QuillLite 1.0 — What’s New

QuillLite is a simple, friendly text editor built for people who use a screen reader.

If you like Notepad or WordPad, you will feel at home in about a minute. The keys are the same ones you already press. What is different is that QuillLite tells you what is going on — out loud, and in a status bar you can actually read.

It installs alongside QUILL for All. You can have both. Neither one changes the other’s settings.

Who this is for

You want to open a file, change a line, and save it. You do not want a whole writing studio in the way to do that.

That is the idea. QuillLite is the editor from QUILL for All, on its own, with everything else taken out.

Getting started in one minute

  1. Open QuillLite. You are in a blank document, ready to type.
  2. Type something.
  3. Press Ctrl+S to save it.

That is it. Everything below is there when you want it, and out of your way until then.

Press F1 at any time and QuillLite tells you what window you are in and what the thing you are focused on does. Press Ctrl+F1 for a list of every key.

The keys you already know

If you have used Notepad or WordPad, you already know QuillLite.

Files

Finding things

Making text look different

The full list is in the User Guide, and Ctrl+F1 shows it inside the app.

What’s in it

Your documents are numbered

Open several files and each one gets a number: document 1, document 2, document 3. The number never changes while that document is open, so “document 3” stays a name you can hold on to.

To move between them:

One thing to know. Your documents live inside one QuillLite window, so Alt+Tab will not step between them. The four ways above are how you move around. We would rather tell you that now than have you find it out while looking for a document you thought you had lost.

A heading tells you it is a heading

Make a line a heading, arrow away, and arrow back onto it. QuillLite says “Heading 2, Installing” – the level, then the heading’s own words.

That sounds like it should have worked all along, and here is why it did not. Your screen reader can only read what a program hands it, and the text box every Windows editor is built on – Notepad’s, WordPad’s, ours – has no way to say “this paragraph is a heading”. It can pass on the font and the size and nothing more. Word manages it by building its own machinery for the job. So a heading, to a listener, read exactly like an ordinary sentence.

QuillLite now says it instead. Three things about how:

It works the same in a plain-text document, where a heading is a line starting with #. That is new too: Next Heading, Previous Heading and the headings list used to refuse in plain text – “Headings are only available in rich text” – in documents whose headings the Promote and Demote keys were perfectly happy to change. They walk those documents now, and the status bar’s Heading cell reads the level there as well instead of saying it cannot.

If you would rather not hear it – you are reading the file as text, and the levels are between you and the words – View ▸ Announce Headings, or Ctrl+Alt+F3, turns it off where you stand and back on the same way. It tells you which way it went, not just “on” or “off”.

And a # is only a heading where a # means a heading. In a .md, a .txt or a document you have not named yet, it is. In a .py, a .sh or an .ini it is a comment, and QuillLite leaves it alone – otherwise opening a build script would have it announcing “Heading 1” down most of the page.

And a list tells you it is a list

Arrow into a list and you hear “Bulleted list, 5 items”. Go a level deeper and you hear “Level 2, 3 items”. Arrow out and you hear “Out of list”.

This one is worth dwelling on, because it is the only thing in this release your screen reader already does everywhere else. Open a web page with a list on it and your reader will tell you it is a list and how long it is – because the browser hands it a list. Open the same list in an editor and it is not a list at all, it is a row of dashes and some spaces, and your reader has nothing to pass on. Writing a nested outline, the only thing separating the second level from the third is the number of spaces, counted by ear.

It works wherever a list is real: Markdown -, *, +, 1., and HTML <ul>, <ol>, <dl> – and a definition list says “Term” and “Definition” as you move between the two, because which of them you are typing into decides what the words mean.

The counting is per level. A list of three whose second item has four sub-items is “3 items” where you are and “4 items” where they are. Never seven. Somebody reorganising an outline by ear is relying on that number.

It stays quiet everywhere it should: moving down a list (your reader is already reading each item), on a --- rule, inside a code fence, in a .py where a dash is a flag, and in rich text where the bullets are the control’s own.

