The editor

This is the room you'll live in. Almost everything you do in Galley happens on this one screen, so this page covers every corner of it. The whole page is built on a single idea: the thing you type on should already look like the printed book, from the very first sentence.

The editor: sidebar of chapters on the left, the book page in the middle, one document bar across the top.

Writing on a real page

Most writing apps hand you one long, edge-to-edge strip of white and call it a document. Galley shows you a book page at the exact trim you picked (a 6×9 paperback, say), set in a real book typeface, with the correct margins. First lines sit flush left, the paragraphs after them indent, exactly the way a printed novel does. There's no separate "layout" step later, because what you're looking at is the layout. Change the typeface, the text size, or the trim from the toolbar, or set them for good over in Book design.

The toolbar, control by control

The controls sit in two places, and each one has a job. Formatting runs along a centred bar above the page. Everything about the state of your work sits on a status bar at the foot of the window, out of the way of the sentence you're writing.

Formatting bar Typeface ⌄ Body Title Scene Header B i U S x² x₂ ❝ ☰ 1. ▦
Status bar (foot) Chapter 4 1,240 words about 6 pages Saved

Find & replace and the command palette both live up in the book's own navigation bar, because both are about going and looking for something rather than changing what is on the page.

Typeface
A dropdown of the 15 book faces, split into Recommended and More faces. This sets the face you write in; the face the book prints in is the same setting, saved per book in Book design.
Text size
14 16 18 , the on-screen size only, for your comfort. It does not affect the printed font size.
Trim size
The page dimensions, from mass-market up to Royal. Changing it here saves to the book immediately, so the page reflows to the real size. Hidden on smaller screens.
Zoom
− 100% + , zoom the page in or out. Click the percentage to snap back to 100%. Purely visual.
Save status
A dot plus a word: a pulsing dot and Saving…, a green dot and Saved, or a grey dot and Unsaved. You'll almost always see Saved. More on this below.
Word count
Live words for the current chapter, on the status bar beside the chapter's name.
About N pages
Roughly how many printed pages this chapter runs to at your trim size, updating as you type. The PDF sets the real count.
Page theme
Flip the page between cream and dark. ⌘⇧L. Doesn't change how the book prints.
Find & replace
Opens find and replace for the whole book. ⌘F. Lives in the navigation bar beside ⌘K. See Revision tools.
Comments
Opens the comments panel on the right: margin notes to yourself, which you can resolve.
Stats
Opens the stats panel: word counts, reading time, and pacing for the chapter and the book.
Version history
Opens the history panel: earlier snapshots of this chapter, ready to compare and restore.
Typewriter scroll
Keeps the line you're typing parked in the middle of the screen instead of drifting to the bottom.
Focus mode
Hides everything but the page. ⌘⇧F. Esc brings the room back.

Block styles: Body, Title, Scene, Header

Select a line, or just put your cursor in one, and a small style switch appears so you can say what that line is:

BodyTitleSceneHeader

Body
Normal manuscript prose. This is almost everything you write, and it's the default, so most of the time you never touch this switch.
Title
The chapter's title line (an H1). Every chapter has one already; you rarely add another. How it's typeset (centered, numbered, all-caps, and so on) is decided once for the book by your chapter opening style, not here.
Scene
A scene heading (an H2), for the occasional titled or dated section inside a chapter. Most novels don't need it. If you just want a blank pause between scenes, use a scene break instead.
Header
A plain sub-heading (an H3), ranged left rather than centered. Non-fiction and memoir use it constantly. It's also the right choice inside a long back-matter page, like a set of author's notes.

Formatting

Select any text and a small bar appears over it. The formatting sits along the top of that menu, above the options for tagging a character or adding a glossary term. The same controls live in the toolbar if you'd rather keep your hands up there.

B i U S “ ”
Bold
⌘B, used sparingly in fiction, but there when you need it.
Italics
⌘I, emphasis, titles, a remembered voice. The workhorse.
Underline
⌘U, rare in books, included for completeness.
Strikethrough
⌘⇧S, or type ~~like this~~. For a deliberate crossing-out you want the reader to see. If you're cutting a passage you might want back later, use Cuttings in the selection menu instead, which takes it off the page and keeps it retrievable.
Highlight
A working mark for yourself. It does not print.
Superscript and subscript
For H₂O and the occasional 1st. Footnote numbers are handled by references and don't need this.
Block quote
An indented passage, for an epigraph or a quoted letter.

Italics disappear from that bar when your book is set in a typeface that has no italic, which is true of every non-Latin face on the shelf. See writing in another language.

There are still no colours and no fonts-within-fonts. If you're reaching for those, it usually belongs in Book design, where it applies to the whole book consistently.

Line breaks inside a paragraph

Press ⇧Return to end a line without starting a new paragraph. The next line begins hard against the margin with no indent and no gap above it. That's what you want for verse, an address, a telegram, song lyrics, or the sign-off on a letter. Plain Return starts a new paragraph and gives you the indent.

Lists and tables

The three buttons after the mark group insert a bulleted list, a numbered list and a table. You can also start a list by typing - or 1. at the beginning of a line.

A numbered list counts in your book's own digits. An Urdu book counts ۱ ۲ ۳, a Hindi book १ २ ३, and an Arabic book ١ ٢ ٣. You don't set this; it follows the book's language.

Tables are there for the books that need one: a memoir with a chronology, a non-fiction chapter with a small comparison. A table keeps its shape in the ebook, in Word and on the printed page, and a table in a right-to-left book runs its columns right to left. A table won't split across two printed pages, so keep them short enough to fit one.

Seeing the invisible characters

Under the type menu there's a switch called Invisibles, and ⌘⇧8 does the same thing without leaving the page, which is the key Word has used for its paragraph marks for years. Turn it on and Galley marks every space, line break and paragraph end on the page, so you can find the double space, the stray break, the trailing whitespace. It's a proofreading view. It adds nothing to your book and nothing to the export, and it turns itself off the moment you switch it off.

What it marks follows your language. In Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hindi and Bengali the zero-width joiners are part of how words are spelled, so they get their own mark rather than being flagged as debris. In a language that never uses them, the same character is debris and is flagged in red. Thai, Japanese and Chinese aren't offered the space mark at all, because those languages don't put spaces between words.

Scene breaks

A scene break is the small visual pause between two scenes in the same chapter, often shown as * * *. To make one, type three dashes (---) on their own line and press return. It becomes a properly centered break. What it looks like in the finished book (asterisks, a small ornament, a thin rule, or just a gap) is a single setting you choose once for the whole book in Book design. You keep typing --- every time; Galley renders it however you set it.

Mentions: @ for characters, # for places

Type @ and a short menu of your characters appears; keep typing to filter, press return to drop the name in. Type # for the same thing with locations. It's the fastest way to never misspell "Siobhán" again, and it does something useful underneath: every mention is a real link back to that character or place, which keeps your story bible tied to the manuscript and lets ⌘K search find every scene a character appears in. Mentions are just your normal text in the exported book. Nothing about them shows up in the final file. If a name isn't in the list yet, you can create the character or place right from the menu.

💡 Mentions are opt-in per keystroke. The @ and # only trigger the menu at the start of a word, so an email address or a hashtag in dialogue won't set them off.

Focus mode

When you want 0 distractions, press ⌘⇧F, or click Focus . The sidebar, the toolbar, all of it slides away, leaving just you and the page. Your word count keeps a discreet spot at the edge so you're never guessing. Esc brings the room back.

Typewriter scroll

Toggle Typewriter and the line you're writing stays parked in the middle of the screen rather than creeping toward the bottom as you go. It sounds like a small thing. Over a three-hour session it's easier on your eyes and neck. Pairs well with focus mode.

Light page or dark page

The room around the page stays dark and calm, but the page itself can be cream or dark, independently. Flip it with Page theme or ⌘⇧L. Write on warm paper in the afternoon, switch to a dark page at midnight so the screen isn't glaring back at you. It changes nothing about how the book prints.

Accent themes

The room has one accent colour, and you pick it: Papaya, Pineapple, Pineberry, Plum, Pomegranate or Watermelon. It tints the buttons, the links and the small marks of the interface, and nothing else. It never reaches your prose and it never reaches the book, so the accent you write under has no effect on what prints.

Open the Accent section of the menu and pick one. It is remembered on that browser and follows you around the app.

Saving, autosave, and version history

There is no save button to remember, and you never have to think about it. Galley saves as you type, saves again the instant you move to another chapter, and honours ⌘S if pressing it makes you feel better. The status bar's save dot tells you where things stand at any moment.

Underneath, it also keeps past versions of every chapter: a snapshot each day, plus one whenever you take a manual snapshot, change a chapter's stage, or make a sweeping change like a book-wide find and replace. Open the History panel to see them.

  • Compare any old version against your current text. The words you added and removed are highlighted inline, so you can see exactly what changed.
  • Restore a version if you rewrote a scene and wish you hadn't.
  • Milestone snapshots are kept for good. A chapter keeps up to fifty snapshots; past that, only the routine daily ones are thinned, so the list stays useful instead of endless.
The version history panel, comparing an earlier draft against the current text with additions and deletions highlighted.
🛟 It is hard to lose work here. Between constant saving, daily snapshots, and a bin that holds deleted chapters for 30 days, your writing has several nets under it. If a save ever fails, Galley tells you instead of pretending it worked. The full picture is in Your data & privacy.