QuillLite — User Guide

QuillLite is a text editor. It opens a file, lets you change it, and saves it back exactly as it found it.

If you have used Notepad or WordPad, almost every key you already know works here. Where QuillLite does something different, this guide says so, and says why.

You do not need to read this guide to use QuillLite. Start it, type, press Ctrl+S. Come back here when you want more.

The first minute

Start QuillLite and you get one window with one empty document in it, called 1: Untitled. Type. Press Ctrl+S when you want to keep it.

That is the whole thing. The rest of this guide is optional.

Three keys are worth knowing straight away:

• F1 tells you where you are. Press it anywhere — in your document, on a button, in any window — and QuillLite says what that window is for and what the thing you are on does.
• F6 takes you to the status bar, which is where the useful facts live. Arrow along it, press Escape to come back.
• Ctrl+F1 lists every key QuillLite has.

Your documents are numbered

QuillLite opens your documents inside one window, and numbers them. Your first is 1, the next is 2, and a number never changes for as long as that document is open — even if you close the one before it.

That number is how you get back to it:

One thing to know. Because your documents sit inside one window, they do not appear in Alt+Tab. Alt+Tab shows you QuillLite, once. The four ways above are how you move between documents. We would rather tell you that here than have you hunting for a document you thought you had lost.

Ctrl+N makes a new document. Ctrl+W closes the one you are in. Ctrl+Q closes everything, asking about anything you have not saved.

Opening a second QuillLite

If you open a file from your file manager while QuillLite is already running, it opens in the QuillLite you already have. That is what keeps the numbering meaningful.

If you really do want two separate QuillLite windows — one per monitor, say — start it with the extra option --new-instance.

Four kinds of document

Every document is one of four kinds. The title bar names the first two; the status bar’s Format and Language cells name all four.

Plain text is like Notepad. One font, no formatting, no markup. Text you paste in arrives as plain text. This is what a .py, a .conf or a log file is, and it is what you want when another program is going to read the file.

Markdown is plain text that means something: # starts a heading, - starts a bullet, ** makes a word bold. QuillLite writes those for you — see Formatting — and reads them back, so the caret can tell you you have arrived at a Heading 2 or walked into a list of five.

HTML is the same idea in tags: <h2>, <ul>, <strong>. Everything Markdown gets, HTML gets, in HTML’s own spelling.

Rich text is like WordPad. Bold, italic, headings, alignment, bullet points, line spacing. It saves as a Rich Text file, which Word and WordPad both open.

QuillLite chooses the kind from the file’s name, and it is only ever a first guess:

.txt and a brand-new document are Markdown because that is what somebody typing ## Notes into one means. A .py or a .conf is plain text because in those a # is a comment and a - is a flag, and an editor that announced “Heading 1” on most lines of a build script would be exhausting.

Saying otherwise

The guess is not binding. Writing HTML in a .txt scratch file is an entirely reasonable thing to do, and there are three ways to say so:

• Ctrl+Shift+M rings through all four kinds — plain text, Markdown, HTML, rich text, and round again. Each stop says its own name, so you press it until you hear the one you meant. This is the fast way.
• Ctrl+Alt+F6 (Format ▸ Document Language) goes straight to one, and tells you what each choice will do before you make it.
• Enter on the status bar’s Language cell opens that same chooser, because the bar is where you notice the answer is wrong.

Moving between plain, Markdown and HTML changes nothing in your document — it changes what the keys write from now on. Going to or from rich text is a real conversion, and going from it throws the formatting away, so it asks first.

The choice lasts as long as the window. It describes what you are typing, not what the file is.

Saving

Ctrl+S saves. Ctrl+Shift+S saves under a new name.

QuillLite makes you one promise here: open a file, change nothing, save it, and it is exactly the file you started with. Nothing is quietly tidied up behind your back.

To keep that promise it remembers three things about every file it opens, and puts them back the same way:

• How the text is stored — different files store letters and accents differently, and QuillLite keeps whichever way yours already used.
• How the lines end — files made on Windows and files made on other systems mark the end of a line differently, and QuillLite does not change yours.
• Whether the file ended with a blank line — if it did not, it will not suddenly start.

You can see both of the first two in the status bar (F6), and you can deliberately change them from Tools ▸ File Encoding and Line Endings (Ctrl+Alt+E) when you actually want to — for instance when somebody needs a copy of an old file in a newer format. The change takes effect the next time you save.

If something goes wrong

While a document has changes you have not saved, QuillLite keeps a copy of it aside, about once a minute. That copy sits beside your file and never on top of it.

If QuillLite or your computer stops unexpectedly, that work is offered back to you the next time you start, in its own document.

Save it, or close normally, and the copy is deleted. So there is never anything in there except work you actually need.

Going back to an earlier version

There is a separate timestamped backups option (Tools ▸ Customize Features), which keeps a dated copy every time you save. That is for the paragraph you deleted an hour ago rather than for a crash. It starts switched off, because it does fill up a folder.

Turn it on and File ▸ Earlier Versions… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E) lists them, newest first, as “Today at 4:12 PM — 2,341 words”. Up to twenty are kept per document; after that the oldest go.

The word count is there to be compared rather than read. Two saves a minute apart are otherwise almost impossible to tell apart by ear, and the version that is suddenly two thousand words shorter is usually the one you are hunting for.

There are two ways to take one:

• Restore puts that version into the window you are in. It does not save, so the file on disk is untouched until you decide, and Ctrl+Z undoes it. A restore chosen by mistake costs you one keystroke.
• Open a Copy puts the old version in a new untitled window and leaves the document you are working on completely alone. Use this one when the question is “what did this say yesterday” rather than “put yesterday back”.

Until version 1.0 QuillLite wrote these files and gave you no way to read one: they were there, correctly dated, and reachable only if you knew where the app kept them. If you have had backups switched on, everything from before this version is in the list too.

Finding things

When a search runs off the end of the document it starts again at the top, and it tells you it has done so. That matters more than it sounds: without it, a document with one match sounds exactly like a document with none, every time you press F3.

How many are there?

The Find window keeps a running count of what you have typed so far, before you press anything. Type three letters and it says how many matches there are; add a fourth and the number changes. Your screen reader reads it as it changes, because it is a label rather than an announcement – a count spoken on every keystroke would talk over the typing it is describing.

