Stop pasting your work into a chatbot.

Start More than an editor

Markelangelo looks like a beautiful markdown editor, and it is one. It also opens real Word documents and real spreadsheets. But what it really gives you is a sovereign writing workshop: a place to draft, interrogate and reshape documents with AI that works inside the page, on your own terms.

Everyone who writes serious documents does the same exhausting shuffle: draft in one window, paste into a chatbot in another, copy the answer back, re-fix the formatting, repeat. Markelangelo ends it. Your prompts become reusable tools that run inside your document and apply in place, and because they run on your own keys or a local model, your work never leaves your machine. See how the AI workshop works →

Why it's different

Who it's for

Writers, researchers, consultants, note-takers and developers who want a fast, focused editor and a real AI workshop, without surrendering their data to someone else's servers. If you value owning your words as much as writing them, this was built for you.

START Getting started

From download to your first saved document in just a few minutes.

Install & first launch

Markelangelo ships as an unsigned installer, so Windows SmartScreen may greet the first run with a warning. This is expected, the app simply isn't code-signed yet, not unsafe.

1. Run the downloaded installer. If SmartScreen appears, click More info, then Run anyway.
2. Let the installer finish, then launch Markelangelo. A one-time welcome tour introduces the essentials.

Staying up to date

Once installed, Markelangelo keeps itself current. It quietly checks for new versions, and when one is ready it offers to download and install it for you, so you are always on the latest without hunting for a new installer. The only thing it ever asks the internet is "is there a newer version?"; your documents are never part of that.

Create & open documents

1. Press Ctrl+N to create a fresh document and start writing straight away.
2. Press Ctrl+O to open an existing markdown file from anywhere on your disk.
3. Choose File ▸ Open Folder to open a whole workspace folder. This populates the file-tree sidebar and, importantly, powers wiki-links ([[note]]) and folder-wide search.

Save your work

1. Press Ctrl+S to save the current document. New documents will ask where to put the file the first time.
2. Prefer to never think about it? Enable autosave in settings and Markelangelo writes changes to disk for you as you go.

Everything you save is plain markdown, exactly where you put it, ready to back up, sync or version however you like.

The headline feature AI comments: argue with your own draft

The AI stops lecturing you from a side-panel. It pins its notes to the exact sentences they're about, right in the margin, like comments beside a Word document, and each one becomes a conversation you can have, and settle, without ever leaving the page.

From passive critique to an action you take

Ask a chatbot to critique your work and you get a wall of prose that you then have to map, by hand, back onto your own sentences. Markelangelo's review prompts (Devil's advocate, Evidence check and Clarity & concision) do that mapping for you. Each remark is anchored to the exact span it concerns, so you can see at a glance what needs attention, and precisely where.

Talk it through, then commit the winner

Click a comment and it opens into a thread, a focused conversation with the AI about that one passage. Push back, add context ("I actually have the Q1 pilot numbers"), ask for options. Together you shape a proposed revision, and when you're happy you resolve it in a single click:

How to run a review

1. Open the Comments panel from the dock rail (or the command palette).
2. Pick a lens: Devil's advocate, Evidence check or Clarity & concision.
3. The AI reads your document and drops anchored comments: passages light up and bubbles appear in the margin.
4. Open any thread to discuss, draft a revision, and resolve it: replace, insert, keep as a note, or promote to a note.

The big idea Your document is the workspace

Most apps bolt a chatbot onto a sidebar. Markelangelo does the opposite: the AI works on the document in front of you, in place, and the prompts you run are reusable tools you own.

The tab-hopping tax

You know the drill. Write in your document, copy a paragraph, switch to a chatbot tab, paste it, type the prompt, wait, copy the answer, switch back, paste it, re-fix the formatting the paste destroyed, then do it again for the next paragraph. Your best prompts live in a chat history you'll never find again, and every round trip sends your work to someone else's servers.

Markelangelo collapses that loop. Your prompts are saved, named, versioned and one keystroke away. You run them on a selection or the whole document; the result streams in beside your text, you see a word-level diff, and you apply it in place, or edit it first. Nothing gets copied out. Nothing gets pasted back.

Three things you do to a document

Select what you want to do something to, then do it

That is the whole design law. Select a passage and right-click, and the menu opens as two columns. The left keeps the familiar editing tools, formatting, synonyms, comment lenses, your saved prompts, Document Leaders and images. The right is a dedicated column of AI actions: Improve, Humanise, Shorten, Expand, Fix grammar, a Tone submenu, plus Translate and Ask AI. One selection, one menu, everything you can do to it.

The other ways in

• Type / → the AI group in the slash menu (Run prompt, Summarise, Generate outline, Translate, Chat with notes).
• Run Prompt (Ctrl+Shift+J) → your whole library of saved tools, with variables and a live token/cost estimate.
• Document Leaders → run a named prompt, persona and model as a single one-click tool on a selected idea, from its sidebar tab or the right-click menu. See Document Leaders.
• Chat with Notes (Ctrl+Shift+L) → ask questions across your whole indexed folder, with citations.

