Beat

An elegant screenwriting app for macOS and iOS, using the plain-text Fountain screenplay format. It's fast, lightweight and, above all, has a distraction-free, minimalistic UI. Beat is also free and open source under GPL.

Official website
Download releases on App Store
Discord Community

Plugin API documentation
Read more on public plugin repository: https://github.com/lmparppei/BeatPlugins/

About Beat

This started as a personal project as I needed a simple, multi-window, lightweight screenwriting application for my own films. All other existing screenwriting apps were weird, expensive, cumbersome or even lacked some pretty important features - such as automatic and visible scene numbering while writing. At this point Beat pretty much outdoes most of the commercial Fountain editors, with certain limitations. To make up for those, Beat some very useful features, such as powerful outlining tools, scene coloring and filtering.

Beat was originally a fork of Writer by Hendrik Noeller and some code still originates from his work, especially within the magnificent continuous Fountain parser.

Selected Features

• Minimalistic UI with as little distractions as possible
• Smart, automatic screenplay formatting
• Multiple story structure views with filtering, sections and synopses, including a collapsing list, index cards and timeline
• Dark mode for the children of the night
• Hide Fountain markup
• Final Draft import / export, including revisions, outline items and soon tags
• Title page editor
• JavaScript plugin API
• Automatic scene numbering
• Page numbers and separators
• Revision generation management
• Autocompletion for characters and scene headings
• Color-coded scenes
• Statistics view, with line count per character, inclusivity by gender, scene locations, etc.
• Fountain QuickLook plugin for Finder
• Backup vault
• ... and much more!

iOS version

Beat for iOS supports a limited set of features, but is getting up to speed with the desktop release. Some thing will, like plugin support, will remain macOS-exclusive, and the iOS version should be considered a companion app for the bigger sibling now.

The mobile version is currently a paid app, available on App Store, but it is still licensed under GPL and this repo contains the code for both platforms. You can build it yourself to avoid paying me anything.

Building from repo

Note: This repository follows my development, so it DOES NOT match the latest release version on either platform. I still can't use branches. Dread lightly, dear friend!

Open the Beat workspace and set your credentials. When building for macOS development, I suggest using the Beat App Store target. You will need multiple Beat frameworks built, but both iOS and macOS release versions have only one external package dependency.

FAQ

Future & state of development

Beat is under active development, and worst bugs will usually be fixed ASAP. If you encounter a bug, contact me through e-mail, Discord or file an issue here on GitHub.

Plugins

You can download the latest public plugins (and learn more about creating your own) in the Beat Plugin repo: https://github.com/lmparppei/BeatPlugins

Will There Be a Windows Version?

Unfortunately no. Beat is written in Objective C and Swift and relies on native macOS APIs. There are no good Fountain editors on Windows, and somebody should really write one! You might be able to use the Beat parser as starting point.

Can I help?

Please do! The person behind this project is not a real programmer but an artist and a filmmaker, and it really shows in the code. Coding assistance, bug reports, feature requests and feedback are highly appreciated!

Support Beat

You can help to keep the project alive by subscribing to the Patreon. However, the creator of this app is a well-off person from a social-democratic welfare country, so you can also send your loose change to NGOs and charities. There is a genocide happening in Gaza and people are in desperate need of help.

Post-mortem

Beat is an anti-capitalist venture.

Beat will stay free and open source forever. I came to filmmaking from a DIY & underground art scene, which works on very different rules than the film industry. We desperately need new voices and new people to tell their own stories instead of all the established middle-class white people — including me. A free screenwriting app might not be the thing that helps you to break through, but it's a start, if you are able to afford (or steal) a Mac. Don't steal it from an individual, though.

If you are here just to steal some code for your own Fountain editor, note that the code is licensed under GPL (v3), so you will need to share your derivative work publicly.

The app has been cooked up through trial and error, and might be rough around the edges, but it is -- above all -- a labour of love. At times, to vent my frustration, I've included quotes from my favourite poets as comments in the code. They include Forough Farrokhzad, Marina Tsvetayeva, Charles Bukowski and myself. All apologies.

Lauri-Matti Parppei
www.parppei.com