The interface

kilna’s window is a frame around one working surface. The frame does not change as you move: the title bar across the top, a sidebar on the left, and the current screen filling the rest.

The window itself never scrolls. Each screen is handed the height that is left and stops at the bottom edge; what is longer than that scrolls inside its own box — the catalogue’s table, the calendar’s queue, the text of a version — and the frame around it stays put. A desktop window has a bottom edge, and a page that runs past it the way a web page does hides the fact that there is more.

The window opens on a splash — the mark, the name, the version — for the moment it takes to open the workspace, and it comes back the size and place it was closed at: maximised if it was maximised, 1200×1200 if it was that.

The sidebar lists the screens: Dashboard (what needs deciding today), Catalogue (every work there is — add, search, filter, and open one), Calendar (the queue and the taken slots), and under Library the things kept beside the works — Notes (ideas, phrases, references), Canon (the world the works share), Register (what the works have spent), Comments, Styles, History (what has happened, newest first) and Trash (everything you deleted, and the way back). Settings (data in and out, the profile editor) stands at the foot.

There is one list of works, not two. Until v0.21 a Works screen carried a second list beside the open card; it said the same things as the catalogue and made you choose which to look in.

An entry may be a door that is not built yet — Collections is one. It sits in the sidebar with a small version chip naming the release that delivers it, so the map of what is coming lives in the app itself rather than in a changelog.

The footer holds the theme switch, the language switch, the profile picker, and Settings.

The sidebar folds to icons. The handle at the left end of the title bar switches it between the full menu (216px) and a column of icons (52px): the words, the version chips and the profile picker go, the Library caption becomes a thin rule, and each icon names its screen on hover. The choice is kept on this machine rather than in the profile — how much room the menu takes is a habit of the person at this screen, not a fact of the craft. Settings is sections under their own addresses — General, The work card, Profile, Data, Agents — and The work card is where you choose which tab a work opens on: Overview by default, Versions or Score if that is where you live.

The title bar

There is one bar rather than a system one over an application one, as in scheda. From left to right: the menu handle, the mark and the version, where you are (the screen, or Catalogue › the work), the search box in the middle, the count of works, the New button, the assistant, the bell, and the window’s own buttons. The screens do not repeat their own name under it: the trail already says where you are. On a narrow window the name and version beside the mark and the count of works step aside and the trail shortens; the window’s buttons never leave. Everything that is not a control drags the window; a double-click maximises it.

New adds a work: with one kind of work in the profile it asks for a title straight away, with several it lists the kinds first. The catalogue used to carry a title box for this at its top; the button reaches from any screen.

Search takes Ctrl+K from anywhere and looks through titles, drafts, notes and assistant replies at once — see Finding things. The bell is lit only by entries that need a look — never by the ordinary record of you adding a work or saving a version, because a bell lit by everything is a bell nobody reads. Pressing it opens the last few entries in place, the ones that need a look first, with See all leading to History.

The whole shell answers to the keyboard: G then a letter jumps between screens, Alt+← walks back the way a browser does, and ? shows the list from wherever you are — see Keyboard.

One more thing floats over every screen: the assistant button in the bottom corner, with a badge while runs are in flight. It opens a drawer with every chat of the profile — see The assistant.

Themes

kilna is a studio tool, so it is dark by default — more precisely, it follows your system’s theme until you say otherwise. The theme button cycles through system, light and dark; the choice is remembered across launches and applies before the first paint, so the window never flashes the wrong color.

Language

kilna speaks English and Russian. The footer button cycles through system, English and Русский; like the theme, the choice is remembered and applied before the first paint.

System follows your OS: kilna takes the first of your preferred languages it has a translation for, matching on the language rather than the region — ru-RU and ru-BY both get Russian.

What is translated is the interface, not your vocabulary. Statuses, kinds, roles, scoring axes and meta fields come from your profile, which is data you own and can edit — so switching the interface to Russian does not rename Draft to Черновик. Rename it yourself in Settings and it stays renamed, in every language. The alternative — translating your profile on the fly — would overwrite whatever wording you had chosen.

There is no fallback between languages. A message missing from one locale fails the build rather than appearing in the other one, because a screen half in English is the kind of bug nobody reports and everybody notices.

Screens are URLs

Every screen has an address, and the open work is part of it: /works/abc123 is that work, opened, and /works/abc123/score is its Score tab. The back button walks your actual history — including between tabs of the same card — and anything that can hold a link, a note, a chat message, a journal entry, can point at a tab directly.

A work’s card

Opening a work gives you a card with a cover, a header and its tabs — Overview, Versions, Scenes, Cut, Score, Releases, Files, Links, Notes, Assistant, History; Scenes and Cut only where the work has them.

The cover is a gradient derived from the work’s id. It is not decoration you chose; it is there so one card is distinguishable from another before you have read a word, and it stays the same for as long as the work exists. Real covers replace it later. The way back to the catalogue sits on it — the one part of the card carrying nothing else.

