Understory

Collect research, shape an outline, and write a draft in one Mac notebook

Meet Understory

Understory is a Mac notes app for turning research into essays, papers, scripts, and books. Notes are ordinary paragraphs that can be arranged beneath other notes to form an outline. The same note can appear in several places, allowing a useful quotation or idea to support more than one part of a project.

Writers can collect material as they read, reorganize it into an argument, and draft sections with the supporting research nearby. Finished work can be published as PDF, Rich Text, Markdown, or a website. Notebooks live in a local Markdown folder or the user's iCloud account, with no separate Understory account required.

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Product details

Website: understory.ussherpress.com
Status: Launched
Category: Productivity
Listed: Oct 21, 2026

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