Why plain markdown?
6 May 2026
Waxcap™ saves your book as plain text files. Writing a novel can take years, and you may put it down and come back to it more than once, so we wanted your writing to be easy to open whenever you need it.
What a markdown file is
A markdown file (.md) is a plain text file. Open one in TextEdit and you'll see the words exactly as they were typed. The only thing separating it from a .txt file is a small set of conventions: an asterisk either side of a word marks it italic, and a # at the start of a line marks a heading. A reader can ignore the conventions and still read the words, while an app that understands them shows them as styled text.
Pretty much any text editor on any computer can open one. What you can type into a Waxcap document is covered in Formatting in the editor.
What's in a project
A Waxcap project is a folder on your Mac. Every document in it, from a chapter to a character's notes, is a markdown file inside that folder, and a small file alongside them records how they're arranged in the sidebar. Waxcap keeps that up to date as you work. The files are named by the app rather than after your chapters, but the words inside are exactly what you wrote.
With iCloud Drive switched on, your projects are in iCloud Drive in Finder, in a folder called Waxcap. Because a project is an ordinary folder, Time Machine backs it up and iCloud Drive syncs it like anything else on your Mac.
When you want a whole project as a single file, to keep on an external drive or to open on another Mac, choose File ▸ Export… and then Save a complete project archive. You get a .waxcap file, which is a standard zip with the same plain text inside.