Ctrl+Down and Ctrl+Up step through the matches without leaving the search box, so you can hear the next one and still adjust what you typed. Enter is what commits and puts you in the document.

Outside the window, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F3 counts the current search anywhere, and Ctrl+Shift+F3 opens All Matches: every match in the document, in order, each with its line and column and the words around it. That is the list you want before a Replace All, because it is the only way to see what you are about to change rather than finding out afterwards.

The Insert menu

Everything that puts something into your document that is not typing.

These were spread through Edit before there were six of them. Insert sits before Format on the bar for the reason Word puts it there: you insert a thing and then you format it, so the menus are in the order the work happens. Every key is unchanged.

Emoji — Alt+.

QUILL’s own picker, and the same key. Search by name, by keyword, by what it looks like, or by a typed smiley — :) finds the smiling face and <3 finds the heart. Or browse by category, starting with Favourites and Recent.

Every emoji comes with a written description of what it actually shows, which is the whole point: a picture wall is exactly the shape of control that cannot be used without sight, so this is a list you arrow through with a description pane beside it. What you insert is announced by name, because a bare emoji character is read as anything from its own name to silence depending on your synthesiser.

It works in every kind of document, rich text included. An emoji is a character, not markup.

The two tag pickers

Exactly one of them is ever available, and it is whichever your document’s language is. The other is greyed out rather than hidden — a greyed row tells your reader it is unavailable the moment you arrive on it, while a row that has vanished leaves you hunting the menus for something you know the app has. Press the key anyway and it tells you what the document is, what it would need to be, and that Ctrl+Alt+F6 is how to change that.

Markdown Tag (Ctrl+Alt+I) offers bold, italic, inline code, a fenced code block, the six heading levels, bullet, numbered and task lists, blockquote, link, image, table and footnote. Type to narrow the list. Link and Image ask for the address afterwards.

HTML Tag (Ctrl+Alt+O) offers 111 tags and 20 whole form fields, and searches by what they do as well as what they are called: type “dropdown” and find both a finished labelled dropdown and the bare select, type “glossary” and find <dl>, type “acronym” and find <abbr>, type “subtitles” and find <track>. For a bare tag you can then give it attributes — class=note; id=summary; aria-label=Summary — and Enter on an empty box skips that step, because an <h2> needs none. A whole form field skips the box entirely: it arrives with the attributes that make it work.

Anything selected is wrapped. Otherwise the cursor lands between the tags.

Whole form fields, wired up

The HTML picker’s top rows are not tags — they are finished controls. Choose Form field: dropdown and you get a label, a for that matches the field’s id, the <select> and three <option>s, all at once.

This is where the picker earns its place. Inserting <select> on its own is the easy half; the half that matters is the wiring, and the wiring is invisible. A missing for renders identically to a present one. A radio group without a shared name looks exactly like one with — except every button can be on at once. Two fields that share an id look perfect until somebody clicks the second label and the first field takes focus. None of that is something you can check by looking, which is precisely why it should not be left to memory.

So every one of these arrives complete:

Select a word first and it becomes the label — and the id is made from it, so the two agree. Select “Postcode”, choose Form field: text, and you get a Postcode field with id="postcode" and for="postcode" already matching.

The id is checked against your document first. Insert a second email field and it will be email-2, not a duplicate of the first. That one line of behaviour is the difference between a form that stays accessible when it is copied and one that stops being so without anybody noticing.

The bare tags are all still there, one row further down, for when a bare tag is what you meant.

Typing things there is no key for

Edit ▸ Insert ▸ Special Character… (Ctrl+Shift+F2) opens a picker for the 357 characters a keyboard has no key for. Two ways in, and the window opens on the first one:

• Type what you are after. The search box takes part of a name – dash, euro, acute, arrow, apostrophe – or one of the words Unicode does not use but people do: gbp, sterling, copyright, eszett, micro. Press Enter to move into the results.
• Or clear the box and browse a group. Fifteen of them: Whitespace, Dashes and hyphens, Quotes, Invisible and control, Typography, Legal and reference marks, Currency, Maths and units, Fractions, Superscripts and ordinals, Arrows, Accented letters (small and capital, listed separately), Greek letters, and Punctuation from other languages.

The results list has three columns – the character, its name, and its code point – and the Description pane below updates on every row you arrow onto, with the same detail Character Details… gives for a character already in the document. The code point column is what tells apart rows that sound the same: “Thin space” and “Hair space” are U+2009 and U+200A.

Enter inserts the character you are on, and QuillLite reads back what it put in – “Inserted — U+2014 Em dash”. That is not a nicety: most of this list is invisible on the page, so without the read-back the command would be a keystroke after which something you cannot see may or may not have appeared.

The search box is also a code-point box. Type 2014, U+2014 or d8212 and the em dash is the first result. A code point that is in no group at all still finds its character, so the picker reaches everything Unicode has and not only the 357 that are grouped.

QUILL has the same picker on Shift+F2, over the same list.

Moving your settings to another computer

Tools ▸ Back Up Settings… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Q) writes your configuration to a .qsf file. Tools ▸ Restore Settings… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+D) reads one back.

The file holds preferences, not a picture of this computer. Your recent-files list, the session QuillLite restores at startup, the window size and the last time it looked for an update are all left out on purpose — carrying them to another machine would give you an editor pointing at files that are not there. The backup tells you how many locations it left behind.

Restoring tells you what was different: how many settings came across, how many have been added to QuillLite since the file was written (those keep their defaults), and how many the file had that this version does not recognise. If the file has nothing QuillLite recognises at all, nothing is changed — a wrong file should not reset your editor.

QUILL has the same thing, on buttons in its Preferences window. The two products use the same file extension but do not read each other’s backups: they are different editors with different settings.

Ending a line without starting a paragraph

Edit ▸ Insert ▸ Line Break (Shift+Enter, the same chord Word uses) ends the line you are on and starts the next one without starting a new paragraph.

That distinction matters in Markdown and nowhere else is it visible. A blank line between two lines makes them two paragraphs, which most renderers show with a gap. A hard break makes them two lines of one paragraph, which is what you want for an address, a verse, or a run of scene-break lines that should sit tight against each other.

