A Writing App Where the Draft Stays Yours

• A folder per book, a page per chapter, titled so search finds them: “12 — The ferry”.
• Pages for people and places. Write [[Marguerite]] in a chapter and Dash links it to the note of that name, so the character’s history is one click from the scene.
• Tags across the folder: draft, cut, check, continuity. A tag pulls every affected chapter into one list when you change something structural.
• A cuts page. Nothing gets deleted, it gets moved. Sentences you loved are easier to lose when you know where they went.
• Focus mode clears the sidebar so it is you and the page, in whichever of the four themes suits the hour.

A first draft is a private conversation with yourself. Knowing it sits on a server, readable by a company and subject to whatever the terms say next year, changes what you are willing to write. That is a real cost to the work, not just a principle.

In Dash the draft is a file on your machine. Lock the chapters you would not want read over your shoulder and they are AES-256-GCM ciphertext, opened with your password or Touch ID. Lock the whole app and it seals itself when you leave the desk. If you turn on sync so the manuscript follows you to the phone, it is encrypted before it leaves the device.

Several writing apps now feed drafts to cloud models, with consent buried in the terms. Dash has no cloud AI at all. The assistant, if you want one, connects to a model running on your own computer, so a request to tighten a paragraph never leaves the machine. With sync off, the app makes no network requests for your content.

Export a page or a folder as Markdown for another writing tool, DOCX for an editor who works in Word, or PDF for a reader. For backups, an encrypted .dashpack file holds the whole project and opens only with your password. Nothing about Dash traps the work inside it.