A place for the fragment you don't know what to do with yet — a line, an image, a premise, a question. Write it down before you lose it. Everything else, including whether it belongs to any project at all, can wait.
Idea Zero is not a project. It sits beside your library, not inside a screenplay, so it's there whether or not you have a project open — and one idea can outlive several projects, or none.
Open the sidebar (the ☰ in the top-left corner if it's collapsed) and click the Idea Zero tab, beside Projects. It replaces the project you're working on for as long as it's open; click the Projects tab to return to exactly where you were, script and all.
Along the top are three views: Capture, Hub and Develop. The sidebar lists your Inbox, All ideas and each collection; picking one takes you to the Hub, filtered to it.
Select some text in your script or your treatment — within a line, or across several — then open Selection on the toolbar and choose Save to Idea Zero. Ctrl+Alt+I (Cmd+Alt+I on a Mac) does the same without the mouse. The text becomes a new idea in your Inbox, and the screenplay itself isn't touched.
The idea remembers which project and which line it came from, so it can point back there later. It's plain text for now — bold and italic in the treatment don't come across — and saving the same selection twice makes two ideas.
The box on the Capture view takes whatever you type and nothing else — Capture (or Ctrl+Enter) only needs the words. No title, no type, no project. If it turns out to be nothing, it costs you one sentence; if it turns out to matter, it's already saved.
A captured idea that isn't in a collection sits in the Inbox, listed right under the box — not lost, not filed, just waiting. Giving it a name, a type or tags doesn't take it out; putting it in a collection does. There's no deadline on leaving it there. Plenty of good ideas never need more than the one sentence they were captured as.
Every text box in Idea Zero works the same way. It starts three lines tall, grows as you write up to fifteen, then scrolls; drag its bottom edge to make it taller or shorter, but never wider. Click anywhere in the box and the caret goes there — at the end if you click below the text.
They all take formatting, too: Ctrl+B bold, Ctrl+I italic, Ctrl+U underline, Ctrl+1 and Ctrl+2 for headings, Ctrl+0 to take one back. The bar at the bottom of the window keeps the list in view. Hold Shift with the arrow keys to select across paragraphs — Ctrl for a word at a time — as in the script.
Your ideas as cards, each showing its name (Untitled until it has one), the collections it is in (Inbox while it isn't in one), the start of its description and a row of chips: its status, types and tags. A long description is cut with an ellipsis where the card runs out of room.
Clicking a card selects it and clicking it again lets go. You can have up to two selected at once: pick a third and the one you picked first is released. Selecting doesn't change your ideas — it is how you choose what to work on. A bar appears above the cards with what you can do with the selection: Clarify, Derive, Break down or Apply for one idea, Combine or Relate for two.
The ✎ on a card opens it for editing:
None of this is required. Classifying a fragment is optional work you do because it helps you find the idea again later — never because the software is asking.
An idea can be Raw (the default — a card shows nothing), Developing or Ready. They're yours to set; nothing moves an idea along on its own. A fourth, Used, belongs to an idea that has been applied to a project (see Apply, below): it can't be set by hand, it simply appears when an idea is in use, and goes when the use does. Filter the Hub by any of them from Status.
Type, Status and — across All ideas — Collection are checklists: tick several and you see ideas matching any of them. Sort orders the grid by newest, oldest, name (either way), most or least related, or Random, which shuffles once and then holds still until you pick it again.
A collection is a name you make up — Interesting Dialogue, Things I Don't Know What To Do With — and a loose bucket for ideas that share it. + beside New collection… creates one; clicking a collection in the sidebar filters the Hub down to it.
Collections are not folders. An idea can belong to several at once, and belonging to one says nothing about its type or its tags — it's just another way of finding it again.
The search box over the Hub looks in an idea's name, description and tags, ignoring capitals and accents — catalepsia finds catalépsia. A few words of syntax narrow it down:
ledger cellar — every word must match, in any orderledger OR cellar — either one (| works too)"wine snob" — that exact phrasecellar -poe — without that word#poe — only in the tags
And binds tighter than or: a b OR c means
a and b, or c. The more of your words an idea matches,
the higher it ranks, and a match in the name counts for more than one in
the body. Hover the box for the list.
The same syntax works in the search over the Ideas panel
beside your script and in the search over Notes (where
#tag finds nothing, as a note has no tags). The Ideas panel
also has a Type filter, listing the types of the ideas
you've applied to the project.
Each idea card there has a Resolve button, like a note's, for when you've dealt with that idea in that place. It marks only that one place: the same idea applied elsewhere stays open. The rail and the project's Ideas tab can show Open, Resolved or All ideas, and open is where they start. A resolved idea stops lighting its line in the script and stops showing its Idea chip on a character or setting.
