FOSSPicks
FOSSPicks
Graham Morrison looks at KIT Scenarist, Inboxer 1.0, Tungsten, rtl_433, Oil 0.3.0, Etcher 1.3.0, and more!
Screenwriter Studio
KIT Scenarist
While there are plenty of applications, and plenty of additions to Vim and Emacs, that help you write a novel, not many can help you write a screenplay for theater, video, television, or films. This may be due to screenplays being more specific, more niche, and perhaps a little lower down on the spectrum of dream careers for people who can follow one word with another. But they're also (theoretically) easier to write than a novel and offer another potential avenue for people wanting to find a path into professional writing. With the odds stacked against authors getting their work published, additional avenues are always worth pursuing.
KIT Scenarist is a Russian application written for screenwriters. It gets off to a great start by offering to run with a preference chosen from 12 different languages, and either a light or dark theme. You then get to choose which modules to enable by default, such as the research module for collecting your background information, the cards module to help you build a script from a series of ideas written on cards, the statistics module to help you charge per brilliant word, the script module itself with support for scenes and standard scriptwriter tools, and, finally, a starter template, such as the "Final Draft Screenplay" template. However, you can just as easily create your own templates or apply a template to an already worked-on script to change its layout and structure.
The application feels more like an IDE for scriptwriters than an augmented text editor. When you start a project, for example, you're guided through creating characters and adding background details for them, creating scenes, adding dialogue, and pulling the whole thing together into a script that can easily be exported as FDX, PDF, Fountain, and DOCX formats. For writers, simple things such as dynamic word count are seldom implemented, but Scenarist gets this right, as it does the automatic text formatting, which gets out of the way and lets you write your dialogue or your descriptions without having to worry about syntax. You can easily see the plot status, organize the threads of your story, and change things around without having to resort to a pair of scissors and randomly sequenced bits of paper.
There's even a review mode where editors can leave comments, and your research can include external directories and images, all selectable from a module tab that can be opened alongside the editor if you opt for the two-panel mode. Scripts have a very specific layout and format, and KIT Scenarist can generate this output from your content without you needing to know the specifics of how to generate the exact formatting. This also includes essential details such as the timing for each line of dialogue, reflected in the chart for the statistics overview for the entire script. Scenarist is remarkably mature and capable. The Qt user interface makes it feel like a native Linux application, and it's easy to see why there are more than 1,000 script writers using the application already.
Project Website
https://kitscenarist.ru/en/index.html
Gmail client
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Armbian 24.11 Released with Expanded Hardware Support
If you've been waiting for Armbian to support OrangePi 5 Max and Radxa ROCK 5B+, the wait is over.
-
SUSE Renames Several Products for Better Name Recognition
SUSE has been a very powerful player in the European market, but it knows it must branch out to gain serious traction. Will a name change do the trick?
-
ESET Discovers New Linux Malware
WolfsBane is an all-in-one malware that has hit the Linux operating system and includes a dropper, a launcher, and a backdoor.
-
New Linux Kernel Patch Allows Forcing a CPU Mitigation
Even when CPU mitigations can consume precious CPU cycles, it might not be a bad idea to allow users to enable them, even if your machine isn't vulnerable.
-
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.5 Released
Notify your friends, loved ones, and colleagues that the latest version of RHEL is available with plenty of enhancements.
-
Linux Sees Massive Performance Increase from a Single Line of Code
With one line of code, Intel was able to increase the performance of the Linux kernel by 4,000 percent.
-
Fedora KDE Approved as an Official Spin
If you prefer the Plasma desktop environment and the Fedora distribution, you're in luck because there's now an official spin that is listed on the same level as the Fedora Workstation edition.
-
New Steam Client Ups the Ante for Linux
The latest release from Steam has some pretty cool tricks up its sleeve.
-
Gnome OS Transitioning Toward a General-Purpose Distro
If you're looking for the perfectly vanilla take on the Gnome desktop, Gnome OS might be for you.
-
Fedora 41 Released with New Features
If you're a Fedora fan or just looking for a Linux distribution to help you migrate from Windows, Fedora 41 might be just the ticket.