View ▸ Announce Lists (Ctrl+Alt+F5) turns it off where you stand. It is a separate switch from the heading one on purpose – reorganising an outline, the level is the work; proof-reading the same file, it is one more thing between you and every item – and the status bar’s new List cell will tell you which item of how many you are on whenever you want to ask.

Bold now works in a Markdown file

Ctrl+B in a .md used to say “Not available in plain text. Press Control Shift M to switch to rich text.” True, and beside the point: somebody writing Markdown does not want rich text. They want two asterisks.

So a plain document now has a language, and it decides what the keys write:

In a Ctrl+B writes Ctrl+Alt+2 writes
Markdown document **bold** ## Heading
HTML document <strong>bold</strong> <h2>Heading</h2>
Plain text document nothing, and says why nothing, and says why

QuillLite reads the language from the file name – .md and .txt are Markdown, the newly-recognised .html, .htm and .xhtml are HTML, a .py or a .conf is plain – and it is never binding. Ctrl+Shift+M rings through all four kinds of document, one press at a time, each saying its own name; Ctrl+Alt+F6 goes straight to one; and the status bar’s Format cell says which you are in.

The announcement names the markup rather than the effect – “Bold in Markdown”, not “Bold on”. Nothing went bold. Two asterisks appeared, and you need to know which of the two just happened.

An Insert menu, with emoji and two tag pickers

Insert was three rows tucked inside Edit. It is a menu of its own now, sitting before Format – the order the work happens in: you put a thing in, then you format it. Nothing you already press has moved.

Only one of the two tag pickers is ever available, and it is whichever your document is. The other is greyed out rather than hidden, so your reader tells you it is unavailable the moment you land on it instead of leaving you hunting the menus for something you know is there.

Forms that are accessible before you start

The HTML picker’s top twenty rows are not tags. They are finished form controls, and they are the reason this picker is worth having.

Putting a <select> into a page is the easy half. The half that decides whether anybody can use the form is the wiring — a <label>, a for that matches the field’s id, the options inside — and every part of that wiring is invisible. A missing for renders exactly like a present one. A set of radio buttons without a shared name looks exactly like a group, except every button can be switched on at once. Two fields that share an id look perfect until somebody clicks the second label and the first field takes focus.

Those are not things you can check by looking, and they are certainly not things to leave to memory at the moment somebody is trying to write a form. So they come with the control:

Select a word first and it becomes the label, with the id made from it so the two agree: select “Postcode”, choose a text field, and you have a Postcode field already wired. And the id is checked against your document before it is used — a second email field is email-2, never a silent duplicate of the first.

The picker also grew from forty-six tags to 111, which matters more than it sounds: the missing ones included <dl>, <dt> and <dd> — the very lists QuillLite now reads aloud to you — along with <figure> and <figcaption>, the table parts that make a table readable, <abbr>, and <br> and <hr>, which the app knew how to write and could not offer. A searchable list ought to be complete; searching 111 is no harder than searching 46, and a tag that is missing is a dead end.

The Markdown picker gained Underline, Horizontal Rule, Strikethrough and Definition List for the same reason — the first two it could already write and had never offered.

Smaller things you asked for

One more thing came with it, in QUILL for All rather than here: a heading saved to an .rtf file is now a proper Word heading. It used to be big bold text with no style attached, so Word’s navigation pane showed nothing – and QUILL itself, reopening the file, read every level back as a Heading 4.

A status bar you can read

Press F6 to step into the status bar, then use the arrow keys to move along it. Each part says what it is and what it says. Press Escape to go back to your document.

There are ten things it tells you: Status Message, Position, Word Count, Character Count, Selection, Format, Heading, Encoding, Line Endings, and Saved State.

Press Enter on one to act on it — Position takes you to a line, Format switches between plain and formatted text, Saved State saves.

Two of those are worth pointing out, because most editors never show them at all: Encoding and Line Endings. Those two decide whether a file opens properly on somebody else’s computer. It is good to be able to check.

