Drafts 5: The MacStories Review

There are few apps I’ve ever used which made a lasting impact on my daily workflow. But for years now, the singular app that’s been the foundation of my iOS use has been Drafts. The app has lived in my dock since I first picked it up, it’s the single most important app I use on the platform, and it’s the only paid app I mandate to anyone looking for must-have apps on iOS.

Drafts is the bedrock app from which I build all my productivity. It’s the single point of text entry that shares to any app, whether through the share sheet, a simple action, or a custom and complex action. Any time I have an idea, I put it in Drafts. Tasks to add to my task manager? I do that from Drafts. Something I want to write about on my blog? That idea starts in Drafts too. It’s the focal point for everything I do.

But times change. Apps age. New features are added in the OS that need to be integrated, which cause some developers to pull the plug. So today, I’m saying goodbye to Drafts 4. And it’s getting replaced by the only app that could possibly replace it: Drafts 5.

Table of Contents

What Is Drafts?

A New Look

Focus Mode

Syntax Highlighting

Capture Anything, Anywhere

Siri

Share Extension

Apple Watch

URL Schemes

Migration Tools

Managing and Organizing Your Drafts

Tags

Workspaces

Taking Action

Action Directory

Drag and Drop with Actions

Action Groups

Extended Row

The Power of Scripting

Prompts

APIs

App Integrations

Callback URL Scripts

Automation Possibilities

Drafts as a Modular Interface

Action Scripting

Writing

Journaling

GTD

Actions and Groups

Actions

Action Groups

Wrap-Up

What Is Drafts?

A New Look

Focus Mode

Syntax Highlighting

Capture Anything, Anywhere

Siri

Share Extension

Apple Watch

URL Schemes

Migration Tools

Managing and Organizing Your Drafts

Tags

Workspaces

Taking Action

Action Directory

Drag and Drop with Actions

Action Groups

Extended Row

The Power of Scripting

Prompts

APIs

App Integrations

Callback URL Scripts

Automation Possibilities

Drafts as a Modular Interface

Action Scripting

Writing

Journaling

GTD

Actions and Groups

Actions

Action Groups

Wrap-Up

What Is Drafts?

A New Look

Focus Mode

Syntax Highlighting

Capture Anything, Anywhere

Siri

Share Extension

Apple Watch

URL Schemes

Migration Tools

Managing and Organizing Your Drafts

Tags

Workspaces

Taking Action

Action Directory

Drag and Drop with Actions

Action Groups

Extended Row

The Power of Scripting

Prompts

APIs

App Integrations

Callback URL Scripts

Automation Possibilities

Drafts as a Modular Interface

Action Scripting

Writing

Journaling

GTD

Actions and Groups

Actions

Action Groups

Wrap-Up

What Is Drafts?

A New Look

Focus Mode

Syntax Highlighting

Capture Anything, Anywhere

Siri

Share Extension

Apple Watch

URL Schemes

Migration Tools

Managing and Organizing Your Drafts

Tags

Workspaces

Taking Action

Action Directory

Drag and Drop with Actions

Action Groups

Extended Row

The Power of Scripting

Prompts

APIs

App Integrations

Callback URL Scripts

Automation Possibilities

Drafts as a Modular Interface

Action Scripting

Writing

Journaling

GTD

Actions and Groups

Actions

Action Groups

Wrap-Up

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What Is Drafts?

This is the single biggest question I get asked whenever I mention the app. At its core, Drafts remains the app it has always been: a place where text starts. It is the quintessential app for trusted capture of text. There are other writing/note-taking apps out there that are great in their own right. Some are more suited for long writing and research, while others are good for simple note-taking. But none of them replicate the functionality that Drafts carries on iOS, where integrations built into the app provide powerful, customized actions. This is where the strength of Drafts really shines: it can be the central hub from which everything flows.

Drafts is truly an impressive balance between simplicity and power. It starts as a blank page and a keyboard: all you need to do is type. If you’re on the go or need your hands free, activate dictation on your device - iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch - and just start talking. Once you’ve captured your text, you can send it elsewhere via actions. Early on this was done through x-callback-url schemes, but the system was previously expanded to include actions that allow further integration across the platform.1

Perhaps Federico, speaking on AppStories about the previous version of Drafts, said it best:

The interesting thing about Drafts is that it can be the simplest note-taking app on the planet, but it can also be the most complex one, once you unlock the power of all its actions, the integrations, the URL scheme…you can build this super-complex and powerful typing experience that is connected to dozens of other apps through actions and automation.

For all that Drafts can be, it starts off as just a simple editor: a place to create new drafts with the keyboard.2 This simple interface doesn’t overwhelm you with options, it just facilitates the quick capture of your thoughts so you can move on to what you were doing. When you’re ready to take action on a draft, a simple swipe gives you access to actions and automation that turn this simple editor into one of the most complex apps in the iOS ecosystem.

What I continue to find amazing about Drafts is the chameleon-like nature that it has with its user base: some may use it as a simple note-taking app, while others employ it at the core of their device usage. For me, it takes center stage for everything I do on the platform. Aside from taking and processing pictures, nearly everything happens through Drafts. It’s still the simple note-taking app it always has been, but with new features come new methods of making custom, complex interfaces that connect to multiple apps, providing the possibility of replacing multiple apps you use today.

I imagined what this update would be like almost two years ago. Although it may seem like a long time, I never expected to get all of the options, capability, and power that Drafts offers with this new version. I completely understand the time it takes to develop complex app like this, and I couldn’t be happier with what has been released. Let’s dive into Drafts, how it has changed, and the new ways you’ll want to use it going forward.

A New Look

The editor is where you make changes to your drafts, and Drafts has added a litany of settings to customize the appearance of the editor and improve the writing interface. The appearance settings are located in the bottom toolbar, denoted by the Aa icon. Inside this menu are theme preferences, icon preference, syntax highlighting, and editor customizations.

Drafts has many customizations for the editor.

Themes are user-selectable, with the option to use a light theme, dark theme, or automatically change between the two based on the lighting conditions – perfect for the iPad Pro with True Tone display. You can also select which theme you’d like to use in the light and dark setting: they are individually selectable, giving you the choice to have a darker theme for both. To change the theme, simply tap under the ‘Light’ and ‘Dark’ indicators in the menu, which presents a menu selection for the available themes. At launch, the available themes are Light, Sepia, Solarized, Dark, Gray, and Solarized Dark. There are also multiple icon choices, accessible by tapping the icon in the menu. For those who have the iPhone X, there is a pure black icon that I’m sure many will want to use.

There are now more glyphs included with Drafts than ever. Not only does this make the visual cue the same between the action and draft drawers, but it also makes the entire editing experience feel more modern thanks to the use of good iconography.

Glyphs give a modern feel to the UI.

The information button (ⓘ) at the top of the draft displays the title of the draft, along with the action log, version history, and location of creation/modification. In the version history, you’re provided options to restore or copy the older version. During the course of writing this review, there have been several times I’ve wanted to recall something I previously wrote, and having the version history saved has been a godsend. The action log provides several types of usable information: you’ll see every action run on a draft, along with the actions that have failed and a reason for the failure – this is especially handy when running newly created actions.

