Write your first entry

Press New entry and start typing. That’s genuinely all there is to it.

There’s no title field to fill in first, no mood to pick, no tags to choose. The first line becomes the title on its own, so just write the sentence you came to write.

It saves itself

You’ll never look for a save button. Dayspring writes as you go, and a small indicator tells you where things stand.

It also works offline. On a plane, on the underground, out of signal — keep writing. It’s stored on your device and syncs the moment you’re back. You can close the app mid-sentence and nothing is lost.

Type / when you want more than words

On a new line, type / and a menu opens. It’s how you put anything on the page that isn’t plain prose — a passage of scripture, a prayer, a photo, a heading, a list.

There are 17 of them. Type a few letters to filter: /scr gets you scripture, /pray a prayer.

The full list is on the slash menu page, but you don’t need to learn it. Open the menu and read.

Formatting

Select any text and a small bar appears with bold, italic, highlight and the rest. Or use the shortcuts you already know — ⌘B, ⌘I.

Dayspring stores your writing as Markdown, but it hides the symbols. When you bold a word, you see a bold word — not **asterisks**. The characters are there in the file, just not in your face. More on formatting.

Writing about a different day

Wrote something on Tuesday about Sunday? Open the entry’s menu and choose Change date. The entry moves to where it belongs, and everything that reads your journal back to you — the Ascent, the Lamp — reads it in the right place.

What happens next

Nothing you have to do. As entries accumulate, the other surfaces begin to have something to show: the Lamp lights up the parts of scripture you’ve been living in, the Altar gathers what you’ve prayed about, and the Ascent starts showing you the shape of a week, then a month.

A handful of entries is enough for those to become interesting. You don’t have to write every day, and nothing scolds you if you don’t.