retry. Reports made without a network are queued and delivered when you’re back online — nothing dropped.
Calm engine-error panel. When the analysis engine trips, you get a calm, plain-English explanation and a clear path forward, not a stack trace.

Settings & customization

One consistent place for every preference, and a shape that lets you add to it.

Universal gear. A single gear icon opens the settings surface for the whole app — no scattered menus.
Data-driven settings. Settings are defined by a schema, so panels stay consistent as new options land.
Custom cards. Advanced users can define their own settings cards for personal or team-specific configuration.
Per-machine persistence. Settings stay with your account on this machine — not synced silently to a cloud you didn’t opt into.

Values & terms

The rules of the road, in the plainest language we can manage.

Plain-language EULA in eleven points. The full license, in eleven readable points — not a wall of legal you scroll past.
“Your tool, not a way to police others.” PasadoDocs certifies your own work for your own purposes. It is not built to be used against other writers.
Never locks you out. The app doesn’t hold your documents hostage — your writing is yours, on your machine, exportable at any time.
Local by default. Nothing about your writing leaves your machine unless you decide to send it.

Glossary

The handful of names you’ll see on this page, defined once.

The Scribble: PasadoDocs’ revision history — a persistent, branching graph of every change a document has been through, kept in a .scribble sidecar file so you can browse it independently. Undo works across sessions, and forks preserve alternate paths so nothing you wrote is truly gone.
Transcript: A plain-English, running account of how a document came into being — every keystroke, paste, cut, and editorial mark, tallied and readable. The Transcript is stored on your machine and stays yours; it travels with a document only if you choose to include it when you share.
Core (AI Adjacency Core): A compiled set of “thumbprints” derived and compiled from the PasadoLabs AI analysis suite of originality tests. When you ask for an AI-adjacency reading on a passage, PasadoDocs compares that passage against the Core and shows you how close it reads to AI cadence — a mirror, hedged, never a verdict.
Personal authorship signature: The shape of how you write — the phrasings, rhythms, and revision habits the app learns from your own writing on your own machine. Your signature grows with you; the more you write, the more accurately PasadoDocs recognises your work as yours.
KSPM — keystrokes-per-minute: A real-time readout of how many keystrokes you’re making per minute — your typing tempo, separate from your composition tempo (which is what WPM measures). Useful when you want to see how the physical work of writing is going, not just the output.

Write with software that acts as your guardian by delivering visual cues into your creative process.

Join the free beta

Free beta for Windows (10 / 11, 64-bit) and macOS (Apple Silicon — M1 through M4; Intel universal coming in a follow-up).