QUILL Lite User Guide

For QUILL Lite 1.2.0, released October 3, 2026.

Introduction

Welcome, and thank you for giving QUILL Lite a try.

QUILL Lite is a text editor for people who use a screen reader. You open a file, you change it, and you save it. When you save, the file goes back exactly the way it came in. Everything in it has a key, and it tells you how each thing you do turned out, so you are never left wondering whether a key did anything.

If you have used Notepad or WordPad, almost every key you already know works here. Where QUILL Lite does something a little differently, this guide tells you, and tells you what it means for you.

If you write letters, notes, stories, web pages or settings files, and you find your way around Windows with NVDA or JAWS, QUILL Lite is for you. It is free, and it is small on purpose.

The installer is for your Windows account only and does not need administrator approval. It puts QUILL Lite and its shared runtime in your user profile. One separate setting, Open QUILL Lite instead of Notepad, changes Notepad for everyone who uses the computer and therefore does require administrator approval; that setting is described later in this guide.

What you will be able to do

By the time you have read this guide you will be able to open any text file and save it back without changing a thing you did not mean to change. You will move between several documents, find words and jump to headings, and select exactly what you want without holding Shift down. You will format in plain text, Markdown, HTML or rich text, check your spelling and find a better word, write by talking, and, if you choose to, ask AI to help. You will have QUILL Lite set up as small or as full as you like. And when something puzzles you, you will know where to find help.

None of this needs to happen on day one. You do not have to read this guide before you start. Open QUILL Lite, type, and press Ctrl+S. Chapter 1 gets you going in a few minutes, and everything after that is there for when you are curious. Read it in order, or jump to the chapter you need.

How this guide is laid out

The chapters follow the order you are likely to want things.

1. Chapter 1: Your first minutes. Start, type and save, the four keys that help when you are lost, and thirty short recipes to try with the app open in front of you.
2. Chapter 2: Finding your way around. Your numbered documents, the window, the status bar, the View menu, and finding any command by name.
3. Chapter 3: Opening, saving and printing. The four kinds of document, how saving keeps your file exactly as it was, getting your work back after a crash, reopening last time’s documents, and printing.
4. Chapter 4: Moving around a document. Find, Go To, bookmarks, and getting back to where you were.
5. Chapter 5: Selecting, copying and changing text. Better ways to select, more than one thing on the clipboard, working on whole lines, and undo.
6. Chapter 6: Formatting, headings and the Insert menu. Bold, lists and headings for every kind of document, hearing the shape of a document, reshaping it, links, and everything on the Insert menu.
7. Chapter 7: Checking your writing. Spell check, the thesaurus, the dictionary, and finding out exactly which character you are on.
8. Chapter 8: What you hear. What QUILL Lite says and what it leaves to your screen reader, its sounds, and catching up on a message you missed.
9. Chapter 9: Writing by voice. Dictation, from your first sentence to starting and stopping with your voice.
10. Chapter 10: AI help. The AI pad, conversations, QUILL’s free AI, and using your own key or your ChatGPT subscription.
11. Chapter 11: Making QUILL Lite yours. Preferences, profiles, switching off what you never use, and changing keys.
12. Chapter 12: Your files, updates and QUILL for All. Where your files are kept, staying up to date, and how QUILL Lite sits beside QUILL.
13. Chapter 13: When you need a hand. The lessons built into the app, and how to reach a real person at support.

After the chapters comes the Keyboard reference: every key QUILL Lite comes with, grouped by menu. Keep it handy for the first few weeks.

QUILL Lite also has guided tutorials: fifteen short lessons you do with QUILL Lite open in front of you, on Help > Tutorials… (Ctrl+Alt+F1). Whenever a lesson covers the same ground as part of this guide, the guide gives you its name, so you can choose between reading about something and being walked through it.

Reading this guide with a screen reader

The guide is built from headings so you can move through it quickly. Each chapter is a level 2 heading, and the main topics in a chapter are level 3 headings. When a topic has parts of its own, those parts sit one level deeper, at level 4, and sometimes at level 5. In JAWS or NVDA, press 2 to move from chapter to chapter, 3 to move between the main topics, and 4 to step through the parts of a topic. Shift with any of those numbers goes back. To see every heading at once, press Insert+F6 in JAWS or Insert+F7 in NVDA and choose headings.

Every chapter ends with a short section called What you learned, and where to go next. If you are skimming, those are a quick way to hear what a chapter covers before you read it.

Keys are written the way QUILL Lite writes them in its menus. Ctrl+Shift+B means hold down Ctrl and Shift together and press B. A menu path such as Tools > Preferences means open the Tools menu and choose Preferences.

When a section walks you through something, the steps are numbered. Follow them with QUILL Lite open beside the guide and you will learn faster than by reading alone. Alt+Tab moves you between the two.

You do not always need this guide to answer a question. Every window in QUILL Lite answers F1 with a short note on what that window is for and what the control you are on does. When you wonder what a checkbox will change, F1 is often the quickest answer.

Chapter 1: Your first minutes

This chapter is your first session with QUILL Lite. You will start it, type something and save it, and meet the four keys that rescue you whenever you are unsure. Then come thirty short recipes, each one a small job from start to finish, with what to press and what you should hear when it worked. Have QUILL Lite open as you read, and try each one as you meet it. A few minutes is plenty to begin.

The first minute

Start QUILL Lite. You get one window with one empty document in it, called 1: Untitled. Type something. When you want to keep it, press Ctrl+S.

That really is all you need. Everything else in this guide is extra.

Four keys are worth learning straight away, because they help you whenever you are unsure:

• F1 tells you where you are. Press it anywhere: in your document, on a button, in any window. QUILL Lite tells you what that window is for, and then what the thing you are on does.
• F6 takes you to the status bar, where the useful facts about your document live. Arrow along it to hear them. Press Escape to come back.
• Ctrl+F1 lists every key QUILL Lite has.
• Ctrl+Alt+F1 opens Tutorials…: fifteen short lessons that walk you through the things that are hard to discover just by pressing keys.

Step by step: thirty things, start to finish

This section is all doing. Each recipe tells you what to press, in order, and what you should hear when it worked. The chapters after it explain each idea more slowly.

Every key here is the one QUILL Lite comes with. If you have changed a key, Ctrl+F1 shows the keys you really have.

Each recipe assumes only that QUILL Lite is open.

Getting started

1. Open a file and save it back untouched.

1. Press Ctrl+O. Choose the file and press Enter.
2. