Drafts And Versioning

Drafts and Versioning

Draft Bench treats drafts as first-class files. A "new draft" operation captures a snapshot of the work-in-progress at a moment in time, preserves it as its own markdown file, and lets you continue revising in the source note.

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What a draft is

A draft is an archived snapshot at a moment in time. Drafts are real markdown files — openable in split panes, linkable via wikilinks, queryable via Bases.

V1 supports three target types — scene, chapter, and single-scene project — chosen by which "new draft" command you run. All three share the same Drafts/ folder; their frontmatter parent ref tells the plugin (and you) which one each draft belongs to.

What a draft is not

A draft is not a parallel version of the entire manuscript. If you're coming from Longform, note:

• Longform's drafts are parallel trees of the whole project ("First Draft," "Second Draft").
• Draft Bench's drafts are per-scene, per-chapter, or per-single-scene-project snapshots.

Full-manuscript parallel versions are planned as a separate feature under Revision Snapshots (post-V1). See the specification.

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Scene drafts

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Use New draft of this scene via:

• The command palette.
• The Manuscript view's toolbar.
• The scene's right-click context menu.

When invoked, the plugin:

1. Snapshots the scene note's current body into Drafts/<Scene> - Draft N (YYYYMMDD).md with dbench-type: draft, dbench-scene: [[<Scene>]], and dbench-draft-number: N.
2. Carries the prose forward in the scene note — you continue revising, not starting blank.
3. Auto-numbers the draft; you never manage N manually.

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Chapter drafts

Use New draft of this chapter via:

• The command palette (with a chapter note active).
• The Manuscript view's chapter card — each card has a "New draft" icon button on its right edge.
• A chapter note's right-click context menu.

A chapter draft is a snapshot of the chapter as a whole — the chapter body plus each child scene's body, concatenated in dbench-order with HTML-comment scene boundaries between sections:

Chapter introductory prose...

<!-- scene: First scene title -->

First scene body...

<!-- scene: Second scene title -->

Second scene body...

Frontmatter is stripped from each piece, but planning sections (Source passages / Beat outline / Open questions) are preserved on every file. The chapter draft captures the state of the work — both the prose and the planning thoughts — rather than a polished frozen artifact. (For polished output, use the Manuscript Builder compile pipeline.)

The chapter note and each scene note are unchanged after a chapter draft is taken — you continue revising them as the working draft.

When to use which:

• Scene draft — preserve the state of one scene before a major revision pass on that scene.
• Chapter draft — preserve the state of an entire chapter (including all its scenes and the chapter-level planning) before a major restructuring pass that touches multiple scenes.
• Both — there's no conflict. A scene's draft history and its parent chapter's draft history live alongside each other in the same Drafts/ folder, distinguished by whether the draft carries dbench-scene or dbench-chapter.

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Single-scene project drafts

For single-scene projects (flash fiction, poems), New draft snapshots the project note's body, like a scene draft but with the project as parent. The draft's frontmatter has dbench-project but no scene or chapter ref.

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Drafts folder placement

Three options in settings:

• Inside each project (default): Drafts/ subfolder inside the project folder.
• Per-scene subfolder: each scene's (or chapter's) drafts in a sibling folder named <Source>: Drafts/.
• Vault-wide: a single Drafts/ folder at the vault root, with filenames disambiguated by project name.

See Settings and Configuration.

Working with prior drafts

Prior drafts are ordinary files. You can:

• Open them in split panes for side-by-side comparison with the current working draft.
• Link to them via wikilinks from notes, feedback docs, or research files.
• Query them with Bases using dbench-type: draft plus the relevant parent ref (dbench-scene, dbench-chapter, or dbench-project).
• Style them distinctively via .dbench-draft CSS class: by default they render with a subtle archival visual cue to avoid editing-archive-by-mistake.

Retrofit: converting existing draft files

If you already have draft files from a previous workflow, use Set as draft from the context menu. The plugin stamps the required frontmatter. See Context Menu Actions.