Your questions, answered

What does Preview mean?

Wildhay is in Preview, which means the foundations are settled but a good deal of the surface is still shifting week to week.

You may notice that things you saw in the old Workshop builds are missing here. That is deliberate — we would rather get the core right before widening it again. Nothing has been thrown out; most of it is waiting for a better place to live.

Where does my writing live?

Wildhay is local first. Every page, shelf, and clipping sits in a plain folder on your own disk. You can open that folder, copy it to a drive, or delete parts of it without asking us.

Anything pulled in from the open web opens inside a walled reader.

When you ask for a summary or a rewrite, only the passage you highlighted leaves the machine, and it goes to a service we run ourselves. You can point Wildhay at your own key instead, or hand the work to a model running on your hardware.

Is Wildhay a reader? A “smart reader”?

Readers are built for taking things in.

Wildhay borrows from the commonplace book instead. We wanted somewhere to gather, argue with, and reshape the things you read, using the page itself as raw material rather than as a destination.

Most “smart readers” keep the old reading job and bolt an assistant onto the side of it: skim for me, click for me, answer for me. We are not convinced that is the interesting half of the problem.

Parts of Wildhay lean on language models, but talking to a machine is not the goal here — it is one tool on a crowded bench.

Why is Wildhay a desktop app and not a website?

Wildhay ships as a desktop app.

A tab is a decent place to read and a poor place to keep things. We wanted plain local files, drafts that survive a flight with no signal, real panes you can tile beside each other, and keyboard handling that a page inside a tab is never allowed to ask for. Building on a shared cross-platform shell means a single codebase covers all three desktop systems, and the parts that decide whether reading feels good — text layout, hyphenation, typography, printing — are handled by a rendering engine that has had twenty years of work poured into it. We are not going to out-write that on our own.

It also lets four people keep pace with a moving web instead of trailing a year behind it. We think the tools people read with are overdue for a rethink, and that the rethinking should not be reserved for teams with a thousand engineers on payroll. Measured that way, a heavy shell looks like a very sensible trade.

Why does Preview feel different from Workshop?

Workshop was a pile of experiments — nested canvases, side panels, voice capture, a “go anywhere” mode nobody could quite explain. Preview is a rebuild on a fresh foundation, tuned for speed and for staying out of your way. That does mean a handful of Workshop features are absent for now. The ones that earned their keep will return in a shape that suits the new design.

Will the features I miss come back?

Most of them. Shelf sharing, the annotation layer, and quick clipping are all on the plan for this year. A few had to be parked while we rewrote the core, but we know how much they meant to the people who opened them every morning. Preview is a floor, not a ceiling.