Sabo Typist
Sabo Typist

The Blank Page is Sacred

Like a Typewriter, Slightly Less Hassle

  • Does not finish your sentences.
  • No Smart Compose: nothing guesses your next word.
  • No “Help me write”, no Copilot, no Writing Tools offering to rewrite you.
  • No autocorrect.
  • No smart quotes and no text replacement.
  • No tone, clarity, or audience suggestions

Sabo has no super intelligence AI stultifying nonsense.

Typewriters don’t have backspaces.Sabo Typist has a first-class backspace.

The templates

Kindling.

Every project starts as a file with the format already in it: your name and address where the magazine wants them, the title halfway down, the count at the top right, the lines there to type over. The fire is yours. This gets it going, and keeps the page to what the publication requires.

From the everyday to the specialised:

  • A letter, a résumé, the minutes, a contract
  • A story for a literary magazine, a novel for a publishing house, copy for a news desk
  • A paper in MLA, APA or Chicago
  • A screenplay, a stage play, a radio play, a podcast

Export makes the Word file, double-spaced, with the footnotes at the foot of their pages.

Sabo Typist is compatible with any paper color.

For screenwriters

Final Draft’s Page, in a Text File.

  1. The Page Is the Industry’s.

    Courier 12, an inch and a half for the brads, every element at Final Draft’s own indent. A page is a minute, and your count is the count everyone else gets.

  2. .fdx, Out and Back In.

    Export writes the file the production office opens in Final Draft, and a .fdx someone sends you opens here.

  3. You Never Format.

    Type INT. and it’s a scene; a name in capitals is a cue. (MORE) and (CONT’D) are drawn where a speech breaks, never typed.

The rest:

  • The script is Fountain, plain text any program can open; it exports as .fountain too, and as PDF, Word and RTF
  • A title page from the lines at the top of the file
  • Sections, synopses and the boneyard stay in the file and never print
  • === starts a new page; >centered< lines and ~lyrics
  • Thirteen more grids: BBC film and television, the taped studio formats, the American three-camera sitcom
  • Radio in the BBC’s two styles and the American one
  • The stage play in its American and British shapes, the Broadway musical and the Dramatists Guild’s

It will not finish your character names.

The Demons of Arezzo

Reliquary Novel

Drafts

Draft from Dec 18, 2025 · 22:40 · The red pen: a memory that doesn’t read like a memory at first

# The Demons of Arezzo

From Racconti Umbri by Giacomo Pieri (1891)
Translated by Margaret Whitmore (1964)

Neri Bostoli brought ice from Venezia, a gift hidden under mulberries in a wooden box. Caterina ate the fruit first, juice on her chin, before her fingers found cold beneath the moss—already weeping vapor. He remembered her tongue movingedging slowly through the mist toward the ice—pink, apprehensive—and when it touched she gasped and laughed, but then her laughter quit like a door slammed shut. HerShe pulled his hand, involuntary, to her and put it on her stomach. When they kissed her mouth was winter-cold, her mulberry tongue moving against his. Now he can taste only mulberries and smoke. The smoke was Robert the cannibal, burnedexecuted in the piazza earlier that day. His smolder and the fog and night gave Neri enoughthe coveridea to attempt midnight mass. The fog had decided it. He will make his way to San Piero flanked by his four armed men—his first appearance since the Tartoli burst into the Bostoli tower and murdered his son, murdered his in-laws, destroyed generations of good grace. Caterina he sent to San Damiano after they found her bloodied and screamingviolated, naked in the street, the baby Meo gone. Twelve months in her incubation cell near the dragon slayers bones and she hadn't delivered. Her belly swollen but nothing stirs. The monks who tend her say she moves with strange purpose. On first report they claimed she sings to shadows in the evening. But they soon realized her songs are for the bats as they emerge one by one from crevices in the stonework, from gaps under eaves. Her voice moves like her head—quick turns, barking phrases thrown at different points on the wall. A note here, cut short. A longer call there. She's learned where they exit and sings them out one by one.

Notes

Arezzo, draft 1
The printed page, after the red pen

— The printed page, after the red pen

Assisi, by hand
Catholic Disneyland, in the fog2 pages

— Catholic Disneyland, in the fog

The opening

A memory that doesn’t read like a memory at first.

Reliquary, a novelThe Demons of Arezzo, in five draftsChoose one

Drafts

Every Draft, Kept. Every Change, There to See.

A draft is kept when you leave a document for another, when you press ⌘S, when you close the app, and after a few minutes without typing. When nothing changed, nothing is kept. To mark a moment, File › Keep a Draft… keeps one with a note.

Choose a draft and the page shows it: what came in since the one before, and what went out, struck through. Double-click it and it is back on the page, and the words you had are a draft too.

The printed page with the red pen on it, the pages you wrote by hand: photograph them, drop in the PDF, and they sit in the notes beside the chapter, as long as you need them.

Nerd friendly: Markdown native. Git under the hood.

Free While It’s in Beta.

Download the installeror the disk image

Version 0.5Build 30macOS 13 and newer5.4 MBSigned and notarized

The Beta Key

Apply the Key

sabo1.eyJwIjoic2Fiby10eXBpc3QiLCJpZCI6InBpX2JldGFfMjAyNjA5MzAiLCJ0byI6ImJldGEgdGVzdGVycyIsIm9uIjoiMjAyNi0wOS0zMCJ9.uA5VcVTxuNE6P9Jz66NAFFyPCUlwlorVp0KxzF2cFtjN8vuB86__vQJcKstGgWO_T_s_LTkw3J_2SzLX5SV3AA

Without it Sabo Typist runs for 14 days from its first launch. Install first, then click the button: it opens Sabo Typist and puts the key in. Or copy the key and paste it into the window that Sabo › Licence… opens. It is one key for everyone in the beta.