September 28, 2026
Reading a script back is when you find the typos. A name spelled two ways, a line that wants one more word, a parenthetical that says "beat" for the third time on the page. Until now, fixing any of them meant finding the same spot again in the plain text, which is exactly the kind of small friction Plainchant is meant to remove.
Now you can fix it where you found it. Double-click any line of the formatted preview, and its paragraph opens right there, in a small box over the page, as the plain text you wrote. On a phone or tablet, press and hold the line instead.
A line of dialogue opens the whole speech, name and all, because a speech is one piece of writing. It works in Page view too: double-click a line on a sheet, and the box opens over that sheet.
The obvious way to build this would have been to make the formatted page itself editable, like a word processor. It is also the way screenwriting apps most often get into trouble: two views of the same script that can each be changed, and slowly disagree about what the script actually says.
So Plainchant does not do that. The box holds the script's own text, and a kept change goes into the script exactly as if you had typed it in the editor. Everything else follows from there, as it always does: the preview redraws, the page count updates, the script saves, and a file you sync with is written. There is still only one script.
That also means Ctrl (or Cmd) + Z in the editor undoes a quick edit, like any other change. That holds even when the edit was made with the editor hidden, in the preview-only layout or on a phone. For that one moment the app quietly brings the editor back, out of sight, so the change still goes into its undo history.
If the script changes while a box is open (in another tab, say, or from a synced file), the quick edit is not written over it. Plainchant says so instead. And a quick tap on a phone still does what it always did: it takes you to that line in the editor. Only a press and hold opens the box.
The tests now stand at 340 unit tests under Node, and 327 unit tests plus 731 checks of the app in a real browser, including the accessibility check with a quick edit open, in every theme.
Press and hold is the part most worth trying on a real phone, where the phone's own text-selection menu may want the same gesture. After that, the next step is the writer's choice, and opening Final Draft files is still near the top of the list.