Quill Inkwell User Guide

Quill Inkwell expands abbreviations in every Windows application. Type a short word, press space, and Inkwell replaces it with whatever you saved: a phrase, an email address, a signature, a paragraph of boilerplate, a template with the caret already in the right place.

It is part of the QUILL family and free, and its abbreviations are the same abbreviations QUILL’s editor expands. There is one library, shared.

Table of contents

1. How expansion works
2. First launch
3. The tray, and why the window closes to it
4. Creating abbreviations
5. Per-abbreviation settings
6. Variables 6a. Fields: expansions that ask you something
7. Case follows your typing
8. Categories
9. Quick Insert, and expanding on demand
10. Sharing one library with QUILL 10a. Where it works 10b. Inside QUILL itself
11. Where expansion refuses to run
12. Typing versus pasting
13. Import and export
14. Settings reference
15. Keyboard reference
16. Portable mode
17. Safe Mode
18. Privacy
19. Troubleshooting

1. How expansion works

While Inkwell is running it watches for typing so that it can recognise the end of a word. It keeps a short rolling window of recent characters – at most 64 – and nothing else.

When you type a character that ends a word (a space, Enter, Tab, or one of . , ; : ! ? ) ] } " '), Inkwell checks the word you just finished against your abbreviations. If one matches, and that entry accepts the character you typed, Inkwell:

1. Sends backspaces to erase the abbreviation.
2. Types the expansion.
3. Moves the caret, if the expansion contains a ${cursor} marker.
4. Speaks or plays a sound, if that entry asks for it.

The character you typed stays where it is. btw keeps the space; btw. keeps the full stop.

Nothing goes near the clipboard during an ordinary expansion.

2. First launch

Inkwell opens its window, shows the abbreviations you already have – including everything QUILL knows about – and starts watching for typing. A handful of common shorthand entries (btw, imo, asap, and so on) come built in so there is something to try immediately.

If Windows refuses the keyboard hook, Inkwell says so in a dialog rather than sitting there looking like it works. See Troubleshooting.

3. The tray, and why the window closes to it

Expansion is a background service. Closing the window keeps it running and tucks Inkwell into the notification area; the tray icon’s menu reopens it, offers Quick Insert, and can turn expansion off.

What to look for. Quill Inkwell’s icon is a gold nib dipped into a white inkwell, on a terracotta-orange tile. If you have used an earlier build, this is new: Inkwell used to share Quill Radio’s blue broadcast-wave icon, so on a desktop with more than one QuillVille app installed several of them looked identical. Every app in the family now has its own: they all share the same rounded tile shape and the same gold accent, but each has its own colour and its own picture.

Turn off Options > Close button keeps expanding if you would rather the close button really exit. Options > Start Quill Inkwell with Windows starts it hidden at login, which is how most people run it.

4. Creating abbreviations

Abbreviations > Manage Abbreviations… (Ctrl+M) is the full list: search it, filter it by category, and add, edit, enable, disable, or delete entries.

Abbreviations > New from Clipboard… (Ctrl+Shift+N) is the fast path. Copy a block of text anywhere, press Ctrl+Shift+N, and Inkwell opens a new entry with that text already filled in as the expansion – you only supply the trigger.

An abbreviation can be anything you can type without a space: addr, sig, @@, ;;date. Longer abbreviations always win over shorter ones, so addr cannot be swallowed by ad.

5. Per-abbreviation settings

Every entry decides these for itself, in the edit dialog:

Two of these are worth explaining properly.

Expand after = Never means the entry never fires on its own; it is reachable only from Quick Insert. That is the right home for a long expansion, or for one you would not want appearing by accident.

Add a trailing space after punctuation only applies to punctuation triggers, because a space trigger already leaves a space and doubling it reads badly. With it on, co. becomes Company, rather than Company ,.

6. Variables

Anywhere in an expansion:

${clipboard} is read at the moment the expansion fires and is never stored.

6a. Fields: expansions that ask you something

A signature is the same every time. A letter opening, a bug report, a booking confirmation is not – it is the same except for a name, a date, a reference. Put a field in the expansion and Inkwell asks for it before typing:

Dear ${field:Name},

Thank you for your message about ${field:Subject}. I will reply by
${field:Reply by=the end of the week}.

Kind regards to ${field:Name}.