The bottom left of the editor window also includes some useful functions. There are up/down arrows to navigate your drafts in the list with a tap. Link mode can be toggled on and off – this turns your entered links into active hyperlinks. Arrange mode rounds out the bottom toolbar, and has two options now: line and block. Line mode is self-explanatory; block mode moves entire chunks of text around. Block arrange mode was extremely useful while writing this review for when I would want to move entire sections around. Arrange mode options are also available via the contextual menu, which helps when you need to select only a portion of text and arrange within that selected text. This is a valuable tool when moving around lines of code or when you have a large text document and only want to arrange small parts.

Arrange mode is now more versatile for entire drafts or selected text.

Focus Mode

New in Drafts 5 is Focus mode, which is activated by tapping on the eye icon in the bottom toolbar of the editor. The primary function of this is to stop automatic draft creation, enabling a specific draft to remain in the forefront. Unlike the setting that determines timed auto-creation of new drafts, Focus mode requires user interaction to be disabled. I like this choice, as it requires the user to specify their intent of entering and exiting the mode, choosing whether or not they want to focus on a singular thought or process.

One of the ancillary benefits of this mode is how it can aid in the processing of drafts: instead of a new draft being created upon the successful execution of an action, it returns you to your previous draft. For most of my meetings at work, I’ll use the iPad and take notes in Drafts. If I switch to Safari – or search in Drafts using Safari View Controller – to look up something for research, returning to Drafts while remaining in the current draft is perfect. I can also create a new draft if I have a task that needs to be completed, send the draft with a note to Todoist, and return to what I was previously working on.

With Focus mode, I am no longer burdened with having to keep a thought in my head while working on something else. It’s almost like I’m meditating: I can focus on the present, have an intrusive thought that is acknowledged, then process it and continue in the present.

Syntax Highlighting

After a while of using Ulysses, I’ve grown to really enjoy the ability to use syntax highlighting. My eye likes the difference between elements, and this was the biggest reason for me using something like Ulysses over Drafts as I did previously. But that all changes now that Drafts has a better foundation for syntax highlighting.

In this initial release, there are five language types available for syntax highlighting:

Plain Text

Markdown

TaskPaper

JavaScript

Simple List

Each of these have their own unique syntax highlighting that follows the normal conventions and brings clarity to the task. Using the Markdown syntax highlighting, you’ll visually see where links are being used. You can even write long pieces entirely in Drafts: this entire review was written using Drafts 5, and my eyes felt comfortable the entire time. All of the MultiMarkdown elements are highlighted in one way or another, and it makes for a huge visual improvement in the app:

Drafts 5 (left) vs Drafts 4 (right).

There are options for the current and default syntaxes. Not only does this provide flexibility to drastically change the syntax language for each type, but each individual draft is able to have a unique syntax flavor – fonts, font size, line height, paragraph spacing, and margin can all be changed on a per-draft basis. There are also toggle settings to add paragraph numbers, use spell check, use smart quotes and dashes, and more. And because these options exist, it enables each draft to become its own type of document.

These custom settings make the editor more visually useful and appealing. The additions of TaskPaper and JavaScript highlighting bring some added possibilities to Drafts in new ways, as I’ll get into more later. In the future, I’m hoping that more syntax languages are supported, and that there will be a nice way to change the colors of the syntaxes to permit more customization. Having the ability to add a custom notation or highlight for text would also be a welcome addition.

With the inclusion of syntax highlighting and the visual change it provides, I can now replace Ulysses in my writing workflow. I appreciate how visually appealing Ulysses’ interface is, but at this point Typewriter Mode is the only feature I miss from it, and I hope to see something similar come to Drafts in the future. I could continue to use Ulysses for writing, but I don’t need the overhead of having two apps that can do similar functions, especially when one has more extension across other apps.

Capture Anything, Anywhere

Drafts’ single biggest feature and benefit is capture: you simply open the app to a blank draft and start typing. Aside from opening the app on the Home screen, there are other methods to capture your text. Ever since the adoption of widgets, Drafts has supported using one in either the Today view or with 3D Touch on the Home screen of the iPhone. This is a simple way to launch the app right to the editing screen in a variety of ways: starting a new draft, inserting the clipboard text, searching the drafts drawer, or dictation – my personal favorite. Drafts also has an additional widget which provides the most recent drafts if you want to open the app to a specific draft you were working on.

All drafts are stored within the app, synced with iCloud using CloudKit. The syncing engine also includes non-draft items like tags and most of the settings throughout the app; this makes setting up a new device a breeze.

Siri

Siri integration, introduced in iOS 11, is also available. You can say things like “Using Drafts, create a note… ” or “Create a note in Drafts…”, then speak the text of your draft. This is great when you’re unable to interact with your devices by touch, and also for those who need the accessibility that Siri can provide.3 Spotlight search is still there, but with it not being tied to Siri, it doesn’t allow for searching unless your hands are free; note search is a missing Siri intent I would like to see added in the future.

I personally use the Type to Siri accessibility feature for note creation, particularly when using my iPad Pro with Smart Keyboard – voice input simply isn’t as accurate. I’m able to capture a note no matter what I’m doing, whether checking Twitter or editing a podcast in Ferrite. I don’t have to back out of what I’m doing to get a thought out.

Share Extension

In Drafts 5 the share extension has been updated – it now features your chosen theme and options for syntax highlighting and tags, while keeping the previous append/prepend functionality. As was true before, appending and prepending brings up the selection interface so you can select just the right draft – helpful for when you’re writing a post and need to gather links, or when creating a link post itself. Also worth noting: if you use TextExpander snippets, those now work directly inside the share extension.

The share extension is great for capturing web snippets.

Apple Watch

Capturing your thoughts on the go with a tiny wrist computer is easy with the Drafts Watch app – new drafts can be entered using dictation or scribble. The Watch app is not a full-fledged editor, but it still gives you access to add/remove tags, append/prepend to a specific draft, or flag, archive, or delete a draft right on the Watch.

Using the Drafts complication, the Watch app is opened in auto-capture mode, meaning it will turn on dictation so you can immediately speak your thoughts.4 Once completed, it will sync with your iPhone, then to iCloud. If your phone isn’t with you, it saves on-device until it’s able to sync with your iPhone.

The Apple Watch app has been expanded to include more options.

￼

Imagine you have your Series 3 Watch and AirPods on a run. While you’re out there completing your rings, you get an idea. No longer do you have to rely on remembering it when you get home – you’ll simply capture it on the Watch and continue on your journey; when you’re back to your phone, the idea will be there waiting, ready for you to process it in the editor.

URL Schemes

Drafts continues to support an extensive URL scheme to get your text into the app, as well as methods of linking back to single or groups of drafts. You can use these in conjunction with other apps to create automation. All of the same URL schemes are available from the previous version, making migration easier than ever.

One item to note is that some of the URL schemes are supported only in the pro version of the app: most notably, /dictate, and /arrange options will not be available on the free tier, and the same applies to use of the action parameter on incoming URLs. These URL components and schemes are more on the advanced level, and allow automation to and from other apps using Drafts as a service for text through other apps like Workflow. As the app evolves, there could be other URL schemes that are developed and may fall into the same category.