QuillLite writes the break in whichever spelling Markdown line break style names in Settings, and says which one it used — the default is a backslash at the end of the line, because the alternative is two trailing spaces, which are invisible on screen, silent to a screen reader, and stripped by many tools when they save a file. If you have ever added two spaces to the end of a line and had nothing happen, that is why.

QUILL has the same command on the same key.

Searching for things you cannot type

The Find and Replace windows have a Search mode with three settings.

Normal text is the ordinary one: what you type is what is looked for, punctuation and all.

Special characters lets you write the characters there is no key for. \t is a tab, \n a line break, \u2014 an em dash, and \N{NO-BREAK SPACE} is exactly what it says. This is the companion to Describe Character: that tells you which invisible character you are standing on, and this is how you then find every other one like it, or replace them all with an ordinary space.

Regular expression treats what you typed as a search pattern – . matches any character, * repeats the thing before it, [abc] matches any one of those, ^ and $ are the start and end of a line. If the pattern is not valid, QuillLite says which character is wrong rather than quietly finding nothing: a search that failed and a search that found nothing are different problems, and only one of them is fixed by retyping.

Whole word works with all three. In regular expression mode it wraps the whole pattern, so cat|dog means “the word cat or the word dog”, not “the word cat, or dog anywhere”.

Bookmarks

A bookmark is a place you meant to come back to.

Bookmarks follow the text as you edit around them, so they stay on the right words rather than drifting.

They are still there tomorrow

Close the document and open it again and your bookmarks are where you left them, along with the place the cursor was. You do not have to do anything to keep them.

This matters more than it sounds. The reason to have bookmarks at all is that there is no scrollbar thumb to glance at and no way to see at a glance where you are in a long file – and that does not stop being true when you close the window. Marking nine places and losing them on the way out is the same loss as never marking them, just later.

Two details worth knowing:

• A document you have never saved is not remembered. There is no filename to remember it by. Save it once and its bookmarks are kept from then on.
• Nothing is written next to your file. No stray sidecar file appears in your folder; the list lives in QuillLite’s own settings folder, keyed by the file’s location. If the file has been shortened by something else since you last had it open, bookmarks past the new end are pulled back to the end rather than sending you nowhere.

You can turn all of this off with the rest of bookmarks in Tools ▸ Customize Features, and then nothing is written at all.

Going back where you came from

They are at the top of the Navigate menu, above the headings and the bookmarks, and they belong to neither of those — so switching both of those off does not take Back and Forward with them. They are always there.

Every jump QuillLite makes is remembered: going to a line, following a heading, picking something out of the heading list or the bookmark list, and landing on a search hit. Alt+Left takes you back to where you were standing before it.

It is the undo for moving about, and the keys are the ones every web browser and file window has used for thirty years. Without it, pressing F3 to check a word somewhere else in the document is a one-way trip: you can find your way back only if you happened to know the line number you were on, which is exactly the thing you were never told.

Unlike bookmarks, this is only remembered while the window is open. It is about where you have been in this sitting, not about the document.

Selecting

Holding Shift and tapping an arrow key selects one character at a time. That is right for two letters and miserable for four paragraphs — you press, and press, and have no idea where you have got to.

So Edit ▸ Selection gives you three better ways. Everything in it tells you how much it took, which is the part that matters: “Selected paragraph, 412 characters” is something you can act on, where a silent selection is one you have to test by pressing something you might regret.

Start a selection and walk to the end of it

This is the one to learn first. Press F8, then move however you like — arrows, Home, End, Page Down, Ctrl and an arrow — and the selection follows you from where you started. Press Shift+F8 when you get there.

No modifier held down the whole way, and no counting. It is the answer whenever the thing you want does not line up neatly with a word or a paragraph.

Ctrl+Shift+F8 is worth remembering for the moment an arrow key has just thrown away a selection that took six keystrokes to build.

Take a whole word, line or paragraph at once

You do not need to know where any of these begin. Growing goes word, line, sentence, paragraph, block, whole document, and says which one it took each time. Shrinking walks back the other way — so you can over-press Ctrl+Shift+X without it costing you anything.

Marks — where you were a moment ago

A mark is not a bookmark. A bookmark is a place you mean to keep. A mark is where you were standing before you went off to check something.

Two more

Ctrl+Shift+Y reads back what is currently selected. There is no glance that confirms you took what you meant to, and the next key you press might replace it. Long selections are summarised rather than read out in full.

Ctrl+Alt+Q puts a second copy of the selection right after the first — or duplicates the line you are on if nothing is selected.

The ones Windows gives you anyway

These work in QuillLite as they do everywhere, and have no menu row because they need none:

| Shift+Home / Shift+End | Select to the start / end of the line | | Ctrl+Shift+Home / Ctrl+Shift+End | Select to the start / end of the document |

Formatting

These are WordPad’s keys, deliberately unchanged.

The same key, the document’s own answer. Ctrl+B used to say “Not available in plain text. Press Control Shift M to switch to rich text”, which is true and unhelpful — somebody writing Markdown does not want rich text, they want two asterisks, and they know it. So what Ctrl+B writes now depends on what kind of document you are in:

Select a word first and it is wrapped. With nothing selected the markup goes in empty and the cursor lands in the middle of it, ready to type — which matters, because otherwise you would be typing after the closing tag with no way to see that you were.

In Markdown and HTML the announcement names the markup rather than the effect — “Bold in Markdown”, not “Bold on”. Nothing on the screen went bold; two asterisks appeared, and you need to know which of the two happened.

HTML gets <strong> and <em>, never <b> and <i>. They are not synonyms to the thing that reads them out: <strong> carries importance into the accessibility tree, and <b> carries only a typeface.

Applying a heading rewrites the line rather than adding to it. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+2 on a line that is already ### Notes gives you ## Notes, not ## ### Notes — and an id= on an HTML heading is carried across, because it is very often the anchor somebody else’s link points at.

The rest of the Format menu — alignment, bullets, line spacing, font — is rich text only, and says so when it cannot run.

They are gathered in Format ▸ Headings, where the digit in the menu is the digit in the shortcut.

A heading is bold text at its own size — 20, 16, 14, 12, 11.5 and 10.5 point for levels 1 to 6, with ordinary text at 11 point. These are the same sizes QUILL for All uses, chosen so that a document you save here still reads as having headings when somebody opens it in Word. Every level has a size of its own on purpose: levels 5 and 6 used to share the 11-point body size, which meant QuillLite could apply them and then could not find them again — heading navigation and the headings list both walked straight past them.