Use cases What you can actually do

These aren't hypotheticals. Every one below ships as a real prompt in your library, run it today, edit it, or fork it into your own. Real problems, real answers, all without leaving the page.

Draft from nothing

Business plan from a blank page. You know the pieces, market, model, financials, risks, but not where to start. Run Business plan and it scaffolds the whole structure into your document, with bullet prompts under every heading telling you exactly what to write. Then fill each section, using Challenge as you go to pressure-test your assumptions.

Any first draft. Draft takes a one-line brief, document type, topic, audience, and writes a structured first draft with clearly-marked [placeholders] where only you know the specifics. A blinking cursor becomes a working draft in ten seconds.

Interrogate what you've written

Reshape it for a new purpose

The board version. You wrote it for engineers; the board needs plain English. Select the passage, run Re-pitch with the audience set to "a non-technical executive", and it recasts tone, jargon and length, with a diff you approve before a word changes.

Meeting notes → decisions & owners. Messy notes in; a clean record out. Actions returns the decisions actually made and an Action · Owner · Due table, inventing nothing that isn't in the notes.

One click, from idea to finished piece

A post in a voice you choose. Jot the raw idea, select it, and click a Document Leader such as "LinkedIn: Contrarian" or "Article: Storyteller". A prompt, a persona and a model, bound into one tool, turn the line into a finished, on-voice draft right below it, no dialog, no settings. See Document Leaders.

A figure that matches the words. Select a passage and, from the right-click Image group, have the AI generate an illustration that fits, in your chosen house style, dropped straight into the page. See Images.

The thread running through every recipe: saved as a reusable tool · runs inside the document · applies in place · on your keys or a local model. No tab-hopping. No copy-paste. No lock-in.

Make it yours Prompts, personas & your own tools

The prompts we ship are a starting point. The real power is that every one is editable, and you can build a library of document tools tuned to exactly how you work, versioned, categorised and one keystroke away.

Anatomy of a prompt

A prompt is a reusable instruction with everything it needs bundled in. The editor gives you:

• Name & description — what it is and what it's for, in a line.
• Template — the instruction itself. Drop in {{selection}}, {{document}} or {{title}} and Markelangelo fills them from what you're working on.
• Variables — add your own slots such as {{audience}} or {{criteria}}. Each is either free text or a fixed set of choices, with a default, and you're asked for it at run time.
• Model — run this prompt on a specific model, or inherit the feature default.
• Persona — attach a default voice (below).
• Global message — a tick to append your standing instruction, or opt this prompt out.
• Respond as a comment — make the prompt post its answer as an anchored margin comment instead of an inline result, with its own pill colour. This is how the review lenses work. See AI comments.

Personas: reusable voices

A persona captures how a reply should sound, its voice, tone and structure, separately from what a prompt asks for. Each is just a name, a one-line description and an instruction that is added to the system prompt of any run that uses it (describe the manner of delivery, not the task). Write a "sceptical reviewer" or a "warm, plain-English editor" once, attach it to any prompt, or pick it at run time. Markelangelo ships a starter set, the Technical Writer, the Natural Writer, the Plain-English Editor, the Concise Minimalist and the Academic, to build from.

One instruction, everywhere

The switchable global message is a single instruction appended to every run. It ships enabled, set to "Return only the requested output, no preamble, no commentary", so you never have to repeat it. Edit it, turn it off, or opt any individual prompt out with its own tick.

Even the built-in actions are yours

The selection rewrites (Improve, Humanise, Shorten, Expand, Fix grammar), the five tones and the document actions (Summarise, Generate outline) are permanent tools, but the instruction behind each one is editable in Settings ▸ Quick Actions, with a Reset to restore the original. That same tab holds the minimum word counts that grey each action out until a selection is long enough to be worth it. See Your document is the workspace.

Fast access

Put your most-used tools on the Quick Action Bar, a row of one-click buttons (your own icon and colour each) carried in the editor's top toolbar, that run any prompt or command. Between that, nicknames on the right-click menu, the ✨ launcher and Run Prompt (Ctrl+Shift+J), your workshop is always a keystroke away.

Bundle a whole way of writing

When a prompt, a persona and a model always belong together, save them as a Document Leader: one named tool you run in a single click on a selected idea. It is the natural next step once your prompts and personas are in shape. See Document Leaders.

Make it yours Document Leaders

Your best prompts, married to a voice and a model, and run on a single idea with one click.

A prompt gives structure. A persona gives voice. A model does the thinking. A Document Leader is all three bound into one named tool, so a whole way of writing becomes a single click. Point one at an idea in your document and it produces the finished piece, in the right shape and the right voice, below the line you selected.

Structure, voice, and the marriage of the two

Run one in a click

Open the Document Leaders tab on the sidebar, select the idea you want written up, and click a Leader. The piece is generated and inserted directly beneath your selection. The same Leaders are on the right-click menu too, so you never have to leave the passage you are working on.

