Ideas basket

Somewhere to put a word, a rhyme, or a phrase you don't want to lose, without breaking your flow to file it into a work. The basket is shared across your whole library — not tied to one project or one work.

Opening the basketDirect link to Opening the basket

Click Ideas basket in the tool palette on the left edge of the editor, alongside Workspace and Dictionary.

The tool palette with Ideas basket selected, the drawer showing three saved ideas, and the kind menu open on Word, Rhyme, Phrase, Idiom and Note

There's no keyboard shortcut for it — only Workspace (Cmd/Ctrl+O) and Dictionary (Cmd/Ctrl+D) have one. See Keyboard shortcuts.

Adding an ideaDirect link to Adding an idea

Type into the field at the top of the drawer, pick a kind — Word, Rhyme, Phrase, Idiom, or Note — and click Add, or press Enter.

There's a second way, faster when the idea is already on the page: select text in the canvas, right-click, and choose Add to basket.

The canvas right-click menu on a selected word, with Add to basket as the last item

This opens the drawer with your selection already filled into the field — pick a kind and click Add to save it, or edit the text first if you want to save something close to your selection rather than the selection itself.

Filtering and deletingDirect link to Filtering and deleting

Use Filter by kind to narrow the list to one category at a time, or leave it on All. Delete an idea with the × next to it — there's no undo, so make sure it's the one you meant.

If a save or delete failsDirect link to If a save or delete fails

If the basket can't reach the server — a dropped connection, an expired session — it tells you, right in the drawer: "Could not save your idea. Please try again." or "Could not delete this idea. Please try again."

Nothing is lost while that message is showing. A failed save leaves what you typed in the field, so you can just try again; a failed delete leaves the idea in the list, since it's still there on the server.

Your basket feeds your suggestionsDirect link to Your basket feeds your suggestions

Every time Ilena suggests a line, it takes five entries from your basket at random and offers them alongside the suggestion request. They are material that is available, never an instruction: a suggestion that uses none of them is a perfectly ordinary suggestion, and most will.

There is nothing to select and nothing to turn on. The five are drawn afresh each time, so the same line asked twice may be offered different material — that is the point. An entry much longer than a couple of sentences is passed over rather than cut short, so the request stays about your line rather than about your notes.

What it's for, and what it isn'tDirect link to What it's for, and what it isn't

The basket holds loose fragments you might use later, and which Ilena may now reach for on your behalf — it isn't a second place to draft lines, and ideas don't attach to any particular work. If you're shaping something into an actual lyric, move it into the canvas of the work it belongs to.

Ideas persist across sessions — they're saved to your account, not just kept in the browser tab, so they're still there next time you sign in.