Migration Tools

Drafts 5 comes with migration tools to port your drafts and most of your actions; this does require the latest Drafts 4 version as well. At startup, the app will ask you if you want to migrate your drafts and actions over from Drafts 4 to Drafts 5. If you choose not to migrate them at that time, you can find the migration tools in the Settings menu, located in the bottom toolbar of the editor.

For the actions, you are able to migrate them individually from Drafts 4. This is useful if you want to clean up your actions as you move over. Actions migrate over as a new action with all of the steps, or you can migrate them using a CallbackURL action step. Some actions may require additional tweaking after you’ve migrated them, but the migration tools will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you and change your scripts and URLs to the new syntax.

Drafts makes capturing your thoughts easy from anywhere on your devices. It is one of the very few apps that provides multiple ways of capture, available anywhere on iOS. Aside from sending an email to the app, you are able capture text into Drafts in any manner which iOS permits.

Managing and Organizing Your Drafts

When you’ve started to amass more than a single draft, you will view and manage them in the drafts drawer. The drawer is accessed with a swipe left to right on the editor. Inside the drawer, if you want to take action on a specific draft, a swipe right to left will bring up options to flag, archive, or trash it. At the bottom of the drafts drawer, there are buttons to create a new draft, enter selection mode, and view operations. If you want to quickly select all drafts in view, tap and hold the select button.

Swipe gestures provide access to the drawer and options for each draft.

A new feature in Drafts 5 is the ability to pin the draft drawer to the side of the screen. This gives you a two-pane view of the app, with your drafts still visible as you type in the editor. It also makes editing multiple drafts more fluid. I’ve been using Drafts primarily in this mode for everything I do. While this is mainly an iPad-first feature, I do have good news for those Plus club members who use their iPhone in an iPad-like way: you can pin the drawer in landscape mode too.

Access the drawer with a swipe or the external keyboard shortcut ⌘1, then pin the drawer with the indicator.

There are additional list options, found in the top menu (the ‘•••’ icon) of the draft drawer: you now have options to toggle on/off the body preview, tags, and last action run for each draft. While I personally only like to show the tags for visual clarity, I appreciate how Drafts gives multiple options to the user.

External shortcuts have been available in Drafts previously, but they have been expanded to gain access to the drafts drawer. The up/down arrows will cycle through your drafts, while the left/right arrows will change folders at the top. When you want to select a draft, tap the enter key to bring it into view. You almost don’t need to have your hands leave the keyboard. Almost.

Tags

Custom folder filters have been completely replaced in Drafts 5 by tags. Tags facilitate user customization and organization for their drafts, and filtering allows you to organize tabs to view drafts exactly how you want them; you can optionally use an action to update tags as well. As you type a tag, any similar tags will temporarily appear in the extended keyboard row so you can see the available choices and minimize the number of them you have.

Tap the tag icon in the top toolbar to add a tag.

The beautiful thing about tags is that they are not part of a draft’s text itself. Since they don’t get in the way of the actual text, they can be put to good use by providing context to your content without actually adding extra content. Tags are able to be any number of things: topics, categories, descriptors, authors, etc. They can be very powerful for what you want them to become. Not only are they useful within the app to organize your various drafts, but by using them with actions and scripting, tags can be used as elements that are able to be passed to other apps.

For example, if you do a podcast, you could have a tag of ad_read which highlights the various ad reads you have on the show. If you capture quotes from somewhere, you can tag the quote with quote or quote:author-name. If you want to have multiple edit states, you could have draft or reviewed or final to compare the different files as you progress in your writing. During the writing of this review, I used several tags so I could quickly filter my writing. This also enabled me to work within my review as a project: by creating and filtering on that tag, I could quickly move through the drafts, modifying each as I went.

An additional swipe on the draft drawer provides access to the tag drawer, or use ⌘T to access with an external keyboard.

In the tag drawer – accessed by swiping right on the draft drawer – you will see all of the tags you’ve used in the app. To start a filter, select a single tag or multiple tags to add, or choose to omit specific tags; you can also use a combination of selected and omitted tags. This filtering applies across the folders of the draft drawer. A nice addition to tagging not present in the app is an or function, which would expand the filtering to get drafts that are tagged with red or blue instead of red and blue as it is today, giving better functionality to the feature.

You can also use the search bar at the top of the draft drawer to further refine your draft search using text. The use of tags and text filtering really starts to set up interesting possibilities for how you view your Drafts. And if you select the ••• button at the top of the draft drawer once you’ve filtered, you’ll see perhaps the best thing to happen in Drafts 5: Workspaces.

Workspaces

Workspaces are a new addition to Drafts, and are part of the Pro subscription only. When you make a workspace, you are essentially creating a saved view of your drafts. This brings a whole new paradigm with using the app. Workspaces use text and tag filters, providing saved spaces to view your drafts.

The easiest way to create a workspace is to look at your draft and filter based on tags or text. From there, hit the ••• button at the top of the drawer, and select “Save Current”; you can also always select a “New” one to get started. The reason I choose the former is so I can get my view set the way I like it, then save it for later use. Once saved, editing or deleting a workspace is a simple right to left swipe on the name in the Workspaces menu.

You can customize each workspace in the menu.

In the edit screen, you can change the sort order of the drafts for each folder, show different items in the preview, and customize the glyph and color of each workspace. Within the Workspaces menu, you’ll also see the option to activate and view quick access tabs. Utilizing it gives you access to any of your workspaces with a simple tap. This is perfect for one-handed use on the iPhone, or for quickly switching without moving your hands far off a keyboard on the iPad. You can also choose view options: glyph + text, text-only, or glyph-only. I absolutely love the way glyph-only looks, and plan to use that going forward.

The Workspace Today widget is something I want to have everywhere on my devices.

You also gain a new widget in your Today view with workspaces. Not only does it give you quick access to them, but on the side it also provides the standard widget elements. I love this widget and its implementation, though I wish I had the option to use it as the 3D Touch widget – sadly, 3D Touch widgets are restricted to compact mode, meaning this wouldn’t be very practical.

Now that I have the Workspaces feature, I want to use it everywhere: the Today view, the Home screen, and the Watch – I want quick access everywhere to open the app in the way I want to see it.

Launcher apps like Launch Center Pro and Launcher can also take advantage of the new /workspace URL scheme. This scheme lets you take your created workspaces and make a direct path to open to a specific workspace. You could even add this to a simple workflow which would open the specified workspace, right from the Workflow widget. I have a few tasks where the URL to a specific Workspace is included, so as I’m going through a weekly review, I can quickly access the workspace that contains my review items. Providing this level of quick access via a URL scheme is a pro-level feature that can elevate your productivity through automation.

The idea of workspaces is an ingenious way of interacting with your drafts. You can separate your drafts out into categories or individual projects and narrow the focus of what you’re doing with the app. Capturing all of your thoughts, ideas, and tasks is wonderful, but placing them in discrete containers for viewing and processing boosts the potential for productivity. I don’t have to think of what drafts I want to see and filter using the tag drawer – I now have custom-built, preset views that I return to on a regular basis. By setting up workspaces, you no longer have to spend a ton of time searching for what you need. You can display exactly the focus of what’s on your mind, and just start capturing your thoughts or acting upon them.