Markelangelo ships two ready-made packs, a generic Article engine and a LinkedIn engine, each with seven personas, so you have fourteen Leaders to try on day one, all running on a frontier model.

Build your own

Press New and a Leader takes shape from parts you already have:

• Name — how it reads on the sidebar, for example "LinkedIn: Wry".
• Engine prompt — the prompt that lays down the structure.
• Persona — the voice it speaks in.
• Model — a specific model, or the feature default.

A Leader is a pure join: it points at those pieces rather than copying them, so improving the underlying prompt or persona quietly improves every Leader that uses it. Edit or delete any Leader from the same tab (hover for the pencil).

WRITING Three worlds, one workshop

Markelangelo is not only a markdown editor. It opens real Word documents and real spreadsheets too, in the same window, with the same AI working inside all three.

Most days you write markdown. But work does not arrive as markdown: a client sends a .docx, an accountant sends an .xlsx, and until now that meant closing your editor and opening something else. Markelangelo opens them where you already are. We call the three Words, Rich Words and Numbers, and the status bar always names the one you are in.

Words

Plain markdown, the surface the rest of this manual describes. Your files stay ordinary .md text on your disk, readable by anything, for ever.

Rich Words

Open any .docx and you land in a proper word processor: a full ribbon, a ruler, real pages that break where Word breaks them, comments and tracked changes. It reads and writes genuine Word files, so what you send is what your client opens.

Numbers

Open an .xlsx and you get a real spreadsheet: formulas, formatting, multiple sheets, the lot. Copy a range here and paste it into a document and you are offered a live link, so the table in your report updates when the workbook does.

The AI works in all three

This is the part that matters. Every prompt, persona and tool you build works on all three worlds, not just markdown. Ask for a rewrite in a Word document and it arrives as a tracked change you can accept or reject. Ask a question of a spreadsheet and the answer lands in the cells, as one undoable step.

Prompts can also be told which worlds they belong to, so a prompt written for spreadsheets does not clutter the menu while you are writing prose.

Moving between them

A markdown document and a Word document can be kept as a pair. Rich Switch makes a .docx beside your .md; MD Switch does the reverse. Neither destroys the other: you end up with both files, sharing a name, and you choose which to work in.

WRITING The editor

A live, distraction-free writing surface where markdown formats itself as you type.

Markelangelo's editor renders your formatting inline, headings, emphasis and lists take shape the moment you write them, so you see the finished look without a separate preview pane. It's plain markdown underneath the whole time.

The ribbon

A ribbon sits across the top of every document, in the same place in all three worlds. Six tabs hold the work: Home for the clipboard, undo and redo, styles, the marks you reach for most (bold, italic, strikethrough, inline code), lists and find; Insert for pictures, tables, callouts, links, wiki-links and a table of contents; AI for everything you can ask of a selection, a prompt or the whole document; Page for paper, margins and running headers; Review for spelling and comments; and View for zoom, reading width and the focus modes.

Beside the tabs sit your quick actions, permanent labelled chips you arrange yourself, so the space above your writing does real work. Double-click any tab to fold the ribbon away and get the room back; click it again to bring it out.

Markdown shortcuts

Prefer to keep your hands on the keys? Type the familiar markdown and it becomes formatting instantly:

The slash menu

Press / on an empty line to open the slash menu, a searchable list of every block you can insert, from tables and code blocks to callouts and AI actions.

The right-click menu

Select any text and right-click for a two-column command centre: editing, synonyms, comment lenses, your prompts, Document Leaders and images on the left; a column of AI actions on the right. It is the fastest way to reshape a passage without lifting your hands from the work. See Your document is the workspace.

Rich blocks

Every block is draggable, hover to the left of any paragraph, list or heading to reveal a handle, then drag it to reorder your document. Beyond the basics, the editor handles the demanding stuff too:

WRITING Split view

See two documents at once, side by side or stacked, both fully live. Perfect for writing with your notes open, comparing drafts, or lifting material from one piece into another.

Right-click any tab and choose Split Right (or Split Down). That document opens in a second pane beside the one you're in, and both are real editors: type in either, and every AI tool, panel and shortcut works in whichever pane you're focused on.

Which pane am I in?

The focused pane carries a fine gold line along its top edge, and the other pane dims very slightly. Click anywhere in a pane to focus it. The outline, properties, statusbar, native menus and every AI action all follow the focused pane, so there's never any doubt about what "this document" means.

The split controls

The split pane has a slim title bar with four quiet controls:

• Synchronise scrolling, scroll one document and the other follows in proportion. Wonderful for comparing two drafts of the same piece.
• Flip the orientation, switch between side-by-side and stacked in one click.
• Swap the panes, exchange which document is where.
• Close the split, back to a single pane, keeping the document you're focused on.

