Changes made outside the app

A .fountain file is plain text, so other programs can change it: another Fountain app, a text editor, a sync service bringing in what you wrote on another computer. Calmly Script notices, and asks before anything is replaced.

Noticing

On Windows, macOS and Linux the app watches the file of the screenplay on screen. On Android it looks at the file every few seconds and again whenever you come back to the app.

A change is a change to what the file says. When a cloud service only touches the file’s date, nothing is asked.

The question

If you have no unsaved changes, the app says the document has been updated outside the app and offers:

• Load new version: the screenplay on screen becomes what the file says now.
• Keep current: the screenplay stays as it is on screen.

If you do have unsaved changes, it warns that reloading will replace them:

• Reload and discard: the file’s new version replaces what you have on screen.
• Keep my changes: your version stays, and with automatic saving on it is written to the file straight away.

Both versions are kept, whatever you answer. Before anything is replaced, the version that arrived and the version you had on screen are both stored in File › Version history, labelled External change (on disk) and Your replaced version. You can always go back to the other one (see Version history and backups).

If you answer Keep, you are not asked again about that same version of the file; a later change is a new question.

Until you answer

While the question is waiting, automatic saving does not write to the file, so it cannot overwrite the other version by accident. What you type is still kept in the app’s backups. If a dialog is open when the change arrives, the question waits until the dialog closes.

If automatic saving finds that the file has changed before it could write, it leaves the file alone and tells you your latest changes are safe in the backup.

Two devices

With a screenplay in a synced folder (Google Drive, Dropbox), you can write on one device and carry on on another. When you come back to Calmly Script on Android, it reads the file again and finds what you wrote elsewhere, as soon as the sync service has brought it to the device. How quickly that happens is up to the sync service.

Writing in the same file on two devices at the same time is not supported: whichever device saves last wins.