Sample-novel walkthrough
The Salt Ledger is the sample novel the starter builds: 24 pages, three characters (Kael, Vess, Immy), one arc, three beats, three leaves — every layer of Keel populated. This lesson touches every feature once, in the order you would really use them. Budget: twenty minutes.
1 · In: launch and sign in
At the login: password mvp, Enter. (Or F2 for dev
mode — the lesson works either way.)
2 · The Map — walk the spine
You land on view 1. The rail's tree shows the whole
spine with status glyphs; everything in the sample is ● canon. Press
j and k: the selection moves, the detail
box under the tree shows each node's card, and the center pane previews the
prose of the selected beat's first leaf.
The ⚠ frontier warning on the tree's border says beat 1.1.3 is the last one specified — the spine runs dry after it. A warning, never a block.
3 · Enter — write in a leaf
With a beat selected, press Enter. Keel checks the leaf out (you hold its lock now) and opens the editor — the thick cyan ✎ border. The keys are vim-lite:
| i / Esc | insert text / back to normal mode |
| h j k l · w b e | move by character, line, word |
| dd · cw · yy · p · u | delete line, change word, yank, paste, undo |
| ^s | save · the foot shows ●unsaved until you do |
| ^f | focus — dim everything but the current paragraph |
| ^e | hand the leaf to your own $EDITOR and reload |
Type a sentence. One sentence per line is the house style — Keel keeps diffs readable that way.
4 · ^m — markup
Press ^m. With no selection you get block directives — pick
break to drop a @break scene break. Select a few
words first (v in normal mode) and ^m offers inline directives instead:
think wraps the selection as @think{...}, interior
monologue the typesetter renders in italics.
5 · ^g — Davy
Type what you want, Enter — the draft streams in; a accepts
it into the leaf, r rejects. Nothing is ever written without
your accept, and accepted spans are logged (the foot's ✎% shows AI density).
Press ^; before generating to inspect the exact context the
DAVY sees — every section pinnable.
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY set in
your environment. Without it you get the honest refusal — "no AI
provider configured" — and everything else in Keel still works.6 · Out to the command line
Quit (^s then q) and stay in the series folder.
Every TUI feature has a command twin. Proofread your edited leaf:
The ✂ mark is per-revision — edit the leaf again and it returns to
unproofread, visibly, in keel status and at render time.
Explore the ledger the sample seeded:
7 · Amend a beat — the blast radius
The centerpiece. Change a canon beat's exit contract and watch Keel compute what that breaks:
Landing is refused while a ⛔ stands. Reconcile the successor into the changeset, then land — everything flips canon in one transaction, and the unreconciled ⚠ becomes tracked debt:
8 · Back in — worldline, review, the book
Relaunch (keel). Press 4: the review view
lists a-1 as landed. Press 7: the worldline lays the three
leaves on a horizontal line — c for reading order,
t for story time across the five eras, ←→ selects, Enter opens
a leaf. Then press F5: the whole book typesets to a
B-format PDF and opens. Finally, from the command line:
You have now touched everything
The spine and its gate, the editor, markup, Davy, proofreading, the ledger, an amendment with a real blast radius, the worldline, and the book itself. Where to go deeper: the writing workflow · the spine handbook · Davy · amendments & blast radius · the book pipeline.