Drag the divider between the panes to resize them; double-click it to snap back to an even split. Your layout, which documents, which way round, and the divider position, is restored next launch along with the rest of your session.

WRITING Proofread mode

Check the whole document at once, and fix every spelling slip in a few clicks, no right-clicking word by word.

If your spelling is creative at the best of times, correcting a document the usual way is tedious: right-click a red word, read the menu, pick the fix, and do it again, and again. Proofread mode turns that into a single sweep. Run it once and every misspelling in the document is marked at the same time, each with its likeliest corrections offered right beside it.

How it works

1. Run it from Edit ▸ Check Spelling or press F7. The whole document is scanned in one pass.
2. Each misspelling is marked in red, with up to three green suggestion pills beside it.
3. Click a pill to accept that correction, the word is replaced and the marks disappear. Click the small cross to keep your original spelling as it is.
4. Prefer to blitz the lot? A floating Correct all remaining bar fixes every word you have not already handled, using each one's top suggestion. Anything you corrected by hand is left untouched.

WRITING Callouts

Draw the eye to what matters with tidy, colour-coded boxes that travel with your file.

Callouts are highlighted panels for notes, tips, warnings and the like, perfect for guidance, caveats and anything a reader shouldn't skim past. Markelangelo gives you five flavours: Note, Tip, Important, Warning and Caution, each with its own colour and icon.

Two ways to make one

1. Press /, choose Callout, then pick the type you want, Note, Tip, Important, Warning or Caution.
2. Or simply type > [!WARNING] on its own line, press Enter, and write the body on the following lines.

Both routes produce the same result, so use whichever feels quicker in the flow of writing.

WRITING Collapsible headings

Fold long documents down to their outline so you can focus on the section in front of you.

Every heading in Markelangelo can be folded. Hover over a heading and a small chevron appears beside it; click the chevron to collapse everything beneath that heading, right up to the next heading of the same or a higher level. Click it again to expand the section back out.

It's a fast way to navigate a big document, collapse the parts you're done with, keep the section you're working on open, and the whole structure stays readable at a glance.

Great for long documents

The longer the document, the more this earns its keep. Working through a lengthy report or a sprawling set of notes becomes far less daunting when you can quietly tuck away everything except the part that needs you right now.

WRITING Images

Drop a picture in, or generate one from your words, and it's saved right beside your document. Everything stays on your disk.

Adding an existing image is as direct as it should be. You can:

1. Paste an image straight from your clipboard with Ctrl+V, handy for screenshots and copied graphics.
2. Drag an image file from your file manager and drop it into the editor where you want it.

Either way, Markelangelo saves the image into an assets/ folder sitting next to your document and inserts a reference to it at the cursor. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is hosted elsewhere, the picture lives locally, right alongside the words it belongs to.

Generate an image from your words

Need a figure that does not exist yet? The AI can make one, and drop it straight into the page. Select a passage and right-click into the Image group, where three routes wait, each following the same "select, then do" law as the rest of the app.

A style library in Settings decides the look, editorial photo, flat vector, watercolour, line art, isometric, or your own. Pick the active style once and every generated image comes out in that voice. Generation runs on your own OpenAI key; the finished picture is saved into the same local assets/ folder as everything else.

ORGANISE Outline & Properties

See your document's shape at a glance and edit its frontmatter as friendly, typed fields, no YAML wrangling required.

Two panels in the right dock help you keep a long document in order: the Outline shows its structure, and Properties gives you a tidy form for the metadata at the top of the file.

Outline

The Outline panel builds a live tree from your headings, nested exactly as they are in the document. It updates as you type, so it always reflects the current shape of your work. Click any heading to jump straight to it, handy for a report or a piece of documentation that runs to dozens of sections.

As you write, the section you're editing is highlighted in the tree, so you always know where you are in a long piece. Think of it as a table of contents you can navigate with, rather than just read.

Properties

Many markdown documents carry a block of frontmatter at the very top, a small slab of YAML holding the title, tags, a status and whatever else you like. The Properties panel turns that block into a friendly form: each entry becomes a typed field you can edit directly, without touching the raw syntax.

Properties come in the shapes you'd expect:

You can add a new property or remove one you no longer need, all from the panel. Everything you change is written back as ordinary YAML at the top of the file, nothing proprietary, nothing hidden. Open the same document in any other editor and the frontmatter reads exactly as you'd expect.

ORGANISE Wiki-links & Backlinks

Connect your notes into a living web of knowledge, link any document to any other with a pair of brackets, and see every connection flow both ways.

Wiki-links are the heart of turning a folder of markdown files into a knowledge base. Instead of hunting for the right file every time you want to reference it, you simply write its name in double brackets, [[note]], and Markelangelo weaves the connection for you. It's the fastest way we know to manage all your project documentation as one interlinked, navigable whole.

Writing a link

Type [[ anywhere in your document and an autocomplete list of every note in your workspace appears. Keep typing to filter it, then choose the note you want:

• Use the arrow keys to move through the list;
• press Enter to accept the highlighted note;
• or simply click the one you want.

