What Scrin is
Scrin is a place to write something long — a novel, an essay, a screenplay, a run of articles — where the line you jot in a spare minute and the finished manuscript are the same file. You open a page that has no title yet, you write, and what you leave there stays in the project until it finds its chapter.
That is the entrance. What comes after it counts just as much: a first draft is not the end of the writing, and revising, finishing, and handing a text to someone else deserve the same care as the first line — and rooms of their own as Scrin grows.
We believe in the people doing this work more than in any tool built for them, this one included. That is exactly why it has to be good: so the attention goes to the text, not to the software under it. A tool like this stays quiet while you write and shows itself only when you step back to tidy.
Your text stays yours, in every format it was written in.
— 7 Hazart
Where the name comes from
A scrinium was a Roman cylindrical case for holding scrolls: papyrus rolls stood upright inside it, protected from damp and from being trodden on. The word travelled into Old English as scrin, a chest or coffer for something valuable, and from there into modern English as shrine — not a place of worship at first, just a chest built to keep something worth protecting.
We kept the older, plainer meaning. A box for the scrolls, before anyone decided the box was holy.
Also here: a few things we believe, The November Notebook, and the guides.