Ctrl+Shift+D is the one worth remembering. It tells you what you are standing in — “Arial, 16 point, heading 2, bold” — which is the question a formatted document raises and that nothing else can answer for you.

Moving between headings

These work in every kind of document. In rich text they walk the point-size ladder above; in Markdown they walk the lines that start with #; in HTML they walk <h1> to <h6>. They used to refuse in a plain document (“Headings are only available in rich text”), which was wrong in the way that matters: plain-text headings are real enough for Alt+Shift+Right to change their level, and only navigation pretended the document had no shape. A # inside a fenced code block is not treated as a heading.

Hearing that you have arrived at one

Arrow onto a heading and QuillLite says “Heading 2”.

It has to, because your screen reader cannot. No Windows edit control has paragraph styles — the control QuillLite hosts can tell JAWS or NVDA the font name, the size and the weight, and has no way to say “this paragraph is a heading”. Word manages it only by shipping an accessibility provider of its own.

The rules are narrow on purpose:

• The level, not the text. Your reader is already reading the line. Saying the title here would speak every heading twice.
• Once, on arrival. Moving about inside the heading says nothing further. You hear it again if you leave and come back.
• Both modes. A rich-text heading and a Markdown heading announce alike.

Applying a heading already tells you so, and the two do not double up. Opening a document whose first line is its title does not greet you with “Heading 1”.

Turning it off — View ▸ Announce Headings (Ctrl+Alt+F3). Sometimes you are reading a document as text and the levels are one sentence too many. The key turns the cue off and on where you stand, and says which way it went — “Headings will not be announced”, or “Headings announced on arrival” — rather than “off” and “on”, so a key pressed by accident is never a mystery. The choice is remembered, but it is meant to be pressed rather than set: it is a decision per document.

A # is not always a heading. In a .md or a .txt, or a document you have not named yet, a line starting with # is a heading. In a .py, .sh, .ini, .yml or .conf it is a comment, and QuillLite says nothing and lists nothing — otherwise a build script would announce “Heading 1” on most of its lines. In an HTML document it is neither: there the headings are <h1> to <h6>, and QuillLite reads and writes those instead.

Hearing that you are in a list

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

This is the one cue in the set your screen reader gives you everywhere except here. On a web page a list reaches the reader as a list with a count, and NVDA says almost exactly this. In an editor a list is not a list — it is characters — so the reader has nothing to go on, and a nested outline sounds like a run of ordinary lines starting with a dash. The only thing separating level two from level three is the number of spaces, counted by ear.

It works in Markdown and in HTML, over all three kinds of list:

A definition list also says “Term” and “Definition” as you move between the two, because which of them you are standing in decides what the words mean — and a definition list written inside out is not something you can see you have done.

The counting rule matters and is easy to get wrong: items are counted at your own level, inside your own list. A three-item list whose second item has four sub-items is “3 items” at level one and “4 items” at level two, never “7”. Two sub-lists under two different bullets are two lists, not one.

What it never says:

• Nothing as you move down a list. That is what the caret does nearly all the time, and your reader is already speaking each item.
• Nothing about - - - or ***. Those are horizontal rules, not one-item lists.
• Nothing inside a fenced code block. A - in a code sample is a sample.
• Nothing in a plain text document. A letter is full of hyphens, and a cue that fired on them would be superstition rather than help.

Turning it off — View ▸ Announce Lists (Ctrl+Alt+F5). Its own switch, next to the heading one and deliberately separate from it: reorganising an outline, the level is the work; proof-reading the same file, it is a phrase between you and every item. Like its sibling it says which way it went — “Lists will not be announced”, or “Lists announced as you enter them”.

And the status bar’s List cell says something the speech never does: which item you are on. “Bulleted list, 4 of 9, level 2”. Saying that aloud on every arrow press would be too much; never being able to find out is its own problem, and a cell answers on demand and costs nothing until you read it. Enter on the cell turns the spoken cue off and on.

Rearranging them — Format ▸ Structure

Until now QuillLite could make headings and walk between them but never move them about, which left cut-and-paste as the only way to reorganise a document — and that is the operation it is worst at. Moving a section by hand means selecting from one heading to exactly the start of the next: a boundary you cannot see, that you have to find by ear, and that takes your place in the document with it when you get it wrong. Alt+Shift+Up does the same thing in one keystroke and tells you it happened.

“Section” means the heading you are in plus everything under it, down to the next heading at the same level or higher. Moving a Heading 2 takes its Heading 3s with it.

Two things to know:

• Promoting a Heading 1 leaves it a Heading 1. It does not turn into ordinary text — losing a heading altogether is not what Alt+Shift+Left is for, and it would quietly drop the paragraph out of your headings list.
• Moving sections works in plain text documents, where headings are Markdown # lines. In a rich text document a heading is a font size rather than something written in the text, and there is nothing there to move; QuillLite says so rather than doing nothing. Promoting and demoting work in both.

These are QUILL for All’s own four keys, so they behave the same in both.

Spell check

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

F7 checks the whole document. It walks you through it one word at a time with suggestions you can arrow through. For each word you can change it, change every one like it, skip it, or add it to your dictionary so it is never questioned again.

Ctrl+F7 selects the word it lands on, so your screen reader reads it to you when you get there – and then, after a short pause, spells it out. That is the part that matters: “receive” and “recieve” are the same sound, so hearing the word tells you nothing, and the letters are the answer. Press the next key and the spelling is cancelled unheard, so it costs you nothing when you did not need it.

Shift+F7 and Alt+F7 work from anywhere in a word, not only from its first letter.

While you type

When you finish a word that is not in the dictionary – finish it, so a space or a comma or a new line, not while you are still in the middle of typing it – you hear a short falling blip and the status bar says which word it was. It is a sound rather than speech on purpose: speech there would interrupt the sentence you are writing, which is the one moment you can least afford it.

You can silence the sound, have the word spoken as well, or change how long it waits before repeating itself on the same word. All of that is in Tools ▸ Spelling ▸ Announcements (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F7).

Spelling Announcements

Twelve settings, in one window, in three groups.

While you are typing. Whether the sound plays at all, whether the word is spoken too (off by default), and the shortest gap before the same word is reported again – zero means every time.

