Meander

Meander is a tiny, single-binary, portable formatter for the production writing markup language Fountain.

Meander is a command-line utility, designed to be self-contained and entirely portable (including fonts), which lets you write wherever you like, on whatever platform you like. You build your writing workflow around your preferred plain-text editor. If that app ever goes away, that platform dies or you simply switch from a Mac to a PC or to Linux, Meander can come with you.

Fountain is a Markdown-adjacent plain-text syntax for — originally — writing screenplays and stageplays. Its guiding philosophy is that that screenplays are version controllable, immune to bit-rot and can be written anywhere. The syntax is simple, repeatable and can be learned in an afternoon. It's also legible as a screenplay without formatting.

In addition to the core Fountain specification, Meander extends the syntax with worthwhile features where possible or idiomatic to do so. These new features are integrated in ways that play nicely with the core Fountain specification.

Meander is open-source and licensed under the GPL 3.0, to ensure it remains available, modifiable and stands a chance of enduring almost as long as your Fountain documents will.

If you want to see all the features that Meander supports, you can read the manual.

Philosophy

I designed Meander out of frustration that screenwriting tools are clunky text editors, prohibitively expensive and often single-platform, typically being made for macOS alone. They also usually save in odd formats that require you to give up your work to some proprietary format.

• Meander is aggressively cross-platform and designed to run even on the most esoteric operating systems.
• Fountain is distraction-free by design. There's no fiddling with formatters or constantly changing a line to be a scene, yes please and thank you. You just write with a few basic rules and Meander will create a polished, formatted screenplay without any effort.
• Fountain is plain-text and can't be locked away or obfuscated. Even if Meander goes away, the text is always there. You can easily version it, process it with other tools and archive it for decades without fear of it becoming unreadable some day.
• Meander would rather you use a really good text editor to write in. iA Writer, Emacs, Sublime Text, etc. are actually designed to efficiently manipulate text in ways that most word processors could only dream of.

I've actually written a companion plugin for Sublime Text, which is designed to make writing novels and screenplays with Fountain and Meander a lovely experience. It's how I write almost everything I do.