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Draft Bench

I want to work with drafts of a scene

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You’ve written a scene and you want to revise it without losing what’s there. A draft in Draft Bench is an archived snapshot of the scene’s current state, written to its own markdown file. The source scene note carries the prose forward; you keep revising, the snapshot stays put. By the end of this you’ll have created a draft of a scene, found it in the vault, and confirmed the source scene is ready for the next pass.

What you’ll need
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  • A Draft Bench project with at least one scene that has body content (a draft of an empty scene snapshots an empty file - works, but not useful).

Steps
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1. Snapshot the scene as a draft
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Open the scene you want to draft. Three ways to invoke the snapshot:

  • Command palette: Draft Bench: New draft of this scene.
  • The Manuscript view toolbar (when the scene is selected).
  • Right-click the scene note in the file explorer or Manuscript view -> New draft of this scene.

A confirmation modal previews the new draft’s path (typically Drafts/<Scene> - Draft N (YYYYMMDD).md - the exact path depends on your Drafts folder placement setting). Confirm.

Draft Bench:

  • Writes the new draft as a markdown file with the scene’s current body.
  • Stamps the draft’s frontmatter: dbench-type: draft, dbench-scene: [[<Scene>]], dbench-draft-number: N, dbench-created-at: YYYY-MM-DD.
  • Auto-numbers the draft (you never manage N manually).
  • Carries the prose forward in the source scene note; you continue revising there, not starting blank.

2. Verify the draft exists
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Open your file explorer (or run a search for the draft’s filename). The draft is a real markdown file at the configured path. You can:

  • Open it in a split pane to read alongside the revised scene.
  • Link to it via [[<Scene> - Draft N (YYYYMMDD)]] from anywhere.
  • Open it in another tool (it’s plain markdown with YAML frontmatter).

The source scene’s frontmatter now has reverse-link arrays - dbench-drafts and dbench-draft-ids - listing every draft that points at it. Open the scene note and you’ll see them in the properties panel.

3. Continue revising
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The scene body stayed in place; revise as you would normally. When you reach the next milestone worth archiving, run Draft Bench: New draft of this scene again. The new draft auto-numbers (Draft 2, Draft 3, …) and the reverse-link array on the scene grows.

Variations
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  • If you want drafts of a chapter (the chapter note as a whole, not its scenes): run Draft Bench: New draft of this chapter while the chapter note is open. The snapshot includes the chapter’s accumulated body. Same pattern as scene drafts - separate command, separate folder convention.

  • If you want drafts of a sub-scene: run Draft Bench: New draft of this sub-scene. Sub-scenes have their own draft history independent of the parent scene.

  • If your single-scene-shape project needs drafts: a single-scene project IS the scene; running New draft of this scene on the project note works the same way. (Created via the Single scene Shape option in the new-project modal - see start-a-writing-project.)

  • If you want drafts in a different location: change the Drafts folder placement setting (Settings -> Draft Bench). Three placements available: per-scene sibling folder (default), project-local (one Drafts/ under each project), or vault-wide root (one shared Drafts/ at the vault root). Future drafts honor the new placement; existing drafts stay where they were.

  • If you want a draft included or excluded from a compile: drafts can be referenced from compile presets the same as scenes. See compile-your-manuscript for how presets pick which files to include.

Related guides#

Reference
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  • Wiki: Drafts and versioning - full reference including chapter/sub-scene drafts, the auto-numbering rule, and the comparison vs Longform’s parallel-tree model.

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