Escribir

A fast, focused text editor for Markdown, Fountain screenplays, and plain text. What you save is byte-for-byte what you typed.

A wooden artist's mannequin riding a fountain pen like a rocket across a mid-century wallpaper of rounded squares, leaving a trail of handwriting behind it.

Free Download on the Mac App Store

Free, and free in the plain sense — no subscription, no in-app purchases, no trial that expires, no account to make.

Available for Mac · iPhone & iPad coming soon

Coming in 1.1

The Paragraph Well

A quiet lane to the left of your text. Rest the pointer on a paragraph and a play button appears in it. Click, and Escribir reads that paragraph aloud in your system voice, highlighting each word as it goes.

Not out yet. The paragraph well arrives in Escribir 1.1 — a free update, like every other. Today’s download is 1.0, and everything below this section is in it.

It knows what a paragraph is

In Markdown that is a paragraph, heading, list item, or blockquote. In Fountain it is a scene heading, action, transition — or a whole speech, the character cue with its parentheticals and dialogue together. Code, tables, and notes get no well.

It reads the writing, not the markup

Asterisks and link URLs are dropped, list numbers are kept, and INT. and EXT. are spoken as the words they stand for. A Fountain speech reads its dialogue, not the cue.

Empty until you want it

The well is blank at rest, and the lane is reserved from the start, so text never shifts when it appears. ⌥Esc reads the paragraph at the caret and Esc stops.

On your Mac, and nowhere else

Speech is synthesised on the device in the voice you picked in System Settings. Nothing is uploaded, and nothing is recorded.

Hearing a paragraph out loud is the oldest editing trick there is. It catches the sentence that reads fine and says badly — and for a screenplay, it is the only way to know whether a line sounds like a person.

See it in action

A Fountain screenplay open in Escribir with live styling: scene headings underlined, dialogue indented to screenplay geometry, and a live word count in the window's bottom bar. — Fountain, styled live — screenplay geometry as you type, with the source one keystroke away.

Escribir's script preview showing a Fountain screenplay rendered as a formatted script page, with title page block, centered character names, and indented dialogue. — Script preview — your screenplay rendered as real script pages.

Escribir's project window with a sidebar file tree over a folder and a text file open in the editor pane. — The project window — a sidebar over any folder, every text file a click away.

A Markdown document in Escribir with live styling: scaled headings, bold and italic text, and dimmed syntax markers. — Markdown, styled as you type — and saved byte-for-byte as plain text.

Live styling, honest source

.md and .fountain render as you type, and ⌥⌘S drops you back to plain source at any moment. The styling is a view, never a format.

A project window over any folder

Open a folder and work across its files with a sidebar, an in-window find bar, and recent-project memory. No import step, no library to maintain.

Git built in

Clone repositories, commit with a per-file save-or-exclude review, switch branches, and push — from inside the editor on the Mac.

Find & Replace done right

Incremental search in a bar inside the window, not a floating panel — and Replace All is a single undo, not one per match.

Free, and only free

One download, everything in it. No subscription, no in-app purchase, no pro tier holding a feature back.

No accounts, no sync service

Nothing to sign into and nothing phoning home. Your documents stay on your device, and Escribir collects no data at all.