Drafts can pile up. When I was attempting to write this review in Drafts with all of the included sections and scripts, the drafts drawer became too much to look through. But with a workspace, I was able to omit the review and any scripts with the use of tags (using the syntax of !tag), and my day-to-day usage became much more clear. I can also keep adding tags to omit so I can move more project-oriented groups off my general list.

Think of workspaces as areas of your life.

Think of workspaces as areas of your life: each one provides a focused view of your drafts without having the clutter of the other areas in your face to distract you. This “General” workspace I’ve described is just one example of how the feature can be used to provide clarity, and I’ll have more to share later in the review. Workspaces are just one part of the larger picture, and explaining their usefulness and power would be understated if I went into depth here.

But I will say this for now: Workspaces, built on tagging, is my favorite new feature of Drafts 5. It has single-handedly changed the way I use the app. Workspaces grant me the ability to do things that I never could have done with the previous version, let alone the free tier of Drafts 5. All of the changes in the draft drawer bring new capability and functionality to Drafts. It’s going to change the way you use the app in the future when you start pairing it with the power of Drafts: Actions.

Taking Action

Actions are the core of what makes Drafts so important to your workflow. Each action will contain one or more steps, sending text where you want it to go. They range from being simple actions to insert text, to complex script actions with multiple action steps to process a draft in a variety of ways.

Actions in Drafts 5 will, for the most part, still function in the same way they always have. Actions are compiled in single or multiple steps using template tags to process them like [[draft]] or [[title]]. Each one of these template tags lets you pull in information that can be passed along to other steps or other applications. There is a range of action steps to choose from: social to system to advanced and more. They may be used singularly or in combination with other steps to create more complex actions that do more for you. A few of them have further customizations, which can be found in the app’s documentation. It would be impossible to cover them all in detail here; however, what I will cover are some of the changes that have improved actions.

Support for running workflows in Workflow, as well as support for x-callback-URLs via a new Callback URL action step, have been improved by adding the returned parameter to be used upon return to Drafts. One of my most used actions uses Blink to get the URL of an app or song; in the previous version of Drafts, this was done through a more complicated URL scheme. It has now been simplified in the Callback URL step, only needing the base URL to be included and letting Drafts handle all of the parameters.

Drafts is able to handle multiple web accounts/services like Dropbox or Twitter via OAuth authentication. OAuth is an authentication protocol that approves one application interacting with another on your behalf without giving away your password. Within the action steps that permit such choices, there is an identifier field to input a separate authentication. Have both a personal and business Dropbox account? Now you can use them within the same app instead of using a workaround. I use this integration for when I handle my personal and podcast Twitter accounts. Even services like WordPress, or other blogging platforms like Micro.blog, can use this method as well once properly configured.

Action Directory

When you’re new to Drafts, it’s a great idea to start by getting some actions and action groups you might find useful from the Action Directory. After you find one(s) you like, you can install them directly onto your device by tapping the link. To access the directory within Drafts, you can tap the + icon located in the bottom right of the action drawer.

The action directory has been completely reimagined with this new version. Within each action is the option to share to the action directory. This takes you to a separate screen where you’ll enter information about the action and see an option to share it to the directory publicly or unlisted; unlisted keeps it away from public view, but still permits you to share the action via links. Additionally, as you make changes to each action, you can now update the listed action via a button. This means you don’t have to upload a new version or duplicate your action, nor do you have to change links once you’ve created and shared an action, making updates a cinch.

You can now share and update actions to the directory without creating an account.

The best part about this: you don’t need to create an account to sign in. Drafts doesn’t ask you for an account or your personal data, it just stores a secret token in iCloud as part of the backup. I really like the new method of sharing actions to the directory; there’s zero on-boarding required to share actions on the web or with others, and my personal data remains private. I wish more apps would be this user-conscious.

Drag and Drop with Actions

Thanks to the foundational changes in iOS 11 centered around drag and drop, Drafts now has the ability to activate an action on a text element coming from another app. Simply drag with your finger onto an action, and the action is highlighted. Whether it comes from Safari, Files, the drafts list, or anywhere else, simply drop your text to start the action. And unless the code in your action explicitly calls for a new draft to be created, that text won’t be saved into Drafts, it will just be acted upon.

You can also drag drafts or actions out to save them as files into Files or other apps. Drafts will use the title line as the file and defaults to a .txt extension. Actions don’t receive a name, and are saved in a Drafts-specific format. You can rename the file with the action name, but I would prefer to see it done automatically; I would also prefer that the drafts be automatically saved with an extension based on their syntax: .md for Markdown, .js for JavaScript, etc.

Drag and drop lets you act on multiple drafts with ease.

Drag and drop is fully supported within Drafts on both the iPad and iPhone, though the iPhone often takes some two-handed use to make it work. Dragging a draft in the drawer, you can either drop it in the draft drawer to create a copy or drop it on an action in the action drawer. This works for one or more files: if you drop multiple files on an action, it will queue the action for each of the provided drafts, snippets, or files.

Action Groups

An action group contains the various sets of actions that you have created or installed. You can make a single action group, or you can make multiple to separate the sets into useful, independent sets. While you can only have one shown at a time on the side, a simple right to left swipe enables access to the Groups tab to select and manage your groups. When using an external keyboard, similar to the action drawer, you can use a ⌘0 shortcut to access the drawer, navigate the groups with the left/right arrows, and navigate the actions using the up/down arrows; to select an action to run on a draft, simply press return and your action will run. And just like the drafts drawer, there is a quick access area at the bottom where you can access your groups quickly, along with the different show modes.

The quick access area is great for one-handed use on the iPhone to switch action groups.

You can also search for an action to run, which will search across all your action groups. This is extremely useful for when you’ve created multiple action groups and can’t remember where an action is quickly. You can move or copy actions to other groups, but you can’t assign the same action across multiple groups as you could in the previous version. I would love to see this functionality get added back somehow, but for now, I’ve added a workaround: by duplicating the action, and using an Include Action action step and providing the name of the action, I can replicate the functionality of the action. I also added a symbol at the beginning of the action (⸁) to denote a duplicate, which I grabbed from the app Symbols. Everything works just the way it did before, and I only need to edit in one action to change them all. It’s not as refined as I’d like it to be, but I can use this workaround for now.5 I would love to see this feature of Drafts 4 make its way to Drafts 5 at some point.

To move actions up and down within groups, you can drag the actions around by touch; if you want to have further controls, there’s a menu for managing them. Within that menu are options to reorganize the group, customize the glyph and color, and share entire groups to the directory without having to share an individual action. It makes sharing setups and new ideas a breeze.

Extended Row

A big change in Drafts 5: there are no more dedicated keys. Previously if you wanted to run an action on a draft using a key, you had to create the action then create a completely separate key. This is no longer the case. Instead, action groups can now be turned into extended keyboard rows, and any action can be a key. If you have multiple action groups, you can now select them from the menu indicator to the left of the extended row; additionally, you can show or hide keyboard rows as you need. To quickly move through your extended rows, use the swipe up/down shortcut on the extended row area – perfect for one-handed use on the iPhone.