• ${field:Label} asks for a value with that label.
• ${field:Label=something} offers a starting value you can accept or replace.
• The same label used twice is asked once and filled everywhere, so the name in the greeting also lands in the sign-off.

A small form appears with one labelled box per field, in the order the template asks for them. Tab moves between them, Enter moves to the next one, Enter on the last accepts, and Escape cancels – and cancelling leaves whatever you typed exactly as it was, because nothing is erased until you accept.

${cursor} still works alongside fields: the caret lands where the template put it, after the answers are in.

7. Case follows your typing

For an entry that is not case sensitive, the case you type carries over:

• btw gives the expansion exactly as you wrote it.
• Btw capitalises each word.
• BTW shouts the whole thing.

8. Categories

A category is free text – Work, Personal, Email, Forms, whatever suits. The manager’s category filter narrows the list to one at a time, and entries with no category are listed under Uncategorised. Nothing about a category changes how an entry expands; it exists to keep a long list navigable.

9. Quick Insert, and expanding on demand

Ctrl+K in the window, or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K from anywhere, opens a type-to-filter picker over every enabled abbreviation, ordered with the ones you use most at the top. Type a few letters, arrow down, press Enter, and the expansion is typed into whatever window you were working in.

Quick Insert is the only way to reach an entry whose trigger mode is Never, and the easiest way to use an abbreviation you have not memorised yet.

Expand the word I just typed – Ctrl+Alt+Shift+X from anywhere, or the Abbreviations menu – expands the word before the cursor without waiting for a space or punctuation. Use it mid-word, at the end of a line where you do not want a trailing space, or for an abbreviation you have set never to expand on its own.

Taking one back. If an abbreviation expands when you did not want it, press Backspace immediately afterwards and Inkwell puts your original abbreviation back. The offer lasts a few seconds and only in the window where it expanded – after that, or after any other keystroke, Backspace does what it always does.

10. Sharing one library with QUILL

Inkwell and QUILL use the same abbreviations.json in the same data folder. Add an abbreviation in QUILL’s own Abbreviation Manager and it expands system-wide within moments; add one here and QUILL’s editor knows it. Inkwell re-reads the file whenever it changes on disk, so neither app needs restarting.

This is also why an installed Inkwell keeps its data in %APPDATA%\Quill rather than a folder of its own.

10a. Where it works

Expansion runs wherever you can type or edit: browsers, mail, chat, forms, office applications, code editors, terminals, and dialog boxes. Two limits are worth knowing about, because both look like faults and neither is one.

Somewhere you cannot type. Before replacing anything, Inkwell checks that the thing with focus actually accepts text. Typing into a list that is doing type-ahead, or a page where Backspace means “go back”, would be worse than not expanding at all. Where it cannot tell, it goes ahead – a missed expansion is the more annoying failure.

An application running as administrator. Windows does not let a normal program see keys typed into an elevated one, so nothing expands there. Inkwell says so the first time focus lands in such a window. If you need expansion in it, start Inkwell as administrator too.

10b. Inside QUILL itself

QUILL expands your abbreviations in its own editor, from the document, without synthesising a single keystroke – which is faster and safer than anything a system-wide expander can do. So Inkwell deliberately keeps out of QUILL’s editor window and lets it do the work. Same abbreviations, same settings, same results; only the mechanism differs, and you should never be able to tell.

11. Where expansion refuses to run

Typing into the wrong window is worse than not expanding at all, so Inkwell refuses outright in:

• Password managers (1Password, Bitwarden, KeePass and KeePassXC, LastPass, Dashlane, Keeper, NordPass, RoboForm, Enpass).
• The Windows sign-in and lock screens, the credential prompt, and the UAC dialog.
• Any window whose title suggests a credential prompt – sign in, log on, password, passcode, authenticate, unlock, Windows Security.

Options > Excluded Applications… adds your own, one program file name per line (notepad.exe). The decision is made from the foreground window alone – its program, its class, and its title. Nothing is ever decided from what you typed.

12. Typing versus pasting

By default an expansion is typed, as synthesised keystrokes. That is the right default: it never touches your clipboard.

A few applications – some rich editors, some terminals – drop fast synthetic keystrokes. For those, turn on Options > Insert by pasting. Inkwell then puts the expansion on the clipboard, pastes it, and puts your previous clipboard contents back. It is a fallback precisely because borrowing the clipboard is rude, and it always restores.