Spelling a word out. Whether words are spelled at all, and how. Plain letters are fastest. The phonetic alphabet – romeo, echo, charlie – is unambiguous where B, D, E, P, T and V are one sound with a rumour attached: a fast voice, a poor speaker, a noisy room. Both is for learning a word rather than checking one. You can also have capitals named, so “cap M, A, C, cap D” tells MacDonald from Macdonald. An example box shows what your choices sound like and says it out loud as you change them.

When the letters follow. Three pauses, because the right pause is not the same in three places: longer in the F7 review, where you are stopped and deciding; shorter when moving between misspellings, where you may be travelling; and shorter again in a list of suggestions, where you are arrowing. Each can be switched off on its own.

QUILL has the same twelve settings under Spelling in its Settings window, so tuning this once tunes both.

The word you are on: the Applications key

With the cursor in a word QuillLite thinks is misspelled, press the Applications key (or Shift+F10, or right-click) and the menu grows a Spelling submenu at the top, named after the word: Spelling: “wrold”. One Down arrow, then Right, and you are on the first suggestion; Enter replaces the word. No dialog opens and the cursor does not move.

Everything about the word is in that one submenu, so the ordinary rows below it – Undo, Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete, Select All – are in the same place whether the word is misspelled or not.

Inside the submenu, under the suggestions:

Every row names the word it is about, so a menu you reached by keyboard still tells you what it is going to do. On a word that is spelled correctly there is no Spelling submenu at all – just the ordinary edit rows.

Ignoring is honoured everywhere: a word you have ignored stops being announced as you type, stops being a stop for Ctrl+F7, and stops being offered by Shift+F7. To keep a word for longer than the session, add it to a dictionary.

When it stays quiet

Some files are not writing at all. They hold settings and instructions that programs read, and they are full of made-up words, abbreviations and names that no dictionary contains. Checking one of those as you type would give you a constant stream of warnings that are every one of them wrong.

So QuillLite does not check those files as you type. It recognises them by the kind of file they are, and it tells you once when you open one, so you are never left wondering whether something is broken.

If you want checking in one anyway, press Ctrl+Alt+F7. It changes only the document you are in — a letter and a settings file open at the same time can quite happily disagree about this. Tools ▸ Spelling shows a tick beside Check While Typing so you can always see which way it is set.

F7 always works, in every file. Staying quiet is only about what happens when you have not asked. If you ask for a check, you get one.

Your dictionary

Words you teach QuillLite are yours, kept in QuillLite’s own folder. If you also use QUILL for All, one setting in Preferences makes both share the same list, so a word taught in either is known to both.

A single document can also have its own short list of words, kept in a small file beside it. That is useful for names that belong to one piece of work and nowhere else.

What is this character?

Ctrl+Shift+C tells you exactly which character the cursor is on — its name, and what it does to a search.

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

Ctrl+Alt+C opens the full description in a window you can read line by line.

The status bar

F6 takes you into it — it is Navigate ▸ Status Bar, because going there is a move rather than a setting. The arrow keys and Home/End move along it, Enter acts on the part you are on, and Escape puts you back in your document. Each part says its own name and value.

View ▸ Status Bar (Alt+Shift+B) takes the bar off the screen altogether, the way Notepad’s does, and puts it back. Nothing is lost when it is away: Ctrl+Alt+W speaks the counts, and Ctrl+G asks for the line number the Position part would have shown you. F6 with the bar hidden says so rather than doing nothing.

Seven of these are worth pointing out.

Typing Mode is the one you cannot find out any other way. Every Windows editor has an overwrite mode, where what you type replaces the letters already there instead of pushing them along, and none of them will tell you which mode you are in — you find out by typing over a sentence you meant to keep. Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+W to switch, or Enter on this part of the status bar.

The Insert key switches it too, because the editing control answers that key whether QuillLite asks it to or not. QuillLite does not claim the key — it is NVDA’s and JAWS’s own modifier and taking it would fight your screen reader — but it does watch for it, so this part of the status bar stays right either way.

Tab Mode is the same idea. QuillLite starts where Notepad does: the Tab key types a tab character. Switch it with Ctrl+Alt+Shift+I and Tab indents the whole line instead, which is what QUILL does by default and what you probably want when the file is code. Shift+Tab outdents either way, so a tab you did not mean to type can always be taken back without switching modes first.

Encoding and Line Endings are the two things that decide whether your file opens properly on somebody else’s computer, and almost no other editor shows them at all. You will rarely need to change them — but when a file arrives looking like nonsense, this is where the answer is.

List answers the question the speech deliberately does not. Entering a list you hear “Bulleted list, 5 items”; this cell also tells you which item you are on — “Bulleted list, 4 of 9, level 2”. Saying that aloud on every arrow press would be too much to listen to, and having no way at all to find out is its own problem when you are halfway through reordering nine things.

Language is what decides the rest. It says whether this document is Markdown, HTML or plain text, and that one fact decides what Ctrl+B writes, what the heading keys write, which of the two tag pickers the Insert menu offers, and whether the List part above has anything to say. QuillLite reads it from the file name; Enter here says otherwise. See Four kinds of document.

Status Message exists because speech is gone the moment it is spoken. If you missed something QuillLite said, this is where you go to read it again.

Copying and pasting more than one thing

The Windows clipboard holds one thing at a time. QuillLite gives you three ways around that, in Edit ▸ Clipboard.

The copy tray is twelve numbered slots that survive closing the app. Copy into a slot with Ctrl+Alt+Y, and paste from any of them an hour later with Ctrl+Alt+V. Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Y empties it.

The collector gathers things up. Each Ctrl+Alt+G adds what you have selected to one growing pile, and Ctrl+Alt+Shift+G pastes the whole pile. This is what you want when you are pulling five quotes out of a long document. Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C empties the pile.

The clip library happens by itself — a rolling history of what you have copied, whether or not you decided at the time that it mattered. Ctrl+Alt+M keeps the current clip deliberately, and Ctrl+Alt+Shift+M opens the list.

And Ctrl+Shift+V pastes text with none of its formatting, which is what you want when something copied from a web page arrives wearing its own fonts and colours.

Working on lines

Edit ▸ Lines is everything that happens to whole lines. It is in Edit because line work is editing — it belongs beside Cut and Paste rather than three menus away from the text it changes.

The first group works on the line the cursor is already on, which is usually the one you want.