Change action group keyboards with an up/down swipe on the extended row.

Now that actions are being used as keys, the key can be represented in the row in one of three ways: the glyph, a text/emoji label, or both the glyph and text. I have been extremely pleased with using glyphs as the icons in most cases. The only drawback I have seen in the extended row is the lack of a visual divider: I would really like to see a divider included in the extended row, providing separation between actions as needed. I have a divider action that I made which does nothing more than provide a space, but I would prefer if it didn’t look like a button to press, similar to the style of the glyph at the start of the row. This was present in Drafts 4, and something that I hope makes its way back to Drafts 5.

The extended row menu provides access to switch your groups and use the built-in commands.

Also included in the extended row is a menu, found by tapping the first icon in the extended row, which is the icon you designate for your action group. Within the menu is arrange mode, included here also to let the user activate the feature without having to dismiss the keyboard. The menu also contains a new feature to Drafts 5: find and replace. This is a proper find and replace that had previously been a pain to use in Drafts 4 via an action. Find and replace uses regex (for those that dabble) to find matching phrases as well as words.

Drafts has a proper find and replace, complete with regex. Finally.

All of these visual and navigational changes are improvements over the previous version of the app. It took me a short time to commit these changes to muscle memory, and they have now become second nature. While some of these fundamental changes are different and might even appear on the surface to be slight regressions, I promise you that they do serve a bigger purpose for the way you will use Drafts in the future.

I now have access to more of the capabilities I’ve set up in Drafts. It helps keep my iPhone from being too cluttered while simultaneously giving me more at my fingertips. On my iPad, I have more functionality than I did previously when using the software keyboard, which gives me more freedom for how and where I use my device. And when I use an external keyboard, it’s an absolute powerhouse with the use of keyboard shortcuts.

Actions are great tools for transforming or manipulating your text. Many of the actions created with action steps are fantastic. But when you look at the incredible improvements to scripting, you will see just how much it will enhance and transform your actions.

The Power of Scripting

As you get into all of the new features and improvements Drafts has to offer, you’ll come to a realization: a tremendous amount of power and utility is achieved via scripting. While scripting was available previously, Drafts 5 includes scripting capabilities that open up an entire world of actions not previously possible.

Scripting in Drafts follows the JavaScriptCore framework provided by Apple. There are many resources available to help you learn JavaScript.6 I’m not a programmer, and I certainly won’t be covering a programming how-to in this review, but what I can say is that with a little time and effort, learning JavaScript will lead to a more powerful experience with Drafts. At first it might feel overwhelming, but I promise you this: the more you learn from other people via the action directory and other posts, the better start you’ll have along the way. If you’re going to get into the scripting power of Drafts, I highly suggest reading and studying the documentation.

There will be a learning curve for both new and existing users of Drafts. System changes require your existing Drafts 4 scripts to be modified to work with Drafts 5, but fortunately, that’s where the migration tools I previously mentioned come in handy.

The script context is now maintained through the full action: if you set a global variable in the first script step, whether it is a var or a const, it can be used in any subsequent script step in the same action without having to create it again. Thanks to the inclusion of Date.js, working with dates and times has been made easier; it is more akin to natural language parsing, but it doesn’t function the exact same way. If you’re clever with coding, however, it would be possible to develop something similar to what other apps like Fantastical or Due provide.

There are a breadth of new script objects at your disposal. The action types have been thoughtfully placed within groups, providing a bit of clarity on what they do. For example, with the App, Editor, and Draft script objects you are able to work inside Drafts itself to accomplish various things; each object contains commands that manipulate your draft(s) when called in the script.

There are a bunch of new script objects as well. There are so many objects now (25 in total at the time of this review) that can be used in various ways I couldn’t possibly - or more importantly, concisely - put into a single review. There have been some amazing actions created already that are available in the directory. While I am anxious to see some of the amazing things the Drafts 5 user community comes up with in the future, I want to cover several of these new objects to show you how they can lead to vastly improved capability.

Prompts

Prompt scripting provides distinct advantages over the basic prompt step. It is no longer just for text field and button choices, but a wide variety of useful methods that transform your actions.

These improvements are helpful in creating a single action that accomplishes multiple things at once. I found myself creating multiple actions like this in Drafts because it saves space in the extended row while maintaining or improving the functionality of the action. Whether it be a Clipboard or a Text Modifier action which group related items, or a journaling action which runs everything related to your text journal, you are able to combine these functions using prompt scripting.

In those two examples, it was possible with Drafts 4 to create them: you needed to create each action and an action set: this method ran a prompt of action names, then ran the selected action via a URL step. This is no longer needed in Drafts 5. The addition of the prompt scripting allows you to create the action set within a single step.

A benefit to using scripted prompts is the ability to combine it with other script elements to select different parts of your draft via a search for text elements. One thing I have always wanted to do with some of my longer writing is quickly move between sections in a Markdown-formatted document. Thanks to JavaScript, used in conjunction with the prompt object, I now have an action that is capable of taking all of the headings and presenting them as buttons to use in search of items. Once I select a specific button, the cursor is moved to the end of that heading. This isn’t like the folding headings of Editorial, but it replicates the quick navigation to each section, and has been paramount in my review process.

Custom scripted prompts help me navigate longer writing of my drafts by Markdown headings.

There are multiple changes to the way Drafts handles text input in prompts: it supports a single text field or text view – perfect for longer text entries – in a prompt. You now have some options when considering how to use a text field: the use of autocorrect or capitalization, placeholder text to show what you need to enter into the step, or the useful option of choosing which keyboard you use to input the text. There are a a plethora of options to choose from: default, numberPad, phonePad, email and URL, and more. This opens up new possibilities with the input of text.

You can also utilize multiple text fields in a single prompt. For example, I create a “Piques of the Week” post every so often on my site. I would do this before via two actions: an action to search my site to get the volume number, and another to prompt me for each item that I would want to write about (up to three); it would give me a single prompt for each item as I went. But now I’ve created a single script action that opens up a pre-populated search in Safari View Controller and, upon closing, will open up a single prompt to put in the number using the number pad and up to three items all at the same time. I don’t have to have multiple steps in succession, it is all done in a unified prompt.

My Piques of the Week posts are as easy as a few taps.

There are also new prompt elements at your disposal. A prompt not only contains buttons and text but is able to have other items: checkboxes to select pre-defined elements, binary toggle switches to turn items on and off, and – my personal favorite – a date/time picker. Rather than have a field to put in your own date format, you can use a system-like date picker to select a date and use some code to change the date into the proper format. I previously would type a task with date entry and send it over to Things; I made a single prompt that creates a task, a note, defines the area, and sets a due date. Another benefit of this method is that I don’t have to create a draft to make a task: I can use the prompt information to populate an action, and go about what I was working on before without adding more items in the drafts list.

Custom prompts for creating single tasks without interruption to your text has been phenomenal.

