Opening a screenplay file: layout, toolbar, status bar

In one line: a tour of every part of the screenplay editor — the three views, the three buttons bottom right, the row of numbers along the bottom, and where find and replace actually lives.

This is a file, not a studio

Click a .script in the file tree and it opens in a tab, exactly like a .md. Same activity bar on the left, same file tree, same AI chat panel on the right. There is no second studio shell around it, no page switcher, no season/episode breadcrumb. Those stayed behind with the old Script Studio.

Which means everything you learned writing prose still applies. The screenplay part is a layer on top, not a different building.

The toolbar: five buttons and a format switch

The toolbar floats above the white page. Five buttons on the left:

1. Export Screenplay — PDF, Word, Fountain, plus merge export when the folder holds other episodes
2. Board — swaps the page for a column of draggable scene cards; press again to go back to Edit
3. Preview — the typeset screenplay, drawn by the same renderer the export uses, so what you see is what ships
4. ? — the shortcut guide, which draws the Tab/Enter flow for whichever format this file is in
5. Focus — cycles off → line → scene, and only appears in Edit

Focus mode dims everything you are not on. It never scrolls the page. That is deliberate: a screenplay line is often three words long, and a page that jumps to keep the cursor centred is harder to read, not easier.

On the right, runtime and format:

• The runtime readout starts with the estimate (dialogue and action words at the script's reading speed, plus the transition), then the target you set yourself. Type whole minutes into the target and clear it to unset. Once a target exists a percentage appears beside it, green below 90%, yellow at 90–99%, red at 100% and over. The estimate is summed from the scenes and recomputed live, so a scene the AI just wrote counts like any other.
• Hollywood / Taiwan switch, plus a gear for format settings. When you change those settings and the book holds other screenplay files, Slima asks whether to apply the change to all of them or just this episode.

The page in the middle

The title block sits at the top: title, episode number, subtitle, writer. Then one scene after another.

Each scene heading row reads left to right: collapse arrow, scene number, INT/EXT toggle, location, the ~Nm estimate, a target in minutes, the time of day toggle, an annotation (+), and delete.

You type straight into the location field. If the book contains a .md file with the same name, the location gets a dashed underline and Ctrl/⌘-click opens it. Character cues above dialogue behave the same way. The annotation button is where (LATER), (CONTINUOUS) or (FLASHBACK) go.

Three views of one file

Same file, three faces

Edit: write line by line Board: drag scene cards into order Preview: the typeset result

Board and Preview live in the same tab. Nothing navigates away.

Board is where structure gets sorted out. One card per scene: drag by the grip on the left edge, or use the ▲▼ buttons. Summary, INT/EXT, location, time of day and cast are all editable on the card. Clicking the card itself does nothing on purpose — to get back to writing, press the pencil "go to scene" button on its heading row. A card covered in editable fields is too easy to fat-finger.

Preview uses the same renderer as export, so the leading, the margins and the Taiwanese scene table you see there are what lands in the PDF. There is a reading toolbar above it with a Cast button, where you assign a voice to each character.

The numbers along the bottom

The status bar sticks to the bottom of the pane whatever you scroll. Its left half names the element you are on and what Tab, ⇧Tab and Enter will do next — that is the part of screenplay writing that eats attention, and having it in front of you beats memorising it.

The right half carries the numbers: word count, scene count, N INT / N EXT, and character count. Word counts print in full. Nothing gets rounded to "13K".

The character count is worth explaining. Slima counts the names you typed on character cues. Type a name and that person is in the cast; there is no character bible to maintain and no "create character" step anywhere. Note the scope, though: that number covers the whole book, every .script file added together. Word count, scene count and the INT/EXT split are this episode. For who is in this episode alone, open the Characters tab of the outline panel.

The three buttons bottom right

Long episodes scroll a long way, so the bottom-right corner of the page carries scroll to top, collapse all / expand all, and scroll to bottom. They only show up once the file has more than one scene.

Collapsed, the file becomes a stack of heading rows and you can read the shape of the episode in one screen. To collapse a single scene, use the arrow at the left of its heading, or press Ctrl+Shift+[.

Find and replace

There is no Ctrl+F in the screenplay editor. Full-text search is the Search panel in the activity bar, it covers the whole book, and screenplay files are in it — headings, action and dialogue are all indexed. Case-sensitive, whole-word and regular-expression switches are there. Clicking a hit jumps to that line, in that scene, in that episode.

Replace on a screenplay is whole-file only. What you get is the "Replace N in this file" button. The per-match replace button never appears on a .script, because a match's position is measured in the flattened text, not in the scene tree, so a single-match replace could not be aimed. Full explanation in find and replace.

It works on a phone

Screenplay files are no longer read-only on mobile. Tap a line and a sheet opens where you change the element type, pick a character from a quick list, edit the text, add a line below, undo, or delete. Tap a scene heading and you get INT/EXT, location, time of day, insert scene, delete scene. Long-press a line to leave a comment.

Related

• Docs: Create a .script file
• Docs: The outline panel: scenes, characters, locations
• Docs: Shortcut cheat sheet
• Docs: Splitting, merging, inserting and reordering scenes
• Docs: Taiwanese and Hollywood
• Docs: Find and replace