Final Verdict on Bibisco
Solid meh for anyone writing spec-fic.
A lot of the data tracking features are nice, but to my great dismay, they get unwieldy if you have too many characters or places.
The lack of ability to subdivide categories for more easily sorting through large numbers discouraged me from putting my entire cast into the character tab. I don't want to swim through a sea of minor characters whenever I want to tag a scene with major ones. (Why can the tag menu not separate the major characters when it makes me distinguish major from minor in the characters menu?)
The locations menu also... doesn't sort by country? Why. Why, when your program has a built in function encouraging me to specify the country and city of every building I might create a page for would you then sort everything purely alphabetically by the name of the individual field or lake or meeting hall I might want to tag rather than, Iunno, creating subfolders for countries, like what it took me two seconds to set up for myself on Scrivener?
The sorting issues aside, if your story has more than a handful of locations or character to keep track of, then the stats menu just becomes too long and drawn out to really be worth reviewing. All in all, it feels like a lovely concept for people writing first world contemporary fiction and not for people writing epic fantasy or space opera or anything else with a lot of travel or a large cast. Supernatural romance set almost entirely in Forks, Washington might work well with it, but I'd hate to imagine trying to handle something like Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn in this sorting system. It would genuinely be less effort to just make individual doc or odt files for characters rather than use Bibisco at this point. Really, overwhelmingly, all of the features with no flexibility in how they're laid out feel intended for, like, small town romcom or thrillers or maybe a mystery novel contained to a few cities at most. I'm sure it's actually lovely for those, but if you're outside the genres this program feels intended for, a lot of its organizational features just aren't that nice.
Also giving the middle finger to second world fantasy and sci-fi: The text editor.
This is the TRUE main reason that I think I'd rather switch to writing in LibreOffice pages than jump to Bibisco if I must abandon Scrivener. The spell check! Scrivener's is no powerhouse either, but at least it can learn. It takes Bibisco a minute or two to accept any word I try to tell it is a word if that word lacks an apostrophe. This isn't even like a, "Haha, shlocky fantasy names with apostrophes" thing. I'm not talking about the Tel'e'brenequiettes of the world. Bibisco eventually accepted me telling it I hadn't misspelled Nathien, but after weeks it still tells me I'm wrong if I write Nathien's. This is my secondary protagonist and he cannot be indicated to possess anything or else spell check gets angry with me, and there is no way to make it stop.
You know what's not a made up name? Darien. (I didn't make up Isambard either.) Bibisco didn't recognize 'em, which meant it will never recognize Darien's or Isambard's names with an apostrophe S. Basically, fuck you unless you're sticking specifically to names that Bibisco already knows, which is only some real-person names and not all of them.
*sigh*
I don't suppose anyone else knows any Scrivener substitutes that run on Linux? I'd really rather find something supported for that OS than risk getting locked outta Scriv while trying to force it to run with Wine.