Prompts have been greatly elevated in Drafts 5 thanks to scripting. They are able to become more than just the simple, singular steps in your workflow. They are complex points of entry as you go about capturing, editing, or sending your text.

APIs

Drafts can now be integrated with many APIs in various ways. The first method is web APIs through the use of HTTP calls: this means you can use GET, POST, REST, and other web methods to send and receive information. While I’m not going to delve into an area where my own knowledge is limited, I can give a great example of where using the web API for a specific service is a better choice than other methods.

In my split task management system, I use Todoist for work.7 Previously, I’d need to either use the URL scheme or email things to Todoist in the background using Drafts. But thanks to the ability to make web API calls in Drafts 5, I can now create new tasks via Todoist’s quick add feature of the API.

Using the API is more powerful than a URL scheme because it parses the dates appropriately. It’s also faster because it doesn’t do the back-and-forth dance that happens with URL automation. I am able to assign priority, projects, and so on, and thanks to the work of Dave Nicholls, I’m able to use the action he created which captures tasks with due dates, notes, and a reminder time. I’ve tailored this in a few ways for work: I can send a single draft over with the title line as a task, and the body as a note; I can also send multiple lines over as tasks. With the exception of turning an email into a task,8 all of my tasks are first entered into Drafts then sent over.

There are countless other APIs to integrate with on the web. You could import the weather from the Dark Sky API, track your time using Toggl, or even post to GitHub. I look forward to seeing what the community comes up with going forward.

App Integrations

Things 3.4 for iPhone and iPad added URL scheme support for deep automation possibilities. It was quickly transformed into a new script object to take advantage of the URL scheme in an API-like way.

The popularity of the app and the intriguing possibilities with automation led to the creation of a bunch of posts, actions, and workflows. Federico created an initial concept of what he wanted to create in Drafts. Others, like Tyler Eich and Peter Davison-Reiber, created awesome scripts to move everything from tasks to entire projects over to Things: Tyler created an action that uses a unique, Markdown-like format to parse the draft and send over tasks; Peter created his Things Parser for Drafts 5, which is an action that uses a similar format, and also combines it with Chrono.js, a JavaScript date parser. I’m not going to go through this in detail, but it really showcases how to use these script objects in powerful ways.

Going forward, other apps – perhaps OmniFocus 3 or a new version of 2Do – could leverage this approach to provide scripting objects in Drafts to implement the automation through JavaScript. Apps should embrace automation and provide good support to facilitate incorporation into other apps. And if it is done as intelligently as Things, any app could be quickly integrated in Drafts.

Callback URL Scripts

This is akin to the Callback URL action step, however, it provides more granular controls. You can add each of the parameters in a callback step without having to remember to URL encode anything.

One of the major actions I use in Drafts is Fantastical Quick Events, which takes a draft and processes each calendar event line-by-line. In Drafts 4, the action was comprised of a single URL action step that would create a single draft for every entry over the course of the action: and when these calendars cover 20-30 days, it creates a lot of extra items. In Drafts 5, it’s accomplished in a single script step, and there are no extra drafts created.

Automation Possibilities

When you look at what you can combine via scripting, it starts to open up automation possibilities in areas like notes, tasks, and more.

One of my main use cases for Drafts is taking meeting notes for work. I’ll use a pre-formatted meeting note to write things down, and when I’m done, I’ll add a few different bits of syntax to different lines: if I want to send a task to my work system (which uses Todoist), I’ll type TTodoist: on that line; if I want to send a task to my personal system, I’ll type TThings:. I just need a syntax that would not be common for me to write, and is something fairly easy to change if I alter my task management system.9 Instead of copying or reorganizing my notes, I can rely on scripting in conjunction with various objects to save all of this for me.

I created an action to process my meeting minutes, which contains a single script that does the following three things:

I’ll scan line-by-line for items to send to Things or Todoist, routing each of them to their appropriate apps.

I’ll strip out the unique syntaxes I’ve used above out of the meeting note.

I’ll save the contents of the entire draft to either iCloud Drive or Dropbox using the FileManager and Dropbox scripting objects.

Processing my meeting notes is made simple thanks to the combination of different script elements.

At first, this may not seem like a lot. But it mixes several different apps via multiple action methods: a web API, a built-in file management object, and a custom app integration. Utilizing the power of scripting, you’re able to integrate to and from multiple sources with Drafts.

Putting together all of the action elements, including scripting, yields powerful and promising results. Add that to the way I’m now using Action Groups and Workspaces, and it becomes clear how transformative Drafts 5 has been to the way I work.

Drafts as a Modular Interface

Now that you have an overview of the changes in Drafts 5, taking full advantage of those changes will require a fundamental shift in how you set up Drafts. Sure, you could make the app imitate your Drafts 4 setup today – but you’d be missing out. When you couple the separate views of Workspaces with the power of actions - especially when accessed from the extended row – it starts growing clear that you’ll have a lot to gain from changing how you use Drafts.

People use Drafts for different things: small snippets of text that go elsewhere, a place to keep simple lists, a place to create messages or emails, or a long list of other, more complex things like a journal, blogging platform, or text editor. Over time, Drafts grows with the user and encompasses multiple facets of an individual’s workflow. So the lens in which you view Drafts - the editor interface and the extended row - needs to change with what you are doing.

This idea of coupling Workspaces and the extended row’s Action Groups together leads to the idea of what I’m calling modules. Each customized module is modified to what you need to do in each type of environment: whether it be action scripting, GTD, or journaling, you’re only a couple taps or swipes away from being in a whole new environment that can behave differently for the task at hand. This creates a separation of functionality optimized for the use case of the moment. If I’m writing, whether that’s for my journal, my website, or even this review, there is a specific way I want to view my drafts and there are critical actions I want to have at my disposal.

With the draft drawer pinned and my workspace selected, I have access to my actions directly from the keyboard row. If I move from a draft of writing to a draft of tasks, I can quickly swipe on the extended row to change actions. And this brings up a subtle, but transformative thought: the keys aren’t really gone, they have simply transformed. They become useful, powerful, and integral to the environment in which I’m working. In the course of spending more time with Drafts 5, I’m actually using the action drawer less and less; instead, I’m running actions from the extended row, without having to open up another pane.

Modules are going to be a major idea going forward with how I approach my use of Drafts.

However, this doesn’t mean that I have to be locked into a single action group either. I can have one set of actions in the extended row, and a completely different set of actions in the action drawer. This duality enables me to distinguish what I’m doing. For example, I might have a thought that I want to share, whether on my blog, a tweet, a message, etc. I will use a “writing” action group in the extended row that contains actions I employ for writing, and couple that with a “social” action group in the action drawer to send the text elsewhere. If I end up writing a lot, I can post it; if it’s short, maybe I’ll tweet it. Having all relevant actions a swipe or tap away is nothing short of magical. Modules are going to be a major idea going forward with how I approach my use of Drafts.

Here are a few ideas I’ve developed so far that highlight the utility of modules.

Action Scripting

Drafts contains a full JavaScript editor in the Script action step. Additionally, you can import or export a script via iCloud Drive or any other app that integrates with iOS 11’s Files app. An additional way to create and edit scripts is to write them directly in the editor using the JavaScript syntax highlighting, then copy/paste them into a script step.