Your file comes back exactly as it was

Open a file, change nothing, save it, and it is exactly the file you started with. Nothing is quietly reformatted, no invisible characters are added or taken away, and a file that did not end with a blank line does not suddenly grow one.

When you want to change how a file is saved, Tools ▸ File Encoding and Line Endings does it on purpose.

Spell check

WordPad never had one. Notepad only got one recently. QuillLite has one, and it is the same one QUILL for All uses.

It knows when to stay quiet. Some files are not writing at all — they hold settings and instructions that computers read. In those, almost every word looks like a mistake to a dictionary, and you would get a steady stream of warnings that are all wrong. QuillLite recognises those files and says nothing as you type. It tells you once when you open one, so you are never left wondering.

Press Ctrl+Alt+F7 if you want checking on in a file like that anyway. It changes only the document you are in. And F7 always works, in every file — if you ask for a check, you get one.

Words you teach QuillLite are yours. If you also use QUILL for All, one setting in Preferences lets both share the same list.

And it spells the word out for you. This is the part that matters most and the part no other editor does. “Receive” and “recieve” sound identical — being told the word is being told nothing. So when you land on a misspelling, QuillLite says the word and then, after a short pause, says the letters.

The pause is deliberate. It is a separate thing it says, not one long announcement, so if you already knew what was wrong you press the next key and never hear it. You only wait if you want to.

You decide how the letters come: plainly (R, E, C), in the phonetic alphabet (romeo, echo, charlie — which is the only way to tell B from D from E from P from T from V through a fast synthesiser), or both. You decide whether capitals are named, so MacDonald and Macdonald are told apart. You decide how long each pause is, and there are three of them, because moving quickly through a document and stopping to choose a correction are not the same activity.

All of it is in Tools ▸ Spelling ▸ Announcements (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F7), with an example box that says your choices out loud as you change them.

The Applications key, on a misspelled word

Put the cursor in a word QuillLite thinks is wrong and press the Applications key (or Shift+F10, or right-click). The menu opens with the corrections — one press of Down and you are on the first one; Enter replaces the word. No dialog, no moving the cursor.

Underneath: ignore it once, ignore it everywhere in this document, add it to your dictionary, or add it only for this file. Then the ways onward — more suggestions, check the whole document, next and previous misspelling — each showing its key, so the menu teaches you the shortcut instead of replacing it.

Every row names the word it is about, because a menu you reached with the keyboard is a menu read out of context.

While you type

Finish a word that is not in the dictionary and you hear a short, quiet falling blip, and the status bar says which word it was. A sound rather than speech, on purpose: speech there would interrupt the sentence you are in the middle of writing, which is the one moment you can least afford it.

You can silence it, have the word spoken as well, or change how long before it mentions the same word again.

Bookmarks, and finding your place again

Press Ctrl+Shift+B to drop a bookmark where you are, and F2 to come back to it. You get nine numbered ones, and they follow the text as you edit around them, so they do not drift out of place.

Alt+Shift+G lists them all.

A proper Selection menu

Holding Shift and tapping an arrow key is right for two letters and miserable for four paragraphs. Edit ▸ Selection has three better answers, and everything in it tells you how much it took.

Start a selection and walk to the end of it. Press F8, move however you like — arrows, Home, End, Page Down — and the selection follows you. Shift+F8 finishes. Nothing held down, nothing counted. Ctrl+Shift+F8 puts back the selection you just lost to a stray arrow key.

Take a whole thing at once. Word, line, paragraph, sentence or block, in one keystroke, without knowing where any of them start. Ctrl+Shift+X grows the selection outwards a step at a time and Ctrl+Alt+Shift+X shrinks it back — so over-pressing costs you nothing.

Marks. A mark is where you were standing before you went to look something up. Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K drops one, Ctrl+M goes back, Alt+M lists them.

And Ctrl+Shift+Y reads back what is selected — because there is no glance that confirms you took what you meant to, and the next key might replace it.

