Calliope
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The app

Ambience — a living writing backdrop

Calliope can give your writing surface a quiet, living backdrop that reacts as you write. It's subtle by design and completely optional — off unless you turn it on.

The Appearance menu with the ambience options and an intensity dial

Ambience lives in the editor's Appearance menu, alongside paper tone and light/dark theme.

On this page

Distraction-free writing has always been calm — but the page never gave anything back for the act of writing. Ambience makes the ground behind your prose react, slowly and subtly, to writing itself: a peripheral reward you notice when you look up, never a thing you sit and watch. It’s the opposite of a gamified dashboard, and it’s off by default.

Choosing an ambience

Ambience lives in the editor’s Appearance menu — the small palette control in the top bar (and in the ⋯ action sheet on a phone), alongside your paper tone and light/dark theme.

  1. In the editor’s top bar, click Appearance.
  2. Under Ambience, pick one of the options below.
  3. Set the Intensity — Subtle, Balanced, or Bold. Balanced is the default, calibrated to read as quiet.

The four ambiences

  • None (default) — a still page, distraction-free exactly as before.
  • Constellation — a faint star appears for every sentence you finish; nearby stars link into a slowly growing constellation across the sky around your prose.
  • Aurora — barely-there, soft-blurred bands of light that deepen the longer you stay in a writing session.
  • Progress — a soft grid that fills from the floor up as you approach your daily word goal.

Each one is a frozen preset — a curated look, not a box of effects to tune. The single Intensity dial is the only knob.

What to expect

  • It’s off by default and entirely optional — nothing appears unless you choose it.
  • It’s a per-device preference, saved in your browser like your paper theme and light/dark choice. It isn’t synced across devices and isn’t tied to a particular book.
  • It’s subtle on purpose: it lives at the edges and in the ambient light, moves over seconds and minutes, and never chases your cursor or flashes for attention.
  • It works whether you’re signed in or writing anonymously.

Progress needs a daily goal. If no daily word goal is set on the book, the Progress ambience has nothing to fill — set one on the Goals & targets page (the Appearance menu shows a small hint in that case).