About the developer

A researcher who writes for a living, and built the tool he wanted to write with.

Folio Writer is made by bbchen, a researcher whose work is academic writing: papers, proposals, reviews, reports — the long documents that take months and have to be right. For years he wrote most of them in Scrivener, whose binder he still thinks is the right way to hold a long draft. His own love is plain-text Markdown — but a scholarly manuscript needs what Markdown alone doesn’t give you: citations and a bibliography, numbered figures and tables, cross-references, equations, a journal’s LaTeX class. Folio Writer is the tool he wanted: Scrivener’s way of organising a draft, a Markdown editor’s calm, on plain files you own, with pandoc, LaTeX and Typst doing the typesetting and the citing.

It sits among tools he uses daily and is grateful for: Zotero for the library, Obsidian and iA Writer for Markdown, Scrivener for the binder, Notability and a reMarkable for reading and notes by hand. Folio Writer borrows from them openly and is meant to work beside them, not replace them.

He thinks of himself as Folio Writer’s architect more than its programmer. He is fluent in SwiftUI and Python, and he works with AI to write the code — which has sped the work up enormously. The design is his: what Folio Writer should do, how it should feel, and the reading, testing and shipping of every feature.

It is not a one-person project. There is one person at the keyboard — plus a calico cat who supervises from the nearest high surface — but Folio Writer has been shaped by its writers. Hana handles testing, the website, and customer support, making sure the app works well, reaches the researchers who need it, and their questions and ideas get through.

Many thanks to everyone who has written in with encouragement, bug reports and the suggestions that keep turning into features: their excitement is contagious, and their comments have been essential to how the app has grown. Keep them coming. If Folio Writer gets in your way, or there is something it should do and doesn’t, write in — the replies come from the person who wrote the code, or from Hana, who tests the app and manages support.