Kabikaboo: The Writer's Assistant
Kabikaboo is an open-source recursive notepad utilitly, designed to help writers in planning a novella or other similar complex project that requires information to be organized in some sort of dynamic tree-based structure. (See screenshot). It is also an invaluable tool for planning any other sort of major project. It is available for Linux and Microsoft Windows (XP/Vista/7)
Kabikaboo's strength lies in its ability to stay out of the way as you work, yet organize your information so you can find it again right when you need it. Kabikaboo does not force you to adhere to any pre-set schema for organizing information. After all, it's your project; shouldn't you be able to organize it your way to suit your needs?
The basis of Kabikaboo's information management is a node. A node can contain subordinate nodes, which may also contain subordinate nodes, and so on et al. In addition, a node can either be an edit node, or a view node. An edit node contains information, while a view node may contain information while simultaniously displaying the information in all subordiate nodes. Nodes can be reorganized and arranged in infinite ways to suite your particular writing style. Like lumping information? Just put everything into a few big nodes. ("Characters", "Places", "Plot".) Or perhaps, like me, you work best by placing every detail in its niche? Make lots of subcategories for each character, location, plot twist, and so on. The point is: you have control over how your data is organized--not the program.
Kabikaboo has other various bells and whistles as well:
- Quick-access history (easily access your most commonly used nodes)
- Document Statistics (for bragging rights!)
- Autosave
- Export to plain text/HTML (easy backup, no worries about getting snared with a proprietory storage format)
- Spellcheck (Linux only)
Kabikaboo is available at no cost under the conditions of the GNU GPLv2 license, and will always be free. Kabikaboo is also free of spyware, adware, and other nasty programs that disreputable software vendors like to install under your nose if you're not paying attention. Don't believe it? You can browse the Kabikaboo source code and see for yourself. Kabikaboo is written in Python, a powerful and popular cross-platform scripting language.