What a book really is
Every book in Quillard can live as a .quill file — an ordinary file you can see in a folder, copy to a stick, back up like a photograph. Press ⌘S and this is what happens: the book is saved to a file you choose, and from then on that file is the book.
This matters more than it sounds. There is no account holding your novel, no server that owns it, no company between you and your words. If Quillard vanished tomorrow, your files would still open — they are yours in the oldest, plainest sense.
Your words live in files you can read, on disks you own.
Meet the sync button
In the toolbar sits a small pair of arrows — the sync button. It is quiet by design. A small dot appears when this book has changes the file hasn’t seen yet; the dot turns urgent when the file has changes you haven’t seen.
Beside it lives the pause button, and it means exactly what it says: while paused, nothing leaves this computer. Not a word, not a keystroke, nothing. It is not a setting buried in a menu — it is right there, because being able to stop is part of trusting the machine.
Lose your internet mid-sentence? Nothing happens. Quillard keeps saving locally, marks itself offline, and picks sync back up when the connection returns. Writing never waits for wifi.
Pairing your machines
Open File → Config → Sync → Computers. On your first machine, click Show a pairing code. On the second, click I have a code and type it in. That’s the whole ceremony — once per computer, any number of machines, nothing else to install.
On the same network, your books travel straight between your machines — desk to laptop, no cloud in between. For a computer far away, give it your address and a pairing code; a small relay passes the parcels along.
And about that relay: every parcel is sealed on your machine before it leaves, with a key only your paired computers hold. The relay carries sealed envelopes it cannot open. Nobody between your two machines — not the relay, not anyone — can read a word.
Sending and receiving
When you’ve written something, press ⌘⌥S — or click the sync button — and your changes go to the file, and on to your other machine. A soft chime tells you the moment they land (you can choose the sound, or silence, in Config).
Receiving is where Quillard differs from every cloud tool: nothing ever overwrites your book silently. When the file has changed — your other machine, your editor, anyone — the sync button offers Review. The incoming changes arrive as tracked changes, marked and attributed, for you to read and accept like suggestions from a colleague. You are always the last word on your own book.
Sync that asks first. Nothing is ever applied behind your back.
When something goes wrong
Both machines edited the same book while apart? Nothing is lost. The next sync shows both sets of changes in review, side by side as tracked edits — you keep what you want, and the rejected line is still in the change history if you regret it.
Nervous about a sync? Press pause first. Look at the sync sheet (the sync button shows every book’s state: in sync, not yet synced, changes waiting). Nothing moves until you say so.
And the deepest safety of all: the file. At any moment you can copy the .quill file somewhere safe, open it in any Quillard, and the whole book — words, comments, history — comes with it. The safety net is not a feature of the sync; it is the file itself.