Scriptor
In your own words. For life.
A scriptorium for what you learn. After a book, a lecture or a video, write a page in your own words. Its ink fades along your forgetting curve, and you bring it back by writing it again from memory. Free, no ads, no account.
English · Русский · Changelog
The idea
Most of what we read or watch is gone within a week. What keeps it is not rereading but retrieval: putting it in your own words, then pulling it back out of memory at the right moments. Scriptor turns that into a quiet ritual at a scribe's desk instead of a deck of flashcards.
How a page lives
- A codex for each source. A book, a video, an article, a podcast, a lecture, a course. Before starting, write a preface (what you know and expect) and up to three questions to the source.
- A page in your own words. Close the source and write from memory. Pasted text is the author's ink: it goes aside as a quotation, and the page stays yours. The page is laid out the Cornell way, with questions on the margin in cinnabar, a golden line for the essence and a colophon at the foot. You can also say it aloud.
- The ink fades. Each page fades along its own forgetting curve (FSRS-4.5). The state of your memory is visible: fresh black pages, brown fading ones, the pale leather of a codex you've let go.
- Restoration. Each restoration asks in a different way: rewrite it from memory, answer the margin questions, or fill the lacunae the mice ate. Before you look, stake one to three candles on being right. Then the page shows what you missed in cinnabar, and your grade bends the curve.
- The page blooms. Restored once, it gets a painted initial. Two margin questions add rubrics. Answering the novice or giving two examples of your own makes vines climb the margin. Holding for half a year lays gold leaf. Putting it to use earns a wax seal.
The learning science inside
| Technique | In Scriptor |
|---|
| ✍️ | Generation effect | Pages in your own words; pasting goes to quotations |
| 🔁 | Retrieval practice and spacing | Fading ink, restorations scheduled by FSRS |
| 🔀 | Varied retrieval | Free recall, margin questions and lacunae in turn |
| 📜 | Pretesting, SQ3R | Preface and questions to the source, asked back when closing |
| 📐 | Cornell notes | Cue column on the margin, summary as the colophon |
| 🧒 | Feynman technique, protégé effect | The novice asks "why?", "an example?", "explain it to a ten-year-old" |
| 🌿 | Elaboration | Examples from your life, parables (analogies), disputes with the author |
| 🕯️ | Metacognition, hypercorrection | Candles staked before revealing; confident mistakes go into the book of errors; the scribe's eye shows your calibration |
| 🔔 | Sleep consolidation | Compline: a few fading pages before sleep. Matins: yesterday's pages recalled in the morning |
| 🗜️ | Summarising | Closing a codex: one sentence, then three words tooled on the spine |
| 🔏 | Transfer | The seal of practice: what you did with it |
| 🎨 | Dual coding | Miniatures drawn with a finger, and drawn again from memory |
| ⚖️ | Disputatio, steelmanning | Thesis, the strongest objections, a reply to each |
| 🧵 | Connecting ideas | Red threads between pages of different books, and their map |
| 🎓 | Interleaved testing | The abbot's exam once a month: mixed questions from every codex, first tell which book |
| 🏛️ | Method of loci | The monastery of memory: ideas set down in its places as vivid pictures, found again on a walk |
New techniques arrive as crafts that open as you go, so a new scribe starts with ink alone. Russian addresses you as he or she, your choice.
Privacy
No account, no analytics, no ads, no network. Everything stays on the phone; a backup is one JSON file you save yourself. Speaking aloud uses the phone's own speech recogniser.
Build
./gradlew assembleDebug # app.scriptor.dev
./gradlew assembleDebug -Pdemo # app.scriptor.demo with a scriptorium half a season in
./gradlew testDebugUnitTest -Prender [-Plang=ru] # draws the screens to app/build/art
python tools/icon.py # the launcher icon and docs/logo.png
Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Room, DataStore. The forgetting curve is domain/Memory.kt; comparing a restoration with the page is domain/Words.kt. All the art (initials, vines, candles, seals, the novice, parchment) is drawn in code in ui/art/Art.kt. EB Garamond is under the SIL Open Font License.
License
MIT · part of Stillcraft
