Writer — overview

What this accomplishes

Draft long-form work in Miton: rich-text editor, citations, export, and memory that learns your preferences. Overview and links to task guides.

Writer is where you draft long-form text. You get a rich-text editor, citation system, export pipeline, and cross-session memory that learns your preferences — without the agent writing in your voice for you.

This page is the overview. Task guides below cover each tool. See also /for-writers.

Current availability

This page documents behaviour verified in Miton development builds. Miton is still pre-release and is not publicly downloadable; invited beta users will receive a signed desktop build with automatic updates.

Before you start

• A Miton development build, an active project and Writer open.
• A connected model; keep the source material or existing document in the same project.

What Writer does

Writer is for people who think in paragraphs and want a partner that suggests, summarises, and cites. You can:

• Draft in a real editor — the page is the document; words appear in the document, not only in a sidebar.
• Insert citations as footnotes or endnotes — BibTeX import; APA 7th, MLA 9th, Chicago, and Harvard styles.
• Export to PDF, DOCX, Markdown, or HTML — PDF keeps tables and footnotes; DOCX today covers headings, lists, and paragraphs.
• Let memory track stylistic preferences across sessions from accepts and rejects.
• Review every suggestion as a tracked change you accept or reject.

How Writer fits with the other lenses

Miton shares one agent engine across Chat, Writer, Canvas, Code, and Automation:

• Code — code editor, search, sub-agents, per-turn rewind.
• Canvas — visual canvas, design tokens, forms, local data.
• Automation — workflow graph, scheduler, webhooks, run inspector.

They share memory, model routing, permissions, and undo. An article drafted in Writer can feed a Code session; an Automation workflow can call Writer to generate a draft.

Default tools

Writer exposes two dedicated agent tools: document_read (list documents, or read one by id or title) and document_write (save markdown content to a document). Citing, outlining, summarising, and rewriting happen through the editor’s own UI and the shared chat tools rather than document-specific tool calls.

Document starters

Writer ships with eighteen starters, each with outline, draft, and checklist:

Blog post, meeting notes, research brief, board update, project retrospective, speech notes, newsletter, RFC, research summary, product spec, changelog, tutorial, resume, short story, cover letter, essay, letter and manuscript.

Novel, book, chapter and manuscript requests route to the manuscript starter. Fork another starter into your project or create a custom one.

Pages in this section

• Document editor — editor, slash menu, tracked changes, outline panel, word count bar.
• Citation system — database, BibTeX import, styles, bibliography.
• Export to PDF and DOCX — the four export formats and their current limits.
• Document starters — starters, fork flow, custom starter.
• Outline mode — outline panel and section-by-section drafting.

Shared topics live in the Docs index. Engineering detail lives in ../../architecture/.

What success looks like

Draft long-form work in Miton: rich-text editor, citations, export, and memory that learns your preferences. Overview and links to task guides. The result remains attached to the active project when you move to another workspace.

Common failures and recovery

• Confirm the intended document and project are active.
• Keep the original text when reviewing a model-proposed change.
• Check the model connection and retry only the failed action, not the complete document.

Related next action

Open the Document editor and continue with a real project document.