Slate Scripts — every feature, scene by scene

INT. THE EDITOR — NIGHT

Pages that behave like pages.

Not a text box with margins — a typesetting engine that thinks in scene headings, cues, and dialogue, and keeps up with you at speed.

Enter knows what comes next

After a scene heading comes action. After a character cue comes dialogue. Press Enter and the next line is already the right element — Tab cycles it if you meant something else. Eight element types, one keystroke each (⌘1–⌘8).

Your cast, one keystroke away

Start a character cue and everyone who's spoken so far is suggested. ↑↓ to choose, Tab or Enter to complete. Scene headings autocomplete the same way — INT./EXT. plus every location you've already used.

(CONT'D) and (MORE), handled

When the same character keeps talking, when a speech breaks across a page — Slate adds the industry furniture itself and never stores it in your text. Real pagination too: a cue is never orphaned from its dialogue.

Typewriter mode & the page bell

Keep the active line centered while pages roll past like a platen. And if you want it, a soft synthesized ding when a new page is born — off by default, like all good bells.

Find & replace that counts

⌘F opens a find bar with a live match counter, next and previous, replace one or all. Matches flash when you jump to them.

It remembers where you were

Reopen a script and the caret is on the line you left, the page scrolled into view. The status bar keeps a live word and page count — plus +N today, the only writing metric that matters at 2 a.m.

Also in the room: macOS spellcheck, bold/italic/underline in prose, a case-cycling Aa button, zoom (⌘+/⌘−), paste that parses whole scenes into elements, and an editable title page.

The format bar — lives at the bottom of the sheet

↶ ↷ Dialogue ▾ BIUS Aa

INT. ST. JUDE'S HOSPITAL — ER — NIGHT

Fluorescent hum. MARA VOSS (38) moves gurney to gurney.

MARA (CONT'D)

Who logged bay nine?

12,480 words · 58 pages +612 today

THE STORY LAYER

The outline and the pages, finally in the same room.

Beats aren't a separate document you forget to update. In Slate a beat covers real lines of the script — so the story structure and the pages can't drift apart.

Beats, on the board and on the page

COLD OPEN · BEAT

The Discovery

Mara finds an unlogged body in bay nine and crosses a line she can't uncross.

tension character

BUT

COLD OPEN · BEAT

The Cover-Up

The record's already been scrubbed — someone got there first.

COLD OPEN

The Discovery

The Cover-Up

ACT ONE

Medical Records

⤷ drop a beat — its scenes move too

ACT TWO

The Stairwell

Beats pinned to lines

⌘⇧B turns the line you're on into a beat. Each one carries a summary, tags, rich notes, and its own comment thread — and washes its covered lines in a soft color band so you can see structure while you write.

But / Therefore, made visible

Every beat declares how it follows the last one — but, therefore, meanwhile, or and. A column of ANDs is the board telling you the story has stopped causing itself.

A corkboard wired to the pages

The Beat Board shows every beat as a card under its act. Drag a card to another act and its script elements travel with it — restructure the story and the pages follow. Not a diagram of the script; a handle on it.

Sections with a Focus switch

Cold open, acts, stinger — split the script however your show needs. Focus mode shows one section and hides the rest; each section can also hold named alternate versions you can compare and swap in place.

Issues and margins

Log story problems where they live — against a section or beat, with severity and a to-do / in-progress / solved state. Threaded comments anchor to actual lines, Google-Docs style. Solve the last open issue and Slate says so: "All issues solved. Clean slate."

Notes that hold anything

Beat notes are a full markdown editor — headings, tables, images, blockquotes — with the little courtesies: type -> and get →, pop the notes out into their own window when they outgrow the margin.

EXT. THE MULTIVERSE — CONTINUOUS

Every version of the story, safely at once.

The big idea, in full: drafts that branch, compare honestly, and merge without eating anyone's work. Software teams have trusted this model for decades. Writers get it with the jargon sanded off.

A draft for every "what if"

Start a new draft as a copy of everything, or a clean slate with just the title page. Scope it to the whole script — or to a single section, when only the cold open is on trial. Main never flinches.

Compare at word level

The merge preview shows exactly what will land: cuts in red, additions in green, moved lines, and — crucially — what stays because you wrote it on the target. Changes diff word by word inside the line, so you can see the one adjective that changed.

Merges that don't clobber

Slate merges three-way from the moment the draft was forked — your co-writer's changes land alongside the edits you made meanwhile, and deleted lines stay deleted instead of creeping back. The preview you approve is the merge you get.

An undo for everything

The newest merge on any draft offers a one-click revert — and the revert itself is ⌘Z-undoable. The history graph records it all: every fork, every merge curving home, every revert struck through honestly.