Move Line Up (Ctrl+Shift+Up) and Move Line Down (Ctrl+Shift+Down) move the current line past its neighbour. Reordering two lines any other way means selecting one, cutting it, finding the new place and pasting – four steps, each of which leaves the cursor somewhere the last one did not. Duplicate Line is Ctrl+D, and Join Lines (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+J) pulls the line below onto the end of this one.

Delete Line is Ctrl+Shift+Delete. Delete to Start of Line (Ctrl+Shift+Backspace) and Delete to End of Line (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Delete) remove everything to one side of the cursor, and Delete Paragraph (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Backspace) takes the whole paragraph.

Each of these tells you what it did, and tells you when it did nothing – “Already the first line” is a different fact from silence, and you should not have to press an arrow key to find out which one you got.

Putting lines in order, and tidying them up

The rest of Edit ▸ Lines works on what you have selected, or on the whole document if you have not selected anything.

Sort lines (Ctrl+Alt+S, or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S for Z to A), Reverse Lines (Alt+Shift+Z) and Number Lines (Alt+Shift+N) change the order; Remove Every Blank Line (Ctrl+Alt+K), Remove Duplicate Lines (Ctrl+Alt+D), Trim Trailing Spaces (Ctrl+Alt+T) and Tidy Whitespace (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+T), which collapses the runs of spaces and tabs that arrive with pasted-in text, clean them up.

Remove Every Blank Line means every one, including the blank lines between your paragraphs – it is the cure for text copied out of a web page that arrives double-spaced, not a tidy-up you want on prose. A line of nothing but spaces counts as blank, because it is blank to everyone reading the document and to every tool that will ever open it. QUILL has this command under the same name, beside a second one called Trim Blank Lines at the Ends, which takes only the blank lines before the first line of text and after the last; QuillLite has just the one.

Each one counts as a single undo, so Ctrl+Z takes back the whole sort rather than putting back one line at a time.

Changing case

Tools ▸ Change Case has five. UPPERCASE (Ctrl+Shift+U), lowercase (Ctrl+Shift+K) and Title Case (Ctrl+Shift+G) are the ones you would expect. Sentence case (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+U) puts a capital at the start and lowers the rest, which is what a heading typed in shouting needs, and Invert Case (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+N) swaps every letter, which is the cure for a sentence typed with Caps Lock on.

Getting deleted text back somewhere else

Restore Deleted Text (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Z) puts your most recent deletion back at the cursor, wherever the cursor now is.

That is what makes it different from undo, and it is the reason it exists. Ctrl+Z puts text back where it came from; this puts it where you are now, so deleting a paragraph and restoring it further down is a way to move it that never touches the clipboard – which means whatever you were already carrying on the clipboard is still there afterwards.

It remembers your last three deletions, and only the deliberate ones: the delete commands above, not every character you backspaced over.

Indenting

Tools ▸ Indenting has Indent (Ctrl+]) and Outdent (Ctrl+[). They work on every line the selection touches, or on the line the cursor is on if nothing is selected, and they say how many lines moved.

These matter more here than they look. QuillLite already goes quiet about spelling in a .json or a .py file, which is an admission that people edit configuration and code in it – and for that person, moving a block in or out a level is the single most common thing to want and the most tedious to do by arrow key.

Asking how deep a line is

Describe Indent Depth (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+V) says how far the line you are on is indented: “4 spaces”, “1 tab”, “1 tab, 3 spaces”, or “No indentation”.

This is the one question about a line that nothing else will answer. A screen reader reads a line’s words; it does not read the spaces and tabs in front of them. So in a YAML file, a Python file or a deeply nested list, the shape of the document – which is most of its meaning – is simply not there when you listen to it, and there has never been a way to ask.

It also tells you something the words cannot: whether this line is indented with the same kind of whitespace as its neighbours. A file where one line uses a tab and the rest use spaces looks identical however carefully you read it, and in a Python file it will not run.

Making Tab indent instead

By default the Tab key types a tab character, the way Notepad’s does. View ▸ Tab Key Inserts a Tab Character is ticked to say so. Clear that tick – Ctrl+Alt+Shift+I – and Tab indents the whole line instead, announcing the new depth as it goes. Working on code, that is usually the one you want.

Shift+Tab outdents in either mode. That is deliberate: it means a tab you typed by accident can always be undone with one keystroke, without first working out which mode you were in.

The status bar’s Tab Mode part always says which one is on.

Abbreviations

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

Ctrl+Alt+A manages your list. It is QuillLite’s own list to begin with; if you also use QUILL for All or Quill Inkwell, Preferences has a switch that makes all three share one list.

Alt+Shift+A turns expansion off and on again, and Tools ▸ Expand Abbreviations shows a tick when it is on. This is the one feature that acts while you type, so the moment you want it off is usually the moment it has just expanded something you meant to keep — which is too late to go looking for a dialog. It is the same switch as the Abbreviations box in Customize Features, reached in one keystroke.

Finding a command

Ctrl+Shift+P opens a search box for commands. Type part of what you want — “sort”, “bookmark”, “print” — and pick it from the list. You do not have to remember which menu it lives in.

Each command shows its keyboard shortcut beside it, which is a comfortable way to learn the keys over time.

The window

QuillLite opens maximized, and after that it opens the way you left it. Make it smaller and that size comes back next time; put it back to full screen and so does that.

Maximized is the default because a small window is where text gets cut off and where a list shows four rows on a screen with room for thirty – and neither costs anything to the person who chose the size. It is one keystroke to change and QuillLite will not ask again.

Every app in the family behaves the same way now: QUILL, Quill Radio, Cast, Weather, Audio Studio, Inkwell, the Converter, the Media Player and Beacon.

Changing what a key does

Tools ▸ Keyboard Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R) is where every key in QuillLite can be changed. The list has every command with the key it answers to; type part of a command’s name to find it, and press Enter on a row to give it a different key.

Finding out what a key already does

The other question is the harder one: is this key free? Press Record a Key, then press the combination you are thinking of. QuillLite says what it does today – “Ctrl+S is File ▸ Save” – or says it is free. That is faster and more reliable than reading a list of two hundred rows.

When a key is taken

Assigning a key somebody else already has does not silently steal it and does not silently refuse. QuillLite names the command that owns it and asks. If you say yes, that command is left with no key until you give it one – which is the honest outcome, because a key claimed twice means one of the pair never fires and nothing tells you which.