“What is this character?”

Ctrl+Shift+C tells you exactly which character you are sitting on.

This sounds like a small thing and is not. A screen reader says “space” for several different characters that look identical and behave differently — and one of them is usually the reason a search is not finding something you can plainly see is there.

Three answers to a clipboard that only holds one thing

And Ctrl+Shift+V pastes text with none of its formatting, which is the one everybody wants and almost nobody has.

Tools for tidying up text

Sort lines, remove blank lines, remove duplicate lines, trim trailing spaces, and change to UPPERCASE, lowercase or Title Case.

Each works on what you have selected, or on the whole document if you have selected nothing. And each one is a single undo — Ctrl+Z takes back the whole sort, not one line at a time.

Abbreviations

Type a short form, press space, and get the long one. Handy for an address, a sign off, or anything you type often and would rather not spell out every time.

It looks after work you have not saved

While a document has unsaved changes, QuillLite quietly keeps a copy beside your file — never on top of it. If the power goes out, that work is offered back the next time you open the app. Save or close normally and the copy disappears.

It reopens what you had open

Close QuillLite with three documents open and it comes back with the same three, in the same order. You can turn this off in Preferences.

Finding a command without hunting through menus

Ctrl+Shift+P opens a search box for commands. Type “sort” and you get the sorting commands, with no need to remember which menu they live under. Each one shows its keyboard shortcut beside it, which is a good way to pick the keys up.

Make it smaller, or bigger

Tools ▸ Customize Features lets you switch whole parts of QuillLite off. Turning something off removes it from the menus and unhooks its keys, so it is properly gone rather than just hidden.

Uncheck the first one and QuillLite is essentially Notepad.

These all start switched on:

Rich text and the Format menu · Heading navigation · Bookmarks · Line tools and change case · Copy Tray and the clip library · Printing · Abbreviations · Spell check · The Selection submenu

These three start switched off, and they sit in the same list rather than being hidden away, because something you cannot find might as well not exist:

Sounds you can hear, change, and switch off

QuillLite makes a short sound when something happens that your screen reader says nothing about: a cut, a copy, a paste, a delete, an undo, a document saved, a document closed, printing started and finished, the app opening and closing. These are exactly the moments where speech tells you nothing, because nothing moved and nothing gained focus — so silence has always meant guessing.

They are designed as families, so you learn them once rather than one at a time. Undo and redo are the same little sound played backwards from each other. Open and close are one pair of bells, rising and falling. Cut, copy and paste are one dry tick in three shapes, and delete is that tick dropped low with a breath of noise under it.

Tools ▸ Sound Scheme (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+O) is all of them in a list that plays each one as you arrow onto it — which is what turns a list of names into something you can actually browse. Every row tells you the whole story: what the event is, whether it is switched on, which file it plays and how long that file is.

For whichever row you are on: Play it (even if it is switched off), switch it on or off, Browse for a WAV of your own, remove its sound entirely, or put it back to the one QuillLite ships. Save As Scheme keeps your whole set under a name — as an ordinary folder you can copy, back up or send to a friend. Restore All Defaults always works, because the sounds QuillLite ships are never overwritten.

Quiet mode

Alt+Shift+M silences everything at once. Press it again and it all comes back.

One key, because “make it stop” is something you need while the noise is happening — on a call, in a quiet room, or having simply had enough today. A setting you have to go and find is not much help at the moment you need it.

Every window answers F1

Press F1 anywhere and QuillLite tells you what this window is for, and then what the thing you are focused on does. Every window. Every button.

Start with a blank document, or don’t

QuillLite opens with an empty Untitled document, the way Notepad and WordPad do.

If you always open an existing file, that empty document is one more thing to close on every single launch — so there is a switch in Preferences to turn it off. Files you double-click, last session’s documents and any recovered work all still open either way, because every one of those is you asking for a document.

Dark by default

QuillLite opens in dark mode, because many of the people it is built for find a bright white screen genuinely hard to look at.

