Trelby is a screenwriting application designed for creating film and television scripts. It provides a dedicated editor that understands screenplay structure and applies the formatting conventions used in professional scripts.
The application treats a screenplay as a sequence of elements, including scenes, action, character names, dialogue, parentheticals, transitions, shots and notes. Each element has its own style, reducing the need to manage indentation, spacing and pagination manually.
Trelby was originally developed under the name Blyte. It subsequently became a community project, and its codebase has been modernised to work with Python 3.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Automatically formats screenplay elements and handles pagination.
- Autocomplete for character names, scene headings and other screenplay elements.
- Draft view displays the screenplay without page-break distractions.
- WYSIWYG view shows the script as it will appear when printed.
- Fullscreen mode for distraction-free writing.
- Small and large overview modes for inspecting screenplay structure.
- Character name database containing more than 200,000 names from different countries.
- Generate scene, location, character and dialogue reports.
- Compare two screenplays to identify changes between drafts.
- Import formatted text, Final Draft XML, Fountain, Adobe Story, Fade In Pro and Celtx documents.
- Export screenplays as PDF, formatted text, HTML, RTF, Final Draft XML and Fountain.
- Built-in PDF generator with configurable fonts, paper settings and watermarks.
- Spell checking, find and replace, and undo and redo functionality.
- Support for non-breaking spaces and Unicode filenames.
- Keyboard-oriented text selection and configurable editing shortcuts.
- Cross-platform support – runs on Linux and Windows.
Website: www.trelby.org
Support:
Developer: Trelby developers
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Trelby was previously developed by a different author under the name Blyte, starting life as commercial software but subsequently released under an open source license.
Trelby is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Script Writing Tools | |
|---|---|
| Trelby | Simple, powerful, full-featured program for writing movie screenplays |
| Manuskript | Use the snowflake method to grow your ideas |
| Screenwriter-mode | A plug-in for Emacs |
| Screenplain | Plain text to readable screenplay |
| LyX | The Hollywood document class equips LyX for script writing |
| Afterwriting | Post-processing tools for Fountain screenplay |
| Story Architect | Reinventing the screenwriting software |
| obsidian-fountain | Fountain support for Obsidian |
| lottie | Fountain screenplay editor |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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I’m here looking for alternatives because Trelby hasn’t been updated in forever and does’nt seem to install on later Ubuntu versions. I’ll be happy when the developers can give us a new package that works !
Have you tried the other software featured in the Script Writing roundup. There’s a link here on this page already, but here it is again.
Trelby installs fine on Arch.