What cannot be changed

Insert is never bindable. It is the key NVDA and JAWS use as their own modifier, and taking it would take away the key you would need to get it back. QuillLite watches it go past – that is what the Typing Mode cell reads – but never claims it. A key on its own with no Ctrl, Alt or Shift is refused too: it would type itself instead.

Putting things back

Reset to Default puts the command you are on back to the key QuillLite ships with. Reset Everything does it for all of them, after asking. Nothing is saved until you press Save, so Escape leaves your keys exactly as they were.

Check for Problems reports anything wrong with the set as a whole: a key claimed twice, a key QuillLite cannot read, and – the one you would otherwise never find out about – a key Windows will accept and then never actually send to a menu, so it is assigned and inert.

Your changes live in your own settings folder and only what you changed is written down, so a key we improve in a later version still reaches you.

Making QuillLite smaller (or larger)

Sounds

Quiet mode

Alt+Shift+M silences every sound at once, and pressing it again brings them 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 of an earcon today. A feature you have to go and find is one that does not help at the moment you need it.

It is the blunt instrument on purpose; the per-event answer is one menu item away. It is shared with QUILL, so silencing one editor silences both – which is what somebody who wanted quiet meant. Tools ▸ Quiet Mode carries a check mark that reads the true state.

Tools ▸ Sound Scheme (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+O) is every sound QuillLite can make, in a list you can hear. Arrow through it and each event plays as you land on it – that is what turns a list of names into a catalogue, and you can turn it off with the checkbox under the list if you would rather move in silence.

Each row says everything about itself: the event, whether it is switched on, which file it plays and how long that file is. The buttons underneath act on whichever row you are on:

Save As Scheme saves the whole set under a name of your own. A scheme is an ordinary folder with the sounds in it, so you can copy it, back it up, or send it to somebody. Restore All Defaults puts every event back and switches them all on, and it cannot half-succeed – the sounds QuillLite ships are never overwritten, so getting back to them is always one press.

QUILL opens the same window over the same schemes, so a scheme you build in one is offered in the other.

Tools ▸ Customize Features (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F) 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.

That is how QuillLite stays small without being poor: you take out what you do not want, rather than learning to ignore it.

Profiles: four ways to say it in one word

The Profile box at the top is the short way. Choosing one sets every checkbox below, there and then – there is no second button to find. Nothing is saved until you press Save, so you can look at what a profile would do and change your mind.

Under the box is a read-only description you can read line by line, and it answers two different questions. First, what the profile is, in its own words. Then what it would actually do to the app in front of you: how many of the 18 areas it keeps and which, which ones it removes, and anything else it changes – Notepad, for instance, also makes Ctrl+N create a plain text document. F1 on the Profile box reads the same thing.

What is spoken when you choose a profile is the short version – “Notepad profile: 2 of 18 features on. New documents will be plain text.” – because your screen reader is already reading the name and the description is there to be read at your own pace.

Custom puts everything back. Arrow onto a profile you did not mean and select Custom: every checkbox returns to how you found it when the window opened. Custom is also what the box reads back as soon as you tick or untick anything yourself, which is not a warning – picking your own is what the list is for.

Afterwards the boxes are just boxes again: change any one of them without having to leave the profile first. Use Profile is still there for when you have hand-edited a profile and want to start it over.

The same four profiles are in Preferences, at the top, with the same description box. “Make this Notepad” is a preference like any other, and you should not have to know that a dialog called Customize Features is where it lives. Preferences offers the whole answers; the 18 individual checkboxes stay in Customize Features.

Here is what each one is, at a glance and then in full.

Recommended

What a new install is. 15 of the 18 areas: rich text, headings, Markdown and HTML, bookmarks, the line tools, the clipboard history, printing, abbreviations, the Selection submenu, spell check, Matches, Go Back and Go Forward, the Command Palette, Describe Character and text size.

Off: autocorrect, timestamped backups, Go To Anything. Those three are not missing features; they are the ones that would be wrong on by default rather than merely unused. Autocorrect rewrites a configuration file’s quotes. Backups quietly fill a folder. Go To Anything is a fourth way to jump when the command palette, the headings list and the bookmark list already cover it.

Choose this to get back to the shipped answer after experimenting.

Everything

All 18 areas on, including those three. Autocorrect will straighten your quotes and capitalise your sentences, every save keeps a dated copy under your data folder, and Go To Anything joins the palette and the two lists.

Choose this if you would rather turn things off as they annoy you than find them one at a time.

WordPad

What WordPad was. Rich text you can format, print, and check the spelling of: bold, italic, underline, headings, alignment, bullets, indenting and line spacing, plus Find and Replace, printing and text size. Five of the 18 areas.

Off: the writing tools behind the formatting. No Edit ▸ Lines, no clipboard history or Copy Tray, no bookmarks, no abbreviations, no Selection submenu, no Matches list, no Back and Forward, no Command Palette, no Describe Character, no autocorrect and no backups.

Ctrl+N makes a rich text document. That is the half of this name a list of menus cannot say, and it is why choosing WordPad changes a setting as well as a set of checkboxes.

Not in real WordPad: the spell checker. It is kept because a word processor without one in 2026 is a surprise rather than a simplification.

Choose this for letters, notes and anything you want to look like something.

Notepad

The smallest QuillLite gets, and the one most people arriving here are replacing something with. Two of the 18 areas: printing and text size.

Off: the Format menu and everything under it, headings, bookmarks, the line tools, Change Case, the clipboard history, abbreviations, the Selection submenu, spell check, Matches, Back and Forward, the Command Palette, Describe Character, autocorrect, backups and Go To Anything. Nothing Notepad does not have – which is the point of choosing it.

Ctrl+N makes a plain text document, and the Save As dialog stops offering you formats you have turned off.

What stays that you might not expect, because Notepad has always had them: Find, Find Next, Replace, Go To Line, Select All, Insert Date and Time, Word Wrap, the font picker, the status bar and Undo. And Tools ▸ File Encoding and Line Endings, which Notepad only grew recently and which is most of what a Notepad replacement is for: getting a file to save back exactly as it arrived.

Choose this for configuration files, logs, quick notes, and anything where a document that secretly carries formatting would be a problem.

