Writing & People

Everything in Ember flows from writing. Type the day as it happened, mention the people in it, and the connections build themselves — no forms, no fields to fill in.

The editor

Ember's editor is plain and calm, with light Markdown-style formatting. Write headings, lists, and quotes as you would anywhere. You can attach photos, and embed a song from the Apple Music catalog to mark a moment.

Scale just the writing area with ⌘= / ⌘−, and reset with ⌘0 — this changes the editor only, not the rest of the app. To scale the whole interface, see Themes & Appearance.

Screenshot: the Ember editor with a mention and a photo
Plain text, your voice, the people woven in.

Mentioning people with @

Type @ and start a name. Ember suggests matching people (including nicknames); pick one, or create a new person without leaving the entry. Once mentioned, the entry belongs to that person forever — it appears on their page automatically.

Mentions are a helper, not a resolver. Ember matches the name and nickname you type; it never guesses who you “really” meant or connects people on your behalf.

Tags, worlds, and stories inline

While writing, you can reference more than people:

  • @name — a person
  • #tag — a tag to group entries by theme
  • ~world — the world a moment belongs to
  • &story — a story to continue across time

These are covered in depth in Worlds, Stories & Tags.

Logging an interaction

Sometimes you want to remember a moment without writing a full entry — a call, a dinner, a long walk. Press ⌘L to quick-log an interaction: pick the people, the medium (call, text, in person…), and add an optional note.

Interactions count as contact, so they keep a relationship feeling tended (see Feed, Nudge & the Graph). Ember is not a CRM, though — log only what you want to remember.

A person's page

Open anyone to see everything you've ever written about them: journal entries, shared stories, logged interactions, and the details you've added — nicknames, birthday, how you met, the worlds they live in. It's the handprint beside a handprint — a life with someone, in one place.

Screenshot: a person's page — timeline, details, worlds
Years of moments, gathered around one person.