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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/8941
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/8941
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

You may want to have a look at [KeepNote](http://keepnote.org/). It's open source and runs on a number of different platforms (Windows and Linux packages are available), but it doesn't do everything you want out of the box. To address your particular considerations:

> - something like a filesystem, with a file for each character

Pretty well check: it allows you to create categories and subcategories to organize your data any way you prefer, and it supports categories with and without text (as "pages" as KeepNote calls them can contain subpages as well).

> - it should have or allow me to create categories like name, gender, age, backstory, and so on

Check: just create another page (as a sibling or child to an existing page) to put the information into.

> - once created, these categories should automatically be available for each character

No do. It can probably be done with a plug-in, and [Import Folder Tree](http://keepnote.org/extensions.shtml) looks promising at least as a starting point, but it isn't done out of the box.

> - adding images, text files, movies and stuff, or linking to these

Pages are (X)HTML web pages so in principle you can add anything that can go onto a web page. The built-in editor is somewhat minimalistic but does include many of the basic features for text editing.

> - it would be nice if it somehow interacted with my writing and timeline software (Scrivener and Aeon Timeline)

No do, at least out of the box.

> - creating relations between characters (married to, boss of, lives next door to, etc.)
> - these relations should not be limited in number

You can make a separate page or set of pages for relationships that describe them, and KeepNote supports full-text search, but there is no _native_ support for something like this that I know of.

One nice thing about KeepNote is precisely that it keeps its data as HTML files along with some XML metadata files in a simple file system directory hierarchy, so backing up your work, working with the files in different software etc. is trivial.

Original score: 4