The header stands still. The cover, the work’s name, its status, its tier and score, the profile’s own fields and the tabs stay where they are, and the open tab takes the rest of the window and scrolls inside itself — a long version otherwise leaves you reading with no idea whose words they are. The name comes first and the craft’s numbers under it: BPM and key are reference you consult, not what you identify the card by. The fields there are read-only, and long ones are cut short with the whole value a hover away — you edit them on Overview, because a header you can type into is a header that shifts under the cursor while it saves. The row of craft fields is off unless you ask for it — Settings has the switch, under The work card — because a row of eight truncated values is a poor way to read fields Overview lays out in full. Turning it off hides the row and nothing else: the values stay, Overview still edits them, exports still carry them.

The name has its own row of things done to it. The pencil turns the heading into a box of the same height — Enter saves, Escape cancels, leaving the box saves — so the header does not move while you rename. Next to it: copy the title, the id (click it to copy), the star — come back to this one — and the dial: how finished the work is, as you judge it. The star is not a status and not a mark; the catalogue has a chip that shows only the starred.

The dial opens a row of stops — Idea, Rough take, … Finished — and clicking one sets it. The same dial appears in the catalogue’s own column, on a calendar chip and on the dashboard, so how far along something is reads the same everywhere. An empty ring means nobody has judged it yet, which is not the same as judging it a bare idea; clicking the stop it already stands on, or Backspace, takes it back to unjudged. The stops are your profile’s (stages); a work that shipped was set to finished when the workspace gained the dial.

Under the name: marks and tags. Marks are the flags your profile offers — Working on it, Not sure, The good one — each with its glyph and colour, raised and lowered with a click. Tags are your own words for what the work is; the box completes from what the workspace already says, so a vocabulary converges instead of scattering into near-misses. Neither moves the work: the status above is worked out from what happened, and these are what only you know.

The menu at the end of the row copies a link to the card, makes a work of another kind from this one — a video from a song — and deletes the work, which goes to the trash with an undo.

A review sits beside what it reviews. If your profile has a role that comments on another — Music ships two, a read against the axes and a critique of the lines — the Versions tab opens the text on the left and what was written about that revision on the right, one tab per kind. Reading criticism away from the lines it discusses is reading half of it. On the Score tab, the revision beside a score is a link to exactly that: the draft that was judged, with its review already open.

The trail at the top names where you are: Catalogue › Harbour lights, with the first part a link back.

The tabs:

Tab	What is there
Overview	The title, status, kind, the fields your profile defines, and its AI actions
Versions	Every draft, by role, the editor, and comparison
Score	The axes, and what this work has scored before
Releases	What ships, where and when — with a count on the tab
Notes	Notes attached to this work
Assistant	The AI panel for this work — see The assistant
History	Everything that happened to it

Only the open tab is loaded. Opening a card no longer fetches every version, score, release, note and chat a work has ever had.

Drafts belong to their role, and survive a closed window. Text typed under one role stays under it, switching back returns what you were writing, and closing kilna does not lose it. See Writing a version.

When something happens

kilna tells you what it did, and stays out of the way when there is nothing to say.

Saving. Most fields save when you leave them — there is no Save button to hunt for. A small Saving… / Saved marker appears next to the field while that is happening, then fades. If a save fails, the field goes back to what it held before, and a message explains why: nothing is left looking saved when it is not.

Messages. Completed actions announce themselves briefly in the bottom right — a work added, a slot claimed, something deleted. They disappear on their own. A message never asks you a question; anything that needs an answer is a dialog you can cancel.

Dialogs. A dialog opens with the cursor in its first field, so you can start typing without reaching for the mouse. However much it holds, its buttons stay at the bottom edge and only the part in between scrolls. Once you have typed into it, a click beside it no longer closes it and throws the text away; Esc and Cancel still do, because those you mean. An action that is not an answer to the dialog — deleting the thing it edits — stands apart at the left of the buttons, away from Save.

The same event is also written to History, from the same wording: the message is what you are told now, the entry is what you can find later.

Deleting never asks. A deletion says what went and offers Undo in the same message. kilna does not put a confirmation in front of it, because a confirmation costs a click every single time to guard against the rare mistake, while an undo costs a click only when the mistake actually happened — and what you deleted is in the Trash either way, long after the message is gone.

When something goes wrong. Failures are written as sentences about your work, not as the database’s own words. “That is not here any more — it was probably deleted in another view” is the whole message; the technical detail stays out of your way unless a screen crashes outright, and then it is folded behind Technical detail for a bug report.

When a screen breaks. A screen that stops working is replaced by a small panel with a Try again button. The rest of the window keeps running, and moving to another screen clears it — one broken screen never takes the app with it.

While loading. Lists and cards show a grey outline of what is arriving rather than an empty box or a spinner. A screen with nothing in it yet says what it is for and offers the one thing worth doing there.

The loop underneath

The frame serves the same five steps everywhere: a work gains versions, a version earns a score, a score wins a calendar slot, and the slot ends in a release you mark by hand. See The loop for why each step exists.