Quill is a writing progress tracker built for long-form projects. If you’ve ever found yourself with a 90,000-word novel to write and no idea how fast you’re actually moving, Quill is for you.
This post walks through everything from creating an account to reading your first heatmap.
Before you sign up, visit the live app and click Try the demo. This loads a fully working version of Quill with fake data — no account needed, nothing saved. It’s a good way to get a feel for the interface before committing.
Click Sign In / Create Account on the splash screen. Enter an email and password (minimum 6 characters). That’s it — no email verification, no OAuth, just a username and password. Your data lives in a private database tied to your account.
After logging in you’ll see an empty dashboard. Quill organizes everything by project — a project is any long-form work with a word count goal.
Go to the Projects tab and fill in:
Click Add Project. You’ll be taken to the dashboard, which is now showing that project.
A “session” is any block of time you spent working on a project. Switch to the Log Session tab.
The session form opens in timer mode by default. Click Start session when you sit down to write. Click Pause if you take a break. When you’re done, click End session — the timer resets and the elapsed time (in minutes) fills in automatically.
If you forgot to run the timer, or you’re adding a session from yesterday, click the Manual tab and type the duration in minutes.
Click Log Session. You’ll see a “Session recorded” confirmation and be taken back to the dashboard.
The dashboard is the main view for a single project. At the top you can switch between projects if you have more than one.
Four numbers at a glance:
A simple visual of total logged words vs. your target. If you set a deadline, it appears here too.
A GitHub-style grid of the last 16 weeks. Each cell is a day; darker amber means more words written that day. Hover over any cell to see the exact date and word count.
If you wrote nothing on a given day, the cell is a pale background. If you wrote a lot, the cell is a deep amber. The scale is relative to your personal best day, so even a 200-word session will show up if that’s your biggest day.
The History tab shows stats across all your projects combined: all-time word count, all-time time logged, total number of sessions, and a heatmap that merges every project into one grid.
This is useful for tracking your overall writing habit regardless of what project you’re on.
If you’ve written (i.e., logged at least one session with a positive word count) on consecutive calendar days ending today, you’ll see a streak counter in the header — for example, 7d streak. The streak resets if you miss a day.
Log editing sessions too. Setting the activity to “Editing” and leaving words at 0 still builds your time total and heatmap — which matters if you spend weeks in revision.
Back-date freely. Quill doesn’t care when you log; it only cares about the date you assign to each session. If you wrote 1,200 words last Thursday and forgot to log it, go ahead and add it with Thursday’s date.
Use notes. Even a single sentence — “got stuck at the chapter break, tried a POV switch” — is enormously useful when you look back months later.
Multiple projects. If you’re juggling a novel and a short story collection, add both. The dashboard switches between them instantly and the History tab aggregates everything.