Getting Started

Your First Workspace

Every world starts somewhere. For yours, it starts with a workspace — the container for everything you build in Inklings. Pages, characters, locations, magic systems, timelines — they all live inside a workspace. One workspace per project, one project per world.

This tutorial walks you through creating a workspace, writing your first page, and connecting it to a second page with a wiki-link. By the end, you’ll have the foundation of a world that can grow as large as your imagination allows.

Launch Inklings

When you open Inklings for the first time, you’re greeted with a persona selector. Three cards appear: Knowledge Builder, Writer, and Game Designer. Pick whichever resonates — this customizes your onboarding tour, not your features. Every persona gets the full toolkit.

Select a persona and click Continue. A short three-step tour highlights the key landmarks:

A welcome message tailored to your persona
The + New Page button in the sidebar (you’ll use this constantly)
The page tree where your world takes shape

Click Next through each step, or hit Skip if you’d rather explore on your own. The tour only appears once — after this, Inklings opens directly to your workspace.

Create your workspace

After the tour, you’ll see the workspace creation screen. Two fields: a name and a folder path.

The name is what appears in the sidebar header. Call it something you’ll recognize — “The Shattered Spire” for a campaign setting, “Thornwall Trilogy” for a novel project, or “Worldbuilding Sandbox” if you’re experimenting.

The folder path is where Inklings stores your workspace database. The default path works for most people. If you want to organize your worlds into a specific folder, change it here.

Type your workspace name and click the create button. The sidebar updates to show your workspace name, and the editor area opens — ready for content.

Create your first page

The sidebar has a + New Page button. Click it.

Sidebar Button
Keyboard

Click the + New Page button at the top of the sidebar. A new entry appears in the page tree with an editable title field.

Press Cmd+N (macOS) to create a new page directly.

Type a title. For this tutorial, let’s create a character page: Magistrate Thorne.

Press Enter. The page appears in the sidebar, and the editor opens with your title at the top and one empty block below it, ready for writing.

Every page in Inklings starts with exactly one empty block. Think of blocks as paragraphs — you type in one, and pressing Enter creates the next. The editor auto-saves your work as you type, so there’s no save button to hunt for.

Write some content

Click into the editor body (below the title) and start writing. Here’s something to get you started:

Magistrate Thorne governs the eastern district of Thornwall Keep from a converted watchtower. She’s known for two things: an encyclopedic memory for legal precedent, and an unsettling habit of knowing what you did last Thursday.

As you type, notice that Inklings saves continuously. Navigate away and come back — your text is still there. Content is stored locally on your machine in a workspace file, not in some cloud service that might go down during your creative flow.

Format your text

Inklings supports the formatting you’d expect from a modern editor. Select some text and apply formatting:

What you want	Keyboard shortcut	What happens
Bold	`Cmd+B`	Selected text becomes bold
Italic	`Cmd+I`	Selected text becomes italic
~~Strikethrough~~	`Cmd+Shift+S`	Selected text gets a strikethrough
`Code`	`Cmd+E`	Selected text becomes inline code
Heading	`Cmd+Alt+1` through `3`	Current block becomes H1, H2, or H3
Bullet list	`Cmd+Shift+8`	Current block becomes a bullet list item
Numbered list	`Cmd+Shift+7`	Current block becomes a numbered list item
Blockquote	`Cmd+Shift+B`	Current block becomes a blockquote

Try bolding “Magistrate Thorne” in your text. Select the name, press Cmd+B, and the text weight changes. Undo with Cmd+Z if you change your mind — undo history persists even if you close and reopen the page.

Connect your pages

Here’s where Inklings earns its name. Create a second page — click + New Page again and title it Thornwall Keep.

Now go back to your Magistrate Thorne page (click it in the sidebar). In the text where you mentioned Thornwall Keep, you’re going to create a wiki-link.

Type [[ — two opening square brackets. An autocomplete dropdown appears showing your pages. Select Thornwall Keep from the list (or keep typing the name until it narrows down). The link appears as a styled inline element in your text.

Click the link. Inklings navigates you to the Thornwall Keep page. That page now knows about Magistrate Thorne too — open the backlinks panel (in the page detail sidebar) and you’ll see the connection listed there.

This is the core of Inklings: pages that know about each other. You don’t maintain a separate relationship map. You write naturally, link as you go, and the web of connections builds itself.

Your sidebar now shows two pages: Magistrate Thorne and Thornwall Keep. As your world grows, this tree becomes your primary navigation tool.

A few things to know about the sidebar:

Click any page to navigate to it
Right-click for options like creating subpages, deleting, or moving
Expand/collapse parent pages with the disclosure arrow
Pages with children show a tree structure — nest locations under a “Geography” page, characters under “Cast,” chapters under “Part One”

The sidebar reflects your world’s structure. You choose how to organize it.

What you’ve built

In under ten minutes, you’ve:

Created a workspace for your project
Written your first page with formatted content
Linked two pages together with a wiki-link
Discovered backlinks that track connections automatically

Your world has two pages and one connection. That’s a start. From here, the connections multiply — every wiki-link, every nested page, every tag you apply adds another thread to the web. The next tutorial shows you how to organize a larger world with hierarchy, types, and tags.