Getting started
Your first show, from opening the page to text moving on a screen.
Your first show, end to end: from opening a page to words moving on a screen somebody else is reading from.
This page is written for the site. Everything after it in the sidebar is the project's own documentation, kept in the repo and mirrored here.
What you need
A browser, and a second screen of some kind — another monitor, a tablet, a phone, a laptop belonging to someone else. That is the whole list. There is nothing to install for the people reading from a display; they open a link.
You do need a server running somewhere both machines can reach. Either use the
hosted one, or run your own — it is a single Go binary and a
docker compose up away.
1. Open the control page
Go to /control. It gives itself a room the moment it loads, and you will
see the id in the address bar as ?room= followed by eight characters.
That room is the session. Everything else in this guide hangs off it.
2. Put a script in
Type, or paste. Pasting from Google Docs or Word brings a great deal of invisible formatting with it, so there is a tidy broom that strips it back to something a prompter can render, and a brighten option for text that came in dark-on-dark.
The editor is a real editor — you can colour lines with Ctrl+Alt+Y, R, B
and N to mark cues, warnings, or whoever is speaking.
If your script is a PDF, drop it on the page instead. It prompts straight from the file.
3. Open a display
Two ways, and which you want depends on where the screen is:
- Screen opens a viewer window on a monitor attached to this machine. Good for the second display on your desk.
- The viewer link — shown on the control page, with a copy button and a QR code — is what you send to a device that is somewhere else. Open it on the tablet, or scan the code with the phone.
Either way, the control page's display counter moves. It reads like
2 local · 1 remote, so you always know how many screens are actually attached
rather than how many you think you opened.
4. Roll
Space starts and stops the scroll. Ctrl+↓ and Ctrl+↑ change speed while it
runs.
The thing to understand early is that your own pane does not follow the viewers. That is deliberate. An operator needs to read ahead to see what is coming, or drop back to check a line, without dragging the talent's screen around with them. When you do want the two brought together, the Sync buttons do it in either direction:
- Go to viewers' position (
Ctrl+Alt+G) moves you to where they are. - Send my position to viewers (
Ctrl+Alt+J) moves them to where you are.
5. The rest, when you need it
Everything is on Ctrl+K. The command palette lists every command with its
shortcut, so the way to learn the keys is to keep using the palette until you
stop needing it. Ctrl+/ shows the bound ones without leaving the page.
Worth knowing about before your first real service:
- Live editing off. By default your edits go out as you type. Turn it off and you can fix a line mid-service in private, then push the whole thing with Send my script.
- A countdown. By duration, or to a time of day. It survives a reload, which matters more than it sounds like it does.
- Messages. Put a line on the talent's screen without touching the script.
- A game controller. Triggers for speed, sticks to scroll, D-pad for text size. Cheap, silent, and far nicer than a keyboard in a dark room.
Where to go next
- Operating is the full manual, and the one to read before you run something that matters.
- Keyboard and controller is every command in one table.
- Themes if you want the viewer to look like yours.
- Architecture if you want to know what is actually happening on the wire.