Once a link is in place, click it to open that note. If the note doesn't exist yet, clicking the link creates it for you on the spot, so you can link forward to a document you haven't written, then fill it in later. Your ideas lead; the files follow.

Precise links

Two small flourishes make links do exactly what you mean:

In the editor, the brackets tuck themselves away so your prose reads cleanly, but they stay in the underlying file. That means your links are portable: open the same folder in Obsidian, or any other tool that speaks wiki-links, and everything still resolves.

Backlinks, the web, both ways

A link only tells half the story: it points outward. The Backlinks panel in the right dock tells you the other half, every note in your workspace that links to the document you're currently reading. Follow those threads and the whole shape of your project reveals itself: which ideas reference this one, where a topic is discussed, how it all hangs together. It's the difference between a pile of files and a genuine, navigable web of project documentation.

Try it

1. Open a workspace folder so Markelangelo can see all your notes.
2. In a document, type [[ and start typing the name of another note.
3. Pick the note from the autocomplete list to insert the link.
4. Click the link to open (or create) that note.
5. Open the Backlinks panel to see every note that links back to it.

ORGANISE The rails & panels

Every tool you need lives one click away down the edges, open a panel when you want it, tuck it away when you don't.

Markelangelo keeps its working tools on two slim icon rails, one down each edge of the window. The left rail switches the sidebar (files, search, recents, prompts, Document Leaders); the right rail is the dock, where self-contained panels open and close independently, so your writing surface stays as clear or as busy as you like.

What's in the dock

The rails

Each rail is a persistent strip of icons. Click one to open its panel or sidebar; click it again to close. Because the rail never goes away, a closed panel is always exactly one click from reappearing, no menus to dig through, no state to remember.

Pop out the labels

Icons are compact, but not always obvious at a glance. A chevron at the foot of each rail expands it to show the text name beside every icon, so you can read exactly what each one does. It works on both rails, left and right. When you want the labels to stay, click the pin beside the chevron and the rail keeps them open across restarts.

This keeps the interface out of your way when you're writing and instantly legible when you're not. Open just the Outline while drafting; add Backlinks when you're linking notes together; bring up the AI panel when you want a hand, then close them all and enjoy a clean canvas.

NAVIGATE Command Palette & Quick Actions

Reach any command, jump to any file, and fire your favourite prompts, all without leaving the keyboard.

Markelangelo is built to be driven fast. Whether you know exactly what you want or you're hunting for it by name, there's a keystroke that gets you there in a second.

The command palette

Press Ctrl+Shift+P to open the command palette: a searchable list of every command in the app. Start typing what you want to do, toggle a panel, switch a theme, run an export, enter Zen mode, and the list narrows as you go. Choose a result and it runs. It's the single fastest way to reach any corner of Markelangelo, and it means you never have to memorise a keyboard shortcut you use only now and then.

Go to file

When you know the document you want, press Ctrl+P for Go to file. Type a few characters of a file's name and a fuzzy search finds it across your workspace, no need to remember which folder it's in or type the name in full. Hit Enter to open it. In a big documentation set, this is how you move between notes in the blink of an eye.

The quick action bar

The quick action bar is a row of your own one-click buttons, carried in the editor's top toolbar beside the built-in formatting controls. Each button carries its own icon and colour, and runs whatever you assign to it, any prompt from your library or any command in the app. Build up a row of the actions you reach for most, and your day-to-day workflow becomes a single click.

CONTROL The Settings Shop

Nothing is hidden and nothing is hard-wired. Every behaviour, from autosave to the exact model behind each feature, is yours to set, in one place.

One home for everything

Open with Ctrl+, or File ▸ Settings. The Settings Shop is a full-width, non-modal workspace that leaves your document running underneath, so you can tune a prompt and see the effect without closing anything — and it now holds every preference in the app on a single rail.

Inside the Settings Shop

• General — session restore, autosave, the daily word goal.
• Appearance — themes and the Typography Studio.
• Language — spellcheck languages and your dictionary.
• Quick Actions — tune the built-in selection actions and build your Quick Action Bar.
• Privacy & Sovereignty — the stance switcher, and the home of your model choices: Seats holds the default model for every job in the app under the stance you are on.
• Model Management — every model with its attributes and capabilities, the templates, and what changed since you last looked. Read-only under a locked stance; yours to build under My Custom.
• Keys & connections — connect providers, manage keys, test them, and point at a local model. It holds no model list.
• Knowledge — the notes folder behind chat-with-notes.
• AI Images — image generation and the style library.
• Usage — a read-only view of spend and tokens (it sits at the foot of the rail).

General preferences

The General section holds the everyday behaviours:

APPEARANCE Themes & reading comfort

Shape the app around your eyes and your mood, pick a theme, tune the typography down to the character, and strip everything back when you just want to write.

