I use Celtx for daily work and it's a good piece of software: easy to use, fast, and has a lot of possibilities on a production environment. The cons for me: The mobile version is not multiplatform. They won't do an Android version for working on the road... they've made an iOS version and think that's enough... a pity.

Celtx Plus is on special for $9.99 .. $5 bucks off

Not a fan of Celtx, it just seems so half assed, it also seems as though their focus is all over the show, I don't want all the post production stuff in my screenwriting software.

I started writing my own screenwriting software awhile back, I wanted to actually have software with revision control and branches so you can experiment with different drafts and not lose any information, I wanted more note features, and to have heaps of meta data for relationships between characters, scenes, locations, etc. I wanted to be able to deprecate scenes, and to have timelines of events.

I got quite far along, and was using it myself to write a screenplay, however I realised that page 1 rewrites are best and therefore a lot of the versioning stuff is not necessary. I use Celtx but hate it.

Maybe I will write a greasemonkey script to modify google docs somewhat and enable some of the features I want, also scrivener is good if anyone has checked it out (doesn't run on Linux though).

@chauncy Both are better for finishing off a script, and for final formating, but I'm not convinced that they are better for writing it. I might give scrivener another shot, they have a beta for linux.

The main thing I don't like about screenwriting software is that things are organised by sluglines, a slugline isn't a good representation of a segment of a story because it is simply a location change. Action can flow through multiple locations. I want software that can separate the story from the formatting, so I want arbitrary segments in the document and I want it to go many layers deep. I want to be able to split my script up into acts -> segments -> scenes -> slug lines if I want to.

Scrivener kind of does this, it allows you to have multiple folders and multiple files, each file representing a story segment, you then compile it at the end to see what it looks like formatted. Not the most elegant solution because I like to see how what I'm writing looks, white space is so important. I also want to feel how the script flows as I'm reading it all the way through, and be able to make changes on subsequent passes. So I feel there is no solution, however the way things work now I might attempt to use Scrivener for the first go at the second draft of my script, and then something like Final Draft for adding polish.

I don't know - despite not being leet when I code I like to use an IDE rather than a text editor, therefore when I write I can only assume I would prefer a word processor.

Fade In looks good one of the better ones that I've seen. However it still has the fundamental problem of treating slug lines as a scene which makes the index card feature useless. I'll play with it and might move to it as it seems really nice and easy.

@adr Yeah the problem with Scriviner is that you have to compile it to see it all at once, you can't then read through it and rewrite it as you go.

I'm trying an experiment with Celtx for my latest script, I have the project split into 3 screenplays, act one, act two, and act three. I then use the scene field to denote a sequence, I then do my slug lines by writing action in upper case, making them bold, and underlining them. You lose autocomplete but you get to organise things better. Eventually I will need to copy and paste into one screenplay (maybe fade in pro), but its kind of a hybrid scrivener approach.

So my scene heading would be something like CHASE SCENE, I can then more accurately use the notecard feature because its not one slug line per location.

@Caliban_17 I loved your comments here. It's true that the standard screenplay format is pretty ugly. When I use a computer to write (or try to) I always end up looking at all the twily doo-dads and mouse ding-a-lings that pop up on the screen. Distraction from the truth is only a few pixels away. So I scribble under a bright light. Fast, so that nothing becomes too precious to chuck in the circular file. I loved watching the docu about woody allen and how he does it. Priceless! great thread. Grate!