It changes what you see and nothing else. The colours are never saved into your file, so a document you send somebody will not arrive full of grey text.

When something goes wrong, there is a person at the other end

Help > Get Help from Support… — Ctrl+Alt+F2 — writes to support@community-access.org, where a person reads it and replies to you by email.

Fill in what kind of message it is, a subject, and what happened. What you expected and how to reproduce it are optional and worth more than anything else when you can give them. Your email address is optional too: you can report a problem without giving one, you simply will not be able to be replied to.

Press Send and your own mail program opens with the whole message already written — QuillLite’s version, your Windows version and your screen reader filled in at the bottom, so you do not have to go and find any of it. Nothing is sent until you send it from there, and QuillLite says so out loud rather than claiming to have sent something it has not. If you use webmail and have no mail program set up, the whole message and the address go on your clipboard instead, so nothing you typed is ever lost.

Writing to support@community-access.org yourself works exactly as well. There is no form you have to use.

It tells you when there is a new version

Help > Check for Updates… — Ctrl+Alt+U, the same key in every app in the family.

If there is nothing newer, it says so in a dialog. That is on purpose: a key that answers with silence is indistinguishable from a key that does nothing.

If there is something newer, the window opens on what changed — the release notes for that version, in a read-only box you can arrow through like a document. Your focus lands in the notes, not on a button, so the first thing you hear is what is in the release. Tab from there and there are two buttons: Update, which downloads it and then offers to install it and restart for you — your settings, your recent files and your recovered work are all kept — and Close, which does nothing at all. Nothing is downloaded until you press Update.

QuillLite also looks once a day when it starts, and says nothing unless there is something. Not while it checks, not when there is nothing, and not when your network is down. Only a real new version speaks, and even then it only offers. If you would rather it never looked on its own, there is a tick box in Settings: Look for updates when QuillLite starts. Ctrl+Alt+U still works either way.

One small consequence: Page Setup moved to Ctrl+Alt+P, because Ctrl+Alt+U means Check for Updates everywhere else in the family and a key that means two different things is a key you cannot trust.

Two things this fixed in QUILL for All

Building QuillLite turned up two real faults in QUILL for All’s editor. Both are now fixed for everybody who uses QUILL, not just for QuillLite.

Headings were losing their bold. Applying a heading set the size correctly but quietly failed to make it bold, with no error, so nothing seemed wrong at the time. Because QUILL partly recognises a heading by its bold, it could then no longer find the headings it had just made — and moving between headings stopped working in formatted documents.

Asking “what formatting is this?” described the wrong line. With the cursor at the very start of a heading, QUILL described the ordinary paragraph above it instead. It now describes the text you are actually on, the same way your screen reader does.

QUILL for All gained things too

QuillLite is never allowed to be better than QUILL for All. Anything it needed that QUILL could not yet do went into QUILL in the same release:

Two keys differ between the two apps, on purpose: QUILL for All has used Ctrl+J and Ctrl+Shift+V for other things for years, and we would rather not take a key out from under somebody’s fingers. In QUILL those two commands are Ctrl+Alt+J and Ctrl+Alt+V instead.

Things worth knowing before you start

Which download do I want?

Download Size Choose this if
QuillLite-Setup-Shared-1.0.0.exe 113 MB You just want to install it. Everything is included. This is the one.
QuillLite-Portable-1.0.0.zip 91 MB You want to run it from a USB stick, with your settings on the stick too.

If you are not sure, take the first one.

When you install it, QuillLite offers to appear in the “Open with” list for text files. That is optional, and it never takes over as the default — Notepad, WordPad and QUILL all stay exactly where they are.

Windows may warn you about the installer until our certificate is fully established. Choose More info, then Run anyway.

Thank you

QuillLite was contributed by Steven Scott, who not only offered the app but tracked down the two heading faults above and left them for us to fix separately, so that adding an app and changing the editor stayed two decisions rather than one.

That is a thoughtful way to give something away, and it is the reason this release makes QUILL for All better as well.