While I was moving and creating actions in Drafts 5, I started off using that last method. I have a separate workspace for my scripts, and I developed an action scripting group to use in the extended row. I don’t need to open a separate app to code for Drafts, because I’m able to use the same app in a different module.

Using a module for action scripting helps the coding process of creating actions.

Thanks to JavaScript syntax highlighting, I was able to create an action that starts a document with this highlighting already applied; it also adds a script tag at the same time. I then thought of other useful actions to add: inserting a prompt step, inserting an ‘if’ or ‘else’ statement, and some other coding elements as well. I also added indent and outdent so I could move within the code a bit easier. Now, whenever I need to script something in Drafts, I can tap an action to create a new document, and I’m off to coding. When I’m done with my scripts, I use the Save Scripts action within the group, which saves all of the drafts with the script tag to iCloud Drive.

Writing

I’ve said it before: Drafts is more than capable of being used as a main text editor. Although this could be done in some form in the previous version, the changes to syntax highlighting – primarily Markdown – enhance the differentiation in the various text elements a user wants or needs to stand out.

For this review, I really wanted to use Drafts as my sole writing instrument. I tried very hard to make it work, but at the end of the day, it really couldn’t be done in the way I needed. I wrote this in multiple stages – requiring notations, notes, highlights, etc. – and Drafts isn’t built for that purpose. Drafts became too unwieldy for my use case.

That is, until Workspaces came along. When the feature was rolled out and the ability to omit specific tags was added, I quickly moved the entire review back into Drafts. I created a workspace that filtered by the tag I created for the review (d5review), and sorted by text. As I developed the sections, I would number each one: this way, I could view the drafts in the order that I want them. I would love to see a manual sort option come to workspaces for this type of thing, but for now, this will do.

My Drafts 5 review module, which worked perfectly.

As I was writing the review, I could simply tap on the new icon (+) in the draft drawer and start a new draft with the d5review tag already applied. This saved quite a bit of time, especially since I kept the draft drawer pinned. If I ever needed to write something else down, I could simply tap the new icon in the editor and it would create a regular draft. Having the workspace environment flexible enough to focus on my writing while still allowing me to capture other thoughts has been invaluable.

With this ‘D5 Review’ workspace, I’m able to use my writing or general action groups, along with my external keyboard shortcuts, to write and include other elements like images via Workflow. I developed a tagging structure and some visual elements to help me along the way. After the review is finished, I’ll save all of the text as a document and create a new ‘Writing’ workspace so that I can clean up my views.

With Drafts 5’s drag and drop implementation, I’m able to take this writing workspace even further. For the review, I was able to drag all of my sections over to a single action, and have the action run on all the drafts. I saved copies of each section as Markdown files in a specified directory; in addition, I saved to both iCloud Drive and Dropbox with the same action, using the proper formats and conventions I needed. This made the reviewing and editing process completely smooth.

Drafts can also be a great blogging tool. Even though I’m not a programmer, it is possible now to create a single script action which posts to WordPress. It could be combined with other script elements to save the file in iCloud Drive or Dropbox, and send out a link to the published post via Twitter in the same script as well. If you know how to code, you can make all of this happen. People have made some of it happen already, though I’d really like to be able to use OAuth to make it happen with Drafts. Or better yet: I’d love to see Drafts natively support posting via WordPress, as with other apps, or in a nice script object. Perhaps in the future we’ll see this happen, but until then, I’ll continue to publish via Workflow.

What my writing module demonstrates is the newly improved ability to work on a longer writing project. While apps like Ulysses and Scrivener are also available for long-form writing and research, Drafts is now able to work for me for anything that I write. I like that my idea can start and finish in Drafts – with the new features that have been added, I’m eliminating the mental overhead of where my writing needs to live.

Journaling

Just like a text editor, Drafts is amazing for journaling. I’ve been using it that way for a while now as a cathartic tool to share my own thoughts and feelings in a non-public way.10 While my approach is much the same as I had previously, the setup that a module provides is completely different.

I created a journal action group which contains multiple actions that aid in the creation of my text journal. I have an action that starts a pre-formatted journal for me and adds a journal tag. I use the ‘General’ workspace I’ve created to house journal entries for now: I could use a different one in the future, but as I’m only keeping one per day and then sending it to DEVONthink, I don’t need to have something separate. But it feels like a journal setup when I switch to the extended row for my actions.

Journaling with Drafts, Workflow, and DEVONthink gives me a great journal.

I also have a time/date entry to quickly add multiple timestamps throughout the day. And of course, there are several Markdown items for links, images, and quotes, along with a divider action for separating my daily journal into sections. Thanks to the prompt and callback scripting objects, I have a single action to runs multiple Workflow-based workflows, which help me insert other items for my journal like images, weather, music, etc. It’s a well-rounded set of tools which enable a quick reach for what I need at my fingertips so I can focus on writing more than searching.

Could I use a journaling app like Day One? Certainly. The features of the app are great, the interface is nice, and it’s a well done app. But I don’t need to go to a fancy app to journal when I can stick with what I already use on a daily basis, cutting down on the number of subscriptions I’m paying for.

GTD

Drafts has been a central place of trusted capture for years, functioning as the focal point for anything I need to get done. It’s a core way in which I use it, and that’s only going to grow with Drafts 5.

One of my single biggest use cases of capture is small lists. When I’ve had a long week and am getting ready for the weekend, I’m always looking to plan what I need to accomplish during that time off. I’ll pull out my task manager to take a look at what’s there, but I’ll also just dump a bunch of things into a plain text list in Drafts, which includes nesting subtasks or notes inside those items. When I know what the task name is, I’ll simply add a checkbox using an action that inserts a - [ ] for each line; this serves as a visual indicator and is also now a functional checkbox, marked complete by tapping in between the brackets. This small change, coupled with the way text is visually wrapped based on indentation, has a profound effect for me: in a way, the app been made into a simple task manager all on its own.

Checkboxes can now be marked complete with a tap.

Now that Drafts has TaskPaper syntax highlighting, you could even use it to create templates that share to OmniFocus or 2Do. You can create actions to add contexts or due/start dates, and any other item you might use to build complex templates. Then, via a single action, it’s sent to your task system; if you develop the template and copy it into a clipboard step, a single action gets you a whole project formatted right within the app.

Calendar entries can be created in Drafts using the scripting object. Taking a similar parsing approach to Fantastical’s syntax, one could create an action that will take each line of the draft and create calendar events.11 Because it wouldn’t have to do the back and forth dance that an app like Fantastical has to, it would run quickly. In the future, I’d love to see the calendar script object expanded to include the importing of calendar entries to provide greater extensibility of Drafts.

Setting this up as a workspace, I created a filter tag gtd; every time I create a draft that is related to tasks or calendars, I quickly tag it and move on. When I need to view my task or calendar items, I simply select the GTD workspace. This takes all of the drafts which are tagged, and sorts on created date in ascending order so I can see the the oldest drafts first. This ensures that I don’t miss a single task or event that I need to process.