The 🔗 on a card shows how many other ideas it's connected to; click it to see them. Each connection has a type in your own words — expands, inspired by, contrasts with, alternative to and the like — and a direction, which the reverse button flips if you got it backwards. You can change a connection's type, remove it, or jump to the idea at the other end.
+ relates the card to another idea: pick an existing one, or capture a new idea on the spot and link it. The Develop tools below make connections for you as they go.
Six tools for working on ideas by hand. There's no AI in them: you write, and they keep the trail. You don't pick the idea here — you pick it in the Hub, where you can see and filter everything. Each idea you selected appears as a card beside the tool — name, description, tags, collections and what it's related to, for reading while you write (the second idea of a Combine sits on the right). You can't change anything on the cards; the ✕ lets go of that idea, and asks first if you have written something that would be lost. Each tool tells you how many ideas it needs. A card's → picks just that idea and opens Derive.
With two ideas selected, a short block above the tool shows what they have in common: shared tags, types and collections, other ideas both are related to, and any relationship that already runs between them. It's there whichever tool you use, so you can see where two ideas meet before you combine or connect them.
Open an idea's Related panel and, under the list of its relationships, a Lineage shows the idea in the middle with what it came from and what came of it around it — directly, or two steps out. Click any idea in the picture to open it. When you relate an idea to another one, each candidate in the list says how it already stands: no relations, how many it has, or that it is already tied to this idea and by what.
Change which ideas are selected and a half-written draft is cleared, so it can't end up on the wrong idea. Leave Develop for another view and come back, and it is still there.
Archive takes an idea out of your everyday lists without losing it — the Archived tab in the Hub shows what you've put away, and Restore undoes it. An idea you don't currently need is still creative material; archiving is for "not now," not "never."
Delete is different: it asks you to confirm, and the idea leaves every list. It isn't gone at once — it waits in Recently deleted, at the bottom of the sidebar, for 30 days, and Restore puts it back, on every device you use. After 30 days it is removed for good, or sooner if you choose Delete forever, which cannot be undone. Use Archive when you only want something out of the way.
Open a project and go to Story ▸ Ideas. It's the Hub, narrowed to the ideas you've applied to that project: the same cards, the same search (with the same syntax), the same filters by type and collection, and nearly the same sorting. Instead of status you can filter by Assigned to — the project, characters, settings, or scenes and sections. The cards sit in four groups you can fold — the project, characters, settings, and scenes or sections — and Ungroup (after Sort) shows one list instead. A card is one place an idea went, so an idea applied in two places is two cards, and the corner of the card says how many places that idea is in ("3×").
You don't edit an idea here; that's for Idea Zero. A card has a View icon instead of Edit: it opens a dialog to read the idea and to move or copy it to another place in the project — the project as a whole (if it isn't there already), a scene or a section, a character or a setting. The card's own Move and Copy icons do the same without opening the idea, and ✕ takes the idea out of that one place (it stays in Idea Zero, and in its other places). Open in Idea Zero, in the View dialog, takes you to the idea in the Hub.
Open the Ideas panel beside the script and every scene or section you've applied an idea to is lit light yellow, the way Notes light a line blue; the one for the card you've selected carries a bar in the margin. The panel is also there beside the Cast and Settings tabs, listing only the ideas about characters, or about settings (with just the search). A character or setting you've applied an idea to wears a small yellow Idea chip after its name, panel open or not; click it to open the panel, and click a card to open that character or setting. Close the panel and the highlights go. On a selected card you can select the text with the mouse and copy it; click the name or the place to let go of the card.
The Ideas panel sits in the right margin next to Notes, shut until you want it, and never open at the same time as Notes. It shows a card for every place you've applied an idea, in four groups you can fold: the project, its characters, its settings, and its scenes and structure. A card gives the idea's name, where it went (the scene and page, or the section and the first line of its synopsis), the start of the idea and its types and tags. Click a card to select it and read the whole idea; click one on a scene or a section and the script goes there.
The tab and the marks only show what you've applied; to apply an idea, or take it back, use Apply in Idea Zero.
Ideas are stored in this browser, the same as your projects. Clearing this browser's data clears your ideas along with everything else — unless you've signed in and backed them up.
When you're signed in, a small chip in the Idea Zero sidebar shows the state of your cloud backup, which is one copy of all your ideas and how they connect, pushed to your account a little after you stop typing. It uses the same storage allowance as your screenplays' cloud backup. Like them it's a backup, never a sync: if the copy in your account and the copy in this browser have both changed, the app asks which to keep — this browser's or the cloud's — rather than guessing. See Import, export and backups.