Scrite is an open-source desktop screenwriting app. Its an offline app, with no built-in cloud syncing. You can find more information on our official website.

• Create screenplays and format elements appropriately.
• Type in multiple Indian and International languages.
• Import screenplays from FinalDraft and HTML formats.
• Export screenplays to PDF, FinalDraft, Text and HTML formats.
• Generate Character and Location Reports
• Capture character and scene notes.

A complete user guide can be found here.

Scrite is developed using Qt 6.11. To build Scrite, install Qt 6.11+ on your computer (Windows, macOS, or Linux) and CMake 3.27+.

Open the project in Qt Creator (it auto-detects CMakeLists.txt) and set the build configuration to Release, or build from the command line:

cmake -B build -S . -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build --config Release

Build artifacts are placed in the binary/ directory.

If you run into bugs, crashes or find missing features OR features that are not working as expected, we recommend that you post a message on our Discord server, discuss it with us there before creating a bug ticket on GitHub.

Here is a link to our Discord server: https://discord.gg/bGHquFX5jK

These talks may help you find your way around the code.

• Solving Problems for Yourself, and Accidentally Thousands More - IndiaFOSS 2025
• Closing The Gaps - QML on the Desktop - Qt DevCon 2022
• Building Beautiful Desktop Apps Using QML - Qt DevDes Days 2021
• Insights from Building Scrite Using QML - Qt Desktop Days 2020

• Guided Tour of Scrite, Sep 2022
• Generating the Statistics Report
• Using Custom Story Beats
• Typing in Multiple Indian Languages

• ScreenwritingScribe reviews Scrite, Jan 2025
• Sarvana from Film Psychology reviews Scrite, in Tamil
• Rahul, Pooja of Paramvah Studios talk about their Film and Scrite
• Nhân Trương reviews Scrite, in Vietnamese
• James K Martin reviews Scrite

If you want to generate documentation from the docs folder, you will also need to install Python and mkdocs.

Most users prefer to install python from homebrew on macOS. In such cases, it works best if a separate environment is created for serving docs.

# Switch to docs/userguide
cd ./docs/userguide

# Fresh Homebrew Python (ensures pip works)
brew install python

# Project-specific virtualenv (isolates from system)
cd your-scrite-docs-folder
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

# Install MkDocs ecosystem
pip install mkdocs mkdocs-material mkdocs-video mkdocs-rss-plugin

# Serve docs
mkdocs serve --livereload

# Open http://127.0.0.1:8000 on your browser

Once you have python and pip installed,

# Switch to docs/userguide
cd ./docs/userguide

# Install Mkdocs ecosystem
pip install mkdocs mkdocs-material mkdocs-video

# Serve docs
python -m mkdocs serve

# Open http://127.0.0.1:8000 on your browser

Further reading: https://www.mkdocs.org/user-guide/installation/

We use a commercial license of Qt 6.11 for all production and beta builds. You should be able to use any Qt 6.11+ release for building Scrite. The code is organized to work well with our webservices in production, so if you build from the source code here — it may not work with our production servers. You should be able to comment away all references to our webservices and construct a purely open-source build. At some point, we will introduce compile time config settings to make this easy.

Ensure that you have OpenSSL 3 installed. We use Windows 11 for development, although the app also works on Windows 10. Earlier versions of Windows are not supported.

Any version of macOS supported by Qt 6.11 should work. macOS builds are universal binaries (x86_64 + arm64).

To build the app on Linux, there are a couple of dependencies to take care of first.

To build Scrite with Hunspell support on Linux, install hunspell-dev. On Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install libhunspell-dev

Make sure that you have cursor, xinerama installed

sudo apt install libxcb-cursor0 libxcb-xinerama0

You will also need OpenSSL 3:

sudo apt install libssl-dev

For running the package scripts, you will need imagemagick and linuxdeployqt

sudo apt install imagemagick

wget -c https://github.com/probonopd/linuxdeployqt/releases/download/continuous/linuxdeployqt-continuous-x86_64.AppImage

Language support on Linux requirres IBUS.

sudo apt install ibus ibus-m17n libibus-1.0-dev

Additionally, ensure that ibus daemon is running and that you setup languages using

ibus-setup

You may also need to include the following lines into environment variables.

export GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus
export XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus
export QT_IM_MODULE=ibus
export XIM_PROGRAM="/usr/bin/ibus-daemon -drx"