A desktop app for writing stories whose events are too tangled to keep straight by hand, time travel above all.
What it is
Chronoscope is a local tool for authoring stories whose events are hard to keep straight by hand. A project is a folder of Markdown files, and a file with an identifier in its frontmatter is an object: a person, a place, an event. Markdown is the only source of truth, so a story stays readable without the app.
How it looks
Everything on screen is a lens over those objects. The main one is a graph of what exists at a chosen moment: people, things, places drawn as frames around what is in them, and nearby events as ghosts. A strip of time above the graph picks the moment, and a click opens an object as it stands then.
Why build it
I write time-travel fiction, where each trip into the past makes another version of history. Such a story cannot be written without seeing which trips happen, in what order, and what each traveller still remembers. Chronoscope works that out and lets a slider move between the versions.
Where it stands
It is in active development and not published yet. It already opens with a built-in story and writes changes back to the project's files.