Snapshots under the floorboards

Independent of drafts, Slate quietly keeps timestamped snapshots of the script as you work. Browse them, preview any moment, restore it — and Slate takes one more snapshot right before the restore, so even rescue missions are reversible.

The merge preview — what will actually land

INT. ALL-NIGHT DINER — 3 A.M.

− Rosa wipes the counter, slow and tired.

+ Rosa wipes the counter like it owes her money.

stays — written on your draft

⋯ 214 unchanged lines

TWO WRITERS. ONE SCRIPT. NO SERVER.

Co-writing that respects the draft.

No live cursors fighting over one page, no accounts, nothing uploaded to anyone. A shared folder you already have — Dropbox, iCloud, or plain disk — carries the work between you.

The inbox — a proposal just landed

AM

Tighten the cold open

from Amira · draft/amira-pass · 2m ago

PROPOSED REVISION

Review & merge Comment Decline

You read the whole change with the same honest preview as a local merge. You always hold the final cut.

Point it at a folder — that's the setup

Each script names its own shared folder, so different projects can have different collaborators. Publish drops a current copy there; your co-writer opens it in Slate and works on their own draft, on their own machine.

Proposed revisions, not surprises

Their pass comes back as a proposal with an author, a title, and a description. It arrives in your inbox with a toast and a pulsing badge; you review it line by line, comment in the margins, and merge — or decline, which is also an answer. Revised resubmissions thread onto the same conversation.

A return ticket for Final Draft people

Publish a .fountain and it carries a hidden return marker — if your co-writer edits it in Final Draft or a plain text editor and drops it back, it re-enters as a real reviewable proposal, not a mystery duplicate.

Reviewing is free. Forever.

A collaborator without a license can still read scripts and review, comment on, and merge incoming proposals at no cost. Your writing partner doesn't need to buy Slate to answer your notes.

Signed, tidied, de-duplicated

Work is signed with a name and initials so you can tell whose changes are whose. Processed bundles are filed away automatically and old ones cleaned up after 30 days — the shared folder stays a folder, not a junk drawer.

INT. YOUR DISK — ALWAYS

Files you could leave with tomorrow.

The most important feature is the one you'll hopefully never need: nothing about Slate holds your writing hostage.

Readable by anything, right now

Every active script sits in your save folder as a plain .fountain file — human-readable screenplay text you can open in any editor on earth, today, without Slate's permission.

A second copy in your cloud

Pick a mirror folder in Dropbox, iCloud, or Google Drive and every save and snapshot is copied there too. It's a backup, not a sync — deleting locally never deletes the copy.

Time-Machine-lite, built in

Timestamped snapshots as you work — capped and tidied automatically, each with a plain-text twin. Deleting a script moves it to the macOS Trash, not oblivion; archiving just puts it away.

In: Final Draft. Out: everything.

Import .fdx and Fountain. Export a WYSIWYG PDF — the exact pages you see, breaks and (CONT'D)s included — plus Fountain, a shareable .slate bundle, and a large-type teleprompter PDF for table reads.

Your margins, your rules

A formatting panel controls page margins and per-element spacing for all eight element types, with live preview. The PDF honors it exactly.

Your save folder — no lock-in, no mystery blobs

📄 The Lighthouse Keeper.fountainplain text — opens anywhere

📄 NIGHTSHIFT.fountainplain text — opens anywhere

📁 Backups/full projects + timestamped snapshots

📁 Archive/put-away scripts, restorable

Edited a .fountain in another app? Slate notices — by content, not timestamp — and preserves your external edits instead of overwriting them.

THE SMALL STUFF

An editor made to delight. A place where you want to write.

A tool you spend nights with should be pleasant company. None of this is necessary. All of it is the point.

It celebrates with you

FADE OUT. That's Draft One — 94 pages, 18,204 words.

Your first script earns a FADE IN. Typing the final FADE OUT earns the tally. Word milestones glow once — 1k, 5k, 10k, 20k — and never nag twice.

Covers with taste

Sixteen mood-named gradients — Noir, Golden Hour, Sunset Blvd — plus eight patterns, so the library reads like a shelf you'd actually browse.

A guided first night

Setup takes a minute, then a hands-on tour walks the real UI over a seeded sample script — a diner short called Closing Time. Re-run it anytime from Help → Show Me Around.

The cheat sheet is one key away

⌘/ opens the keyboard shortcuts sheet from anywhere. The fastest way to write is also the first thing it teaches: Tab cycles what the next line becomes.

Updates handle themselves

Slate checks quietly, downloads in the background, and installs when you quit. No wizard, no interruption — just release notes in the corner when something new lands.

Calm by default

Animations settle rather than bounce, every one respects your system's reduced-motion setting, and the page bell stays off until you ask for it. Empty states encourage instead of scold: "Nothing on the page yet. FADE IN: is waiting."