Markelangelo is a place you'll spend hours, so it's built to feel right for you. Everything here lives in Settings ▸ Appearance (Ctrl+,), from the overall theme down to the width of a line of prose.

Themes

Turn on Follow system and Markelangelo tracks your operating system's light and dark preference automatically. Or choose one of three hand-tuned themes yourself:

The Typography Studio

The Typography Studio puts the finer details of your prose in your hands, with a live preview that updates as you drag. Start with a font pairing:

Then dial in the reading experience with four sliders and a toggle:

Small changes here make a real difference over a long session; a Reset typography button restores the defaults whenever you want a clean slate.

Focus, typewriter & Zen

When you want the world to fall away, three writing modes clear the decks:

• Focus mode (F10) dims everything except the paragraph you're working on.
• Typewriter scrolling keeps the caret centred on screen as you type, so your eye never chases the line down the page.
• Zen mode (F9) hides all the chrome, sidebar, tabs, toolbars, everything, leaving only your words. Press F9 again to bring it back.

Document zoom

Need the text a little larger or smaller for the moment? Zoom the document with Ctrl+= and Ctrl+- (or Ctrl and the scroll wheel), anywhere from 70% to 200%, and Ctrl+0 to snap back to 100%. It scales the document, not the chrome, handy for presenting on a big screen or squeezing more onto a small one.

CONTROL Language & spelling

Write in the language you think in, with a dictionary that learns your words and a thesaurus that never needs the internet.

Everything here lives in Settings ▸ Language (Ctrl+,). Markelangelo separates two kinds of spelling help: the live underline as you type, and a whole-document Proofread sweep. Both draw on the settings below.

Spellcheck languages

Choose up to five languages to check at once, so a bilingual document is underlined correctly throughout. British English is enabled by default and pinned to the top of the list; the full set on offer comes from your operating system, with names shown in plain form (British English, American English, and so on) beside their language code.

Your personal dictionary

Names, jargon and coinages that are not "wrong" just need adding once. Type them into your personal dictionary, or right-click any underlined word and choose Add to dictionary, and they stop being flagged everywhere, in every document.

The thesaurus

Reach for a better word without leaving the page. Synonym lookups use a WordNet-derived dataset of around 140,000 entries, bundled with the app and entirely offline. Open it from the right-click menu on a word, the Thesaurus dock panel, or the "Look Up Synonyms" command (Ctrl+Shift+Y).

Proofread: the bulk pass

When you want to fix a whole document at once rather than word by word, Proofread mode (F7) checks the lot in a single pass and offers one-click corrections. It runs against a bundled British-English dictionary on your own machine. See Proofread mode.

CONTROL AI providers & keys

There is no Markelangelo AI account and no middleman. You connect a provider you already pay for, or a model running on your own machine, and your keys stay encrypted on your disk.

Everything here lives in Settings ▸ Keys & connections (the palette door is Keys & Connections…). It holds the connections and the keys only: the models themselves live next door in Model Management, under the stance that governs them. Three built-in providers are ready to connect, and you can add your own.

The providers

The three built-in providers cannot be removed, only disabled. Any additional OpenAI-compatible endpoint can be added yourself.

Adding a key, safely

On a provider's card, choose Set key and paste your API key. It is encrypted with your operating system's secure storage (Keychain, DPAPI or libsecret) and stored on your machine only. It is never synced and never logged, and the app itself only ever holds the last four characters to show you; the full key stays in the vault and goes straight to the provider when you run a request. Each card also offers Replace key, Clear, and Test & refresh, which verifies the connection and pulls the provider's live list of models. Each card shows how long since that list was last refreshed, and once it has been a while a gentle prompt suggests refreshing, because model names are chosen by the providers and change over time, not by Markelangelo.

Or go fully local, no key at all

Prefer nothing to leave your machine? Run a model server locally and point Markelangelo at it. One-click presets set up Ollama (http://localhost:11434/v1) and LM Studio (http://localhost:1234/v1) for you; a local endpoint needs no key, no account and no bill. Install one, pull a model, and select it.

The model catalogue

Each provider carries a catalogue of models with an editable label, context window, maximum output and price per million tokens in and out. Built-in models can be relabelled and repriced; you can add models by id too. The pricing you set here is what drives the cost meter, so keeping it current keeps your Usage figures honest.

A model for every job

In the Defaults tab you choose the model behind each kind of work, so a quick tidy-up can run on something cheap and fast while long-form drafting reaches for a frontier model:

Any prompt or Document Leader can also override its own model, so the default is only ever a sensible starting point.

CONTROL & CONFIGURATION Markelangelo Labs

Experimental, opt-in features that lean on third-party tools. The first inhabitant: run Claude on your own subscription instead of an API key.

