September 20, 2026
The second half of the first day was about everything around the writing: how a newcomer finds their way in, what the app is called, and how a writer keeps track of more than one script.
The first time you open the app, a short welcome tour now explains the two panes, how the typing helpers work, and where your work is kept. It never appears again unless you ask for it.
Behind the ? button there is now a full Help window: a Fountain cheat sheet, every keyboard shortcut, and what each button does. Every example in the cheat sheet is checked by the tests against the real parser, so the Help can never quietly drift away from what the app actually does.
All of the app's windows share one helper for opening and closing, which means they all behave the same way for keyboard and screen-reader users: focus moves into the window, stays there, and returns where it came from.
Three names were in circulation at once: "SLASH Frictionless Screenwriter" on the page, "NeuroFountain" on the repository, and "The Void" and "The Canvas" on the panes. The brief for a new one was calm and a little whimsical.
Plenty of good names were already taken. Vellum is a well-known book formatting app, which is the opposite of the pitch. Foolscap and Dormouse are already quiet writing apps. Plainsong was perfect, and two apps already use it.
So the app is called Plainchant: the same music under its other name. Plainchant is unaccompanied, unornamented singing, a single line of melody. Fountain works the same way: plain text first, with the formatting layered on afterwards.
The repository was renamed to match. The domain, a trademark search and a real logo are still on the list.
Scripts can now be searched, renamed, duplicated and deleted from the Library. Deleting is gentle: a script goes to Recently deleted first and can be brought back, and it is only removed for good after thirty days or when you say so twice.
Renaming a script simply changes the Title: line in its text,
because the text is the script. Nothing about a script is hidden away
outside what you wrote.
Export now downloads a proper .fountain file named after the
script's title, which any text editor and most screenwriting apps can
open.
Import works the other way: pick a .fountain or
.txt file from the Library, or drop it onto the page. It reads
files written on Windows, Mac and Linux alike, including older ones in
Windows' own text encoding. An import always adds a new script and never
replaces anything.
The app was one very long HTML file, with nearly a thousand lines of script and seven hundred of styling inside it. The code now lives in a set of small files, one per job, and the styling in its own stylesheet.
The split was done mechanically, and then checked: every original line of code was proven to exist exactly once in the new files. A new structure test fails if a file is forgotten, a name is declared twice, or a file grows past five hundred lines.
The app has a name, a welcome, Help, a Library, and a way in and out for scripts. The tests have grown to 144 unit tests and 330 checks of the app itself.
Two things are next. Typing a character's name for the fiftieth time should not require typing all of it, so the app should suggest names and locations it has already seen.
And the scripts themselves live somewhere with a hard size limit, which is fine for a few short films and not fine for a writer's whole body of work. That needs a careful plan before any code is written.