I also have an action group for GTD. This contains my actions for sending items over to GoodTask/Things/Todoist12 or a grocery Reminders list, and some convenient keys for applying tags, Markdown formatting for lists & tasks, as well as a few others. There were times during this review that I wanted to keep the writing/editing going on specific sections, so I created a Remind Me of Things action to replicate Siri’s “Remind me of this…” feature: it takes the title of the draft as the task, prompts me for a reminder date, then sends over a task to Things with the permalink to the draft in the note.

Actions in the module help remind me of specific drafts.

The GTD module I have set up is one that will definitely change over time, especially as I modify my task management system. The inclusion of Reminders and Calendar integrations is a start; the more ways that Drafts gets integrated, the more power I’ll have to get things done within this system. As I start to expand on this idea, I might even look to include the gtd tag as the notification badge count, so that I know how many items I have left to act upon.

But what about extending that further? What if I could receive a Drafts notification about a task like I would with any other task manager? What about storing notes, files, and other items that other task managers provide? What if I could take these ideas and incorporate them? This is where it starts to get interesting; it has already started to change the way I look at my task management. The concept is beginning to take shape with Drafts’ existing features, but there are a few features related to calendars and contacts that need to be implemented via script objects before I can create the solution I have in mind. I’ll share that one with you when it’s ready.

A Quick Note on Pricing

There’s a very generous free tier to Drafts. You can do a lot with it: create, edit, and act on your drafts. But the limitations of the free tier, namely the creating and editing of actions, are really worth the Pro subscription. You can choose between a monthly or yearly subscription (the latter of which includes a 7-day free trial): the monthly is $1.99, while the yearly is $19.99.13

Why the subscription? The subscription model pays for the work already put into Drafts 5, and supports the app’s future development. Adding additional features that integrate to other apps, creating customizable syntax highlighting, and even something many people have wanted for years – Drafts for Mac – can all be made possible by supporting the developer and his fantastic work. And there is plenty more that can be done in the way of integrations as the app moves forward.

Now that Drafts is free to try, you can easily test out ways to integrate the app with your life. With the modular interfaces you can make with Workspaces and Actions, and ideas that could lead you to replace apps with Drafts, I’ve shown you only a glimpse of the power and flexibility that Drafts 5 has to offer.

The more I look at the future of Drafts and the possibilities that can be added and developed over time, the more excited I get. For most other apps, they serve a singular purpose, and they serve it well. But with the agile, flexible nature of Drafts, it can become so much more, which makes it a better value for your money. With a little time and effort, you can make Drafts into whatever you want it to be.

Actions and Groups

Here are the Actions and Action Groups that were a part of this review:

Actions

Blink

Update Tags

Clipboard

Text Modifier

Navigate Headers

Piques Post

Add Single Thing

List to Todoist

Send to Things

Things Parser

Events in Fantastical

Process Meeting Notes

Remind Me of Things

Action Groups

Key Action Group

Action Scripting Group

Journal Action Group

GTD Action Group

Wrap-Up

I love the direction Drafts is taking. Leveraging the groundwork of the previous versions, Drafts 5 breaks that foundation down and builds it back up to be something even better. It has taken another large leap while keeping true to its “capture and action” roots.

The feature set that has been created for Drafts 5 gives new life and intriguing possibilities going forward. With tags, I organize my drafts like I would files on a traditional personal computer and use Workspaces to create different projects I might be working on. With actions and the powerful new scripting features, I save or act upon those drafts to expand the capability of the app.

Drafts has done a fantastic job with the implementation of new features, but there are some missing features I would have appreciated in this release. While the app aims to be a text-focused application, support for images and files through drag and drop would be a welcome addition. Dragging an image from Safari into a Markdown-formatted draft, for example, could provide a formatted link to that image from its web location. Dragging a file from Dropbox could provide an option for insertion of the text or a link back to the file provider. These features would allow Drafts to utilize more data than just text, while keeping the text-based nature it strives to maintain.

Pushing modules further, I would love to see Workspaces get improved by allowing a pre-defined action group. That way when switching Workspaces, the user can automatically have all necessary tools at their disposal right away, thus speeding up capture.

Drafts becomes the ultimate productivity tool.

When you combine Workspaces and Action Groups to create powerful modules to work within, adding syntax highlighting elements and using focus mode to concentrate on your text, Drafts becomes the ultimate productivity tool. I write, journal, program, manage and create task and calendar entries – and so much more – all within a single app simply by changing my modular environment. I don’t need to have a ton of different apps for these different tasks, which saves me money spent on subscriptions. It also eliminates the mental friction of where I need to begin – all my text starts in Drafts.

Drafts morphs to be whatever I need with a tap or swipe. I use it day in and day out to do real work from my iPad and even my iPhone; it is a model example of what a productivity app can be on iOS.

One unique element of Drafts is how versatile it will be to each individual user. Some may use it as a simple text capture app, while others use it for almost everything they do on iOS. Both extremes, along with everything in the middle, are what makes this app amazing. The app can be completely adaptable to the user, much in the way that task managers are used in unique ways from person to person. And Drafts comes with a strong community of other users – highly capable, supportive, and helpful people to assist you.

The current state of Drafts reminds me of the way apps like Workflow and Pythonista worked their way to maturity in the world of productivity apps on iOS: each started out with small pieces and iterated over time, becoming better with each release. The new version of Drafts builds on an already strong foundation, while providing new functionality and room for future enhancements.

As I look toward the future and the features that will be added over time, what other creative ways will I be able to use this simple text editor? What other apps could I replace with some script object additions, giving me more power in Drafts? I’m not sure, but I’m excited to find out. One thing is certain: Drafts, for me, has become the most versatile app on iOS.

If you are completely new to Drafts, I highly recommend reading the Drafts 4 review as well. It will go through some of the things I might mention in this review and give you some further background on the app. There is also the documentation found on the Drafts website. ↩︎

Drafts drafts. Workflow workflows. Tomato tomato. ↩︎

When Siri works. ↩︎

This is an optional setting, and can be changed in the Watch app on the iPhone. ↩︎

And because I’m feeling so generous right now, here’s a massive key action group that I have created, which has duplicate actions with the prefix I mentioned already created. If you read the footnotes of long reviews, you’re welcome. ↩︎

For Lynda.com, you should check with your local library. Some libraries offer free access to Lynda.com, which saves you some money per month. Turns Out™, libraries are still wonderful things. ↩︎

This is due to the fact that I’m forced to use a PC at work. But it works really well. And I can connect to it in a number of ways, which is great for me. ↩︎

This is a big use case for me with Todoist. Thankfully, there is a fantastic Outlook extension that can be installed. ↩︎

Which never happens… ↩︎

I like some of my thoughts and feelings to remain private, and don’t need a big company to keep – or mismanage – my personal data. ↩︎

I’m not savvy enough to create this. I’m not an expert programmer, so I’m hoping someone who is ends up creating an awesome one inside of Drafts. For now, I’ll use Fantastical. But someone please give me a reason to reduce my app count. ↩︎

My task management stuff is a bit of a mess right now. ↩︎

Prices are USD. See the App Store price in your country, as the price may vary. ↩︎