Moving between them

Nothing is one-way. Choosing Notepad and then Everything puts it all back, including the Format menu and the keys that go with it. The one thing a profile does not put back is a setting you changed by hand afterwards – profiles only ever set what they claim.

Two things are never switchable whatever you choose: Tools ▸ Preferences and Customize Features themselves, because switching off the menu that holds the switch is a door that locks from the inside.

Searching the list

Seventeen checkboxes is a long way to Tab through, so the box below the profile row filters them as you type. It matches what an area does as well as what it is called, so typing “curly quotes” finds Autocorrect and typing “dictionary” finds Spell check. The line under the box says how many are left, and Down from the box moves straight into the list.

The 18 areas

The last three start switched off, and they sit in this same list rather than being hidden away, because something you cannot find might as well not exist.

Autocorrect is off because curly quotes are lovely in a letter and unhelpful in a settings file. Backups are off because they quietly fill a folder. Go To Anything is off because the command search, the headings list and the bookmark list already each do their own part of the job.

Two things are never switchable, on purpose. Tools ▸ Preferences and Customize Features stay, because switching off the menu that holds the switch is a door that locks from the inside. And File Encoding and Line Endings stays, because getting a file to save back byte-for-byte the way it arrived is most of what a Notepad replacement is for.

Settings

Tools ▸ Preferences (Ctrl+,) has everything in one place.

Seven settings live only there: what Ctrl+N creates, whether you start with a blank document at all, how often unsaved work is copied aside, whether last session’s documents reopen, whether spelling is checked as you type, and whether your abbreviations and your taught words are shared with QUILL for All.

Start with a blank document is on, the way Notepad and WordPad do it. Turn it off if you always open an existing file: without it you are handed an empty Untitled to close on every launch. Files you open by double-clicking, last session’s documents and recovered work all still appear either way. QUILL has the same setting under General.

The rest are a keystroke away instead: dark mode and word wrap are on the View menu, and the editor font is Format ▸ Editor Font — which is where Notepad has always kept it, and which is the one row the Format menu keeps if you switch rich text off.

Dark mode is on by default. It changes what you see and nothing else. The colours are never written into your files, so a dark theme can never leave grey text in a document you send somebody.

Printing

Ctrl+P prints. Ctrl+Alt+P is Page Setup.

Long lines are wrapped to fit the page whatever your Word Wrap setting says, because a printed line that runs off the edge of the paper is simply gone.

In this version, rich formatting does not print. Your text prints in the editor’s font, with headings marked rather than styled. We would rather tell you that here than have you find it on paper.

Speech

QuillLite talks through NVDA or JAWS, and nothing else. There is no built-in voice, and that is on purpose: a second voice talking over your screen reader is worse than silence.

It also says as little as it can. Your screen reader already announces window titles, where your focus has moved, the names of buttons and what you have selected. QuillLite only tells you things it alone knows — that a save happened, that a search wrapped around, that bold went on, that four things were replaced.

Everything it says also goes into the first part of the status bar, so F6 will bring back a message you missed.

If you have no screen reader running, QuillLite says nothing out loud — but every message is still there in the status bar.

Where your files are kept

Your settings, recent files, copy tray and any recovered work are kept in a QuillLite folder inside your own Windows user folder. Help ▸ About QuillLite shows you the exact location.

It is deliberately not inside QUILL for All’s folder. QuillLite is offered as an alternative to QUILL, not as part of it, and installing or removing one should never affect the other.

Uninstalling QuillLite does not delete that folder. Recovered work is the one thing you might not have finished with, and an uninstaller is the worst possible moment to discover that.

The portable copy keeps everything on the stick

If you are running the portable QuillLite – the .zip you unpack rather than the installer – then none of the above applies. Everything goes into the data\QuillLite folder inside the bundle, right next to QuillLite.exe, and nothing at all is written to the computer you are plugged into. That is what portable means, and QuillLite does it from the very first launch: there is no setting to find first.

Until version 1.0 it did not. A portable QuillLite quietly used %LOCALAPPDATA%\QuillLite on the host machine instead, and said nothing about it – so settings did not travel with the stick, and, worse, recovered copies of documents you had not saved were left behind on someone else’s computer. If you have been carrying a portable QuillLite, that folder is where anything you seem to have lost will be, and it is worth deleting once you have what you want out of it.

Delete the data folder from the bundle and QuillLite goes back to using this computer’s own profile – that folder is what marks the copy as portable.

Keeping QuillLite up to date

Help > Check for Updates… (Ctrl+Alt+U) asks whether a newer QuillLite has been published. It is the same key, and the same window, in every app in the family.

If there is nothing newer you are told so in a dialog, which is deliberate: a key that answers with silence is indistinguishable from a key that is not bound.

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. Tab from there reaches two buttons:

• Update downloads the new version and then offers to install it and restart for you. Your settings, your recent files and your recovered work are kept.
• Close does nothing at all. Nothing is downloaded until you press Update.

While the download runs you hear it reach a quarter, a half and three quarters, and then that it has finished.

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 the network is down. Only a genuine new version speaks, and even then it only offers. Turn the daily look off in Settings (“Look for updates when QuillLite starts”); Ctrl+Alt+U still works either way.

What QuillLite is not

QuillLite is a companion to QUILL for All, not a replacement for it.

If you want artificial intelligence, dictation, document conversion, comparing two documents, publishing or braille tools, those are QUILL, and QuillLite is built so that it will not slowly grow into them.

Both are free, both are built for screen reader users, and they install perfectly happily side by side.

Every key, in one table

Generated from the same table that builds the menus, so it cannot drift from what is actually bound. Ctrl+F1 shows this list inside the app.

File

Edit

Edit ▸ Matches

Edit ▸ Lines

Edit ▸ Selection

Edit ▸ Clipboard

View

Insert

Format

Format ▸ Line Spacing

Format ▸ Headings

Format ▸ Structure

Navigate

Navigate ▸ Bookmarks

Tools

Tools ▸ Spelling

Tools

Tools ▸ Change Case

Tools ▸ Indenting

Window

Help

Built per window

Two of these read differently on a keyboard than in a table: Ctrl+Shift+> and Ctrl+Shift+< are the keys your fingers know, and they are listed above as Ctrl+Shift+. and Ctrl+Shift+, because that is the same physical key and the spelling wx understands.

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 QuillLite’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.