This can also be set per application, which is usually what you want: one stubborn program should not mean every other program has its clipboard borrowed. List the program’s file name under paste_processes in inkwell.json beside the abbreviation library, and only that program uses the clipboard route.

13. Import and export

The manager’s Import… and Export… buttons read and write the shared library as JSON. Export is the honest backup of everything, including every per-entry setting; import merges entries in.

14. Settings reference

Inkwell’s own preferences live in inkwell.json beside the library:

Abbreviations themselves are not listed here: they are shared, and they live in QUILL’s abbreviations.json.

15. Keyboard reference

Every dialog follows QUILL’s dialog conventions: Escape cancels, Enter activates the default button, every control has a name your screen reader announces, and focus starts where the work does.

16. Portable mode

The portable zip carries a data folder next to QuillInkwell.exe. When that folder is present, the abbreviation library and settings live on the stick, and a portable QUILL sitting beside it shares them. Remove the stick and nothing is left behind on the machine.

17. Safe Mode

With QUILL_SAFE_MODE=1 set, Inkwell starts without installing the keyboard hook at all and says so. The manager still works, so you can edit abbreviations; nothing is watched and nothing is typed.

18. Privacy

Inkwell has to notice typing to recognise an abbreviation. Here is exactly what that means:

• Bounded. At most 64 characters are held at once, in memory only.
• Never stored. Nothing is written to disk, added to a log, or sent anywhere. There is no network code in the expansion path.
• Cleared constantly. The buffer empties after every expansion, on Escape, on any arrow key, Home, End, Page Up or Down, Insert, Delete, or function key, on any Ctrl or Alt combination, whenever focus moves to another window, and whenever expansion is paused.
• Content-blind. No rule anywhere looks at what you typed to decide whether to keep it. The check that suppresses expansion looks only at which window has focus, which is why it cannot be fooled by an unusual password field.
• Its own output is ignored. Inkwell marks the keystrokes it synthesises and skips them, so an expansion can never feed itself. Keystrokes from dictation software and on-screen keyboards are not skipped – those users get expansion like everyone else.
• Switchable. Ctrl+Shift+E stops it, the tray menu stops it, and Safe Mode never starts it.
• Self-repairing, not self-extending. Windows silently removes a keyboard hook that responds too slowly, so Inkwell quietly re-installs its own every few minutes. That refresh changes nothing about what is watched or kept.

19. Troubleshooting

Nothing expands anywhere. Check Ctrl+Shift+E is on, and that the window in front is not one of the excluded ones (section 11). If Inkwell warned at startup that Windows refused the keyboard hook, see the next item.

Nothing expands in one particular application. If Inkwell announced that the application runs as administrator, that is the reason (section 10a). Otherwise the application may not report itself as editable, or may be dropping the typed keystrokes – press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+X there to expand on demand, and if that works but ordinary typing does not, add the program to the per-application paste list (section 12).

“Expansion unavailable” at startup. Windows refused the low-level keyboard hook. Almost always this means the application you are typing into runs at a higher privilege level than Inkwell – Windows does not let a normal program see keys sent to an elevated one. Start Inkwell the same way you start that application.

It expands in QUILL but not elsewhere, or the reverse. They share a library but not a switch: QUILL’s editor expansion has its own setting, and Inkwell’s Ctrl+Shift+E governs everywhere else.

A new abbreviation is not recognised. Both apps re-read the file when it changes; if one was mid-edit when the other saved, close the manager and try again.

Some text arrives scrambled or truncated in one particular app. Turn on Options > Insert by pasting (section 12).

An abbreviation fires when I do not want it. Set that entry’s Expand after to Never; Quick Insert can still reach it.

Getting help

Support is run by Community Access, and the address is support@community-access.org. A person reads it, and replies come back by email.

The quickest way there is Help > Get Help from Support… (Ctrl+Alt+F2), which every app in the family answers with the same form: what kind of message this is, a subject, what happened, and – if you want an answer – an email address to reply to. What you expected and how to reproduce it are optional, and worth more than anything else when you can give them.

Press Send and your own mail program opens with the whole message already written, addressed to support, with Quill Inkwell’s name and version and your Windows version filled in at the bottom. Nothing is sent until you send it there, so you can read it over, add anything, or change your mind.

If this machine has no mail program set up – webmail only, say – the app puts the whole message on your clipboard and tells you the address, so nothing you typed is lost. And writing to support@community-access.org yourself always works just as well: there is no form you have to use. Say which app you were using and what happened.