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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Sub-scene drafts

When a scene has sub-scenes, you have two granularity choices for capturing a revision moment:

1. Snapshot the whole scene — New draft of this scene concatenates the scene's intro ## Draft body with each sub-scene's ## Draft body in dbench-order, preserving the boundary structure between units.
2. Snapshot one sub-scene — New draft of this sub-scene snapshots only that sub-scene's body. The other sub-scenes and the parent scene's intro prose are unaffected.

Both are valid; pick whichever matches the revision moment. If you're about to rewrite the relationship between three sub-scenes, take a whole-scene draft first. If you're polishing one sub-scene before moving on, take a sub-scene draft.

New draft of this sub-scene

Use New draft of this sub-scene via:

• The command palette (with a sub-scene note active).
• A sub-scene note's right-click context menu.

The plugin snapshots the sub-scene's current body into Drafts/<Sub-scene> - Draft N (YYYYMMDD).md with dbench-type: draft, dbench-sub-scene: [[<Sub-scene>]], and dbench-draft-number: N. Same shape as a scene draft, one structural level deeper.

Whole-scene drafts of hierarchical scenes

When New draft of this scene runs against a scene with sub-scenes, the snapshot body is a concatenation:

Scene introductory prose...

[[Loading the cart]] body...

[[The road-blessing]] body...

[[Rolling out]] body...

Each sub-scene's frontmatter is stripped. Planning sections (Source passages / Outline / Open questions) on the sub-scenes are preserved alongside the ## Draft content — same as the chapter-draft approach. The original scene note and its sub-scenes are unchanged; you continue working in them.

Coexistence with existing whole-scene drafts

If you set a child note as a sub-scene via Set as sub-scene and the parent scene already has whole-scene drafts from before the split, the retrofit surfaces a one-time notice:

"Wax And Iron" has 1 existing whole-scene draft. Future drafts of this scene can snapshot the whole scene or individual sub-scenes.

The existing whole-scene drafts are not touched — they remain valid historical snapshots of the scene before it was split. New drafts (after the split) can go either route per the granularity choice above. Old drafts and new drafts coexist in the same Drafts/ folder, distinguished by whether the draft carries dbench-scene or dbench-sub-scene.

When to use which:

• Whole-scene draft — preserve the entire scene state (intro + all sub-scenes) before a structural pass that might reorganize, merge, or split sub-scenes.
• Sub-scene draft — preserve one sub-scene before polishing it in isolation.
• Both — same logic as scene + chapter draft coexistence: each sub-scene maintains its own draft history alongside the scene's whole-scene history.

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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.