Parts and chapters

Your thinking reads like a book. Every chapter belongs to one part, and each part has a title, a short summary of what it covers, and its chapters in order. The front page lists them all.

Cranes arranges, you adjust

You never file anything. Cranes places each new chapter in the part it fits best, and from time to time reorganizes the parts as your thinking grows. You can then:

• rename a part,
• move a chapter to another part,
• pin a part or chapter to put it first,
• archive what you don’t want in the book.

Your choices win. Later reorganizing keeps a part you named, with its name, and leaves a chapter where you put it. See Pin, rename, and move.

You can’t create, split, merge, or delete parts yourself. Parts come from the chapters in them, so they follow what you’ve actually been thinking about.

New chapters

A chapter that doesn’t fit any part yet waits under New chapters. It finds a home the next time Cranes reorganizes. Once your book has parts, that happens at most once a day, and only when three or more chapters are waiting or a part has grown past twelve chapters.

You can’t move a chapter into New chapters, but you can move one out of it at any time.

Reorganizing is gentle

Cranes tries to keep what already works. A part keeps its identity through renames and splits, a single reorganization moves at most a quarter of the chapters already in parts, and a part’s title only changes when what it covers has changed. You shouldn’t open Cranes one morning and find the book unrecognizable.

Counts on the front page

The line under the title counts your chapters, parts, moments (the passages chapters rest on), and threads. Archived chapters aren’t counted, and neither is New chapters as a part.