Claude on your Pro or Max subscription

If you already pay for a Claude subscription, Labs lets Markelangelo's text features run on it, no pay-as-you-go key needed. Three steps, all inside the app:

• Download the runtime. The Claude tool is large, so it's fetched only when you ask, and verified by checksum before it installs. Never use Labs? It costs you nothing.
• Sign in with your plan. Click Sign in, approve in your browser, paste the token back. It rides entirely on Anthropic's own sign-in flow.
• Turn it on. The app runs a quick test turn so you can see it working, and a small Max badge sits in the status bar whenever your subscription is doing the talking.

CONTROL Privacy & Sovereignty

One click decides how far your words are allowed to travel. Everything that follows, the models on offer, the defaults each feature uses, and every run in the app, already agrees with it.

Settings ▸ Privacy & Sovereignty is one room with one job: you pick a stance, and from that moment the app is already right. There is no second set of switches to keep in step, and nothing quietly steps outside your choice to be helpful.

A stance is not a flag on a setting. It is a list of models, worked out from live data: what OpenRouter publishes about its providers and their retention policies, what your own machine is running, and which of your own keys are set. Four of the five stances are locked, which means the list is the list. You choose your defaults from it, and you can neither add to it nor hide anything in it.

The five stances

Direct keys and an Anthropic Max subscription exist under My Custom and nowhere else. That is why there is no "run anyway" anywhere in the app, and nothing to consent to: under a locked stance there is no outside-the-stance run to permit. The only way out of a locked stance is to choose My Custom, which is a deliberate, visible act.

Seats: the whole app's model choices, on one panel

Under the cards sits Seats. A seat is the job a model does: Writing (prompts, quick actions, document actions, the Conversational writer, Map Expand, Build it), Quick (the Conversational interviewer, which needs structured answers), Vision (reads pictures and charts), Images (makes pictures), Knowledge index (the embeddings behind chat-with-notes) and Voice (dictation).

Every seat shows what it will use, and you change it from the served list. Nothing else is offered. Each stance keeps its own seat choices, so switching stance swaps the whole set and switching back restores exactly what you had. The active card carries a small pill that says switch on and go when every seat already has a compliant choice, and "2 seats need a choice" when they do not.

Model Management: your list, under My Custom

Settings ▸ Model Management is the models environment, straight after the stance that governs it. Under a locked stance it is read-only and says so: you are looking at every model that stance serves, with where your text goes, what each can do, its price per million tokens, its context window, its health and its lifecycle. Under My Custom it becomes yours to build.

• The filters narrow and never widen: Where your text goes, what a model Can do, and Other (price, health, lifecycle), with a search box for names, vendors and providers.
• Templates switch on a curated list in one click: Best available, EU balanced, Zero retention, Direct keys. Mine is not a template, it is the set of models you switched on by hand.
• Every row is marked with why it is on. yours means you switched it on, and we will never switch it off for you. template means a template put it there. kept means something of yours still points at it, so it stays.
• The watch bar across the top is what changed since you last looked.

One model selector, everywhere

Wherever a model is chosen it is the same picker: the Run Prompt override, a prompt's own model and its two Conversational seats, a Leader's model, a Flow node, Retry on another model, the seat defaults on the stance page, and the repair on a stopped run.

• The trigger reads "{model} · {attribute}", so the closed state already tells you where the text goes.
• The lock bar says what the list is and why: "EU Only · showing the 12 models served by EU-based providers that writing can use. Nothing else is offered."
• The filters only narrow. A locked stance cannot be widened from a picker.
• The rows are rich: what the model is, where your text would go, what it can do, what it costs, and whether we have tested it.
• The footer takes you to the right room: Privacy & Sovereignty under a locked stance, Model Management under My Custom.

A model you pinned that your stance does not serve is shown on the trigger in gild, marked not served, rather than hidden. Hiding it would be the silent substitution this whole design exists to end.

The model chip: where this run will go

Beside every control that fires a run sits a small model chip naming the model and its attribute: "Mistral Large · EU-based · Mistral (FR)", or "Claude Opus 5 · Direct to Anthropic". A run on your Anthropic Max subscription says "Direct to Anthropic (your Max subscription)".

The chip asks the same resolver the run itself will ask, so it cannot claim a model or a route the run did not take. When the seat cannot be served, the chip turns gild and carries the sentence in its tooltip. In dense lists and menus it shrinks to an icon and the words move to the tooltip, so every option in a list still tells you where it would go before you pick it.

When a run cannot go ahead: the stopped door

If the model a run would use is not served, the run stops. It is never swapped for something else, and you are never asked to make an exception. The sentence is always the same shape and always ends the same way:

"Nothing was sent" is the point: you never have to wonder whether the words went anywhere while the app worked out that they should not have. The other reasons speak just as plainly: a model that has vanished from the stance's list, one that has reached its end date, one whose providers are down or degraded, one that cannot do the job, a provider you switched off, or a missing key.

There are three ways out, and no fourth: pick a served model from the picker in the door (which runs this one thing and leaves everything else alone), switch stance (or "Choose a model", or "Add a key", whichever the reason calls for), or Not now. Where the run was fired from a panel rather than a button, the same sentence and the same three doors appear under the control you pressed, not behind a dialog covering the thing you are trying to repair.

The watcher: what changed since you last looked

Model lists move. Providers move country, endpoints go dark, models are retired, better ones arrive. A background watcher reads OpenRouter's lists daily and turns what changed into sentences, in our words rather than an event log.

1. New. A model has arrived. It is offered, never switched on.
2. Gone. A model is no longer served. If something of yours pointed at it, it is switched off, every seat that named it waits for a choice, and nothing is substituted.
3. Expiring. A model has an end date, or has just reached one.
4. Dark. The providers serving a model are down or degraded, so it is "not answering right now", never "gone". Nothing of yours changes while it is dark.
5. Re-characterised. What a model is has changed: it gained or lost a zero-retention endpoint, its capabilities changed, or its provider now publishes a different headquarters, which is what EU Only reads.
6. Your override touched. A model you switched on yourself has just changed. Your switch is exactly where you left it, and the choice is put back to you.
7. Newer in family. A newer member of the same family has arrived, is served under your stance, and can do everything the one you use can do.

That last one is the family line, one line beneath the picker wherever a model is pinned. It informs and never moves. Try it changes this one control and nothing else. Switch everywhere shows every place the old model is chosen, lets you tick the ones to move, and repoints them in one go, so nobody is left half-upgraded; it only ever offers seats your stance would still serve afterwards. Not now is remembered for that pair and never asked again.

Everything the watcher raises collects in the watch bar at the top of Model Management: only what you have not seen, each row a sentence you can act on, with Open the log for the whole history and Mark all seen to empty it. The loudest row, the one about a model something of yours points at, is also raised as an alarm on the stance card and the Seats panel, where the choice was made.

How OpenRouter and its partners apply this

1. Every provider is labelled. OpenRouter publishes each downstream provider's headquarters, its data-retention policy and whether it may train on what you send.
2. Markelangelo attaches the controls to each request. Depending on the stance it sets a zero-data-retention flag, a "do not collect this data" directive, and, for EU Only, an allow-list of EU-headquartered providers.
3. OpenRouter routes only to providers that comply. Its routing engine narrows the candidates to those that satisfy the controls and passes the data-handling directives along with the request. If none can meet them, the request is refused rather than quietly sent to a weaker provider.
4. The commitment is the provider's. The actual promise (no retention, no training, EU residency) is made by each downstream provider under the terms OpenRouter publishes and applies. OpenRouter is the gatekeeper; the providers are the parties bound by it.

So Markelangelo states the constraint, OpenRouter applies it against its partner providers, and you can read the detail in OpenRouter's own sovereign-AI documentation. Totally Local needs none of this: there is no network call to route.

CONTROL Usage & Budget

Every AI run is metered the moment it happens, so you always know exactly what your workshop is costing you, broken down by model and by feature.

Markelangelo records each run: the model, the feature, the tokens in and out, and the estimated cost from the pricing in your model catalogue. It all stays on your machine. You can read it two ways: the Usage dock panel for a quick glance while you work, and the Usage & Budget settings tab for the fuller picture.

What it shows

Choose a time range, Session (since you opened the app), Today, Week (the last seven days) or All, and see the total cost, the number of runs, and tokens in and out. Two tables break it down: by model and by feature (quick actions, prompt runs, document actions, chat, semantic index, image generation), so you can see at a glance where your spend is really going.

A monthly budget, as a guide not a gate

Set a monthly budget in US dollars and the Usage panel tracks your month-to-date spend against it, turning amber past 80% and red past 100%. It is a soft ceiling: a gentle signal, never a wall. Runs are never blocked, whatever the meter says. Set it to 0 to switch the budget off entirely.

MANAGE History & export

A safety net under every save, and clean documents to hand out, however your reader wants them.

History

Markelangelo keeps local snapshots of each file so you can always step back. A snapshot is taken on save, before an AI change is applied, and whenever you ask for one by hand. Open the history for a file to diff any snapshot against the current version and restore it in a click, all stored locally, nothing sent anywhere.

Export, print & copy

When a document is ready to leave the app, there is a route for every destination, all from File:

Whatever you hand over looks finished, embedded images and all, while your source stays plain markdown on disk.

REFERENCE Keyboard shortcuts

The handful of keys that get you around Markelangelo without lifting your hands from the keyboard.

COVENANT Your work, your machine

Markelangelo is built on a simple promise: your files are yours, and nothing leaves your machine unless you ask.

This isn't a setting you switch on, it's how the app is made. The editor, and all local or bring-your-own-key work, stays account-free, telemetry-free and sovereign. There is no sign-up, no login, no phone-home, no analytics quietly watching what you type.

The covenant

Why it matters

If you live in your documentation, the writers, researchers, engineers and note-keepers who spend their days inside their words, this is the difference between a tool you rent and a tool you own. Your ideas, drafts and half-formed thoughts are some of the most personal things you make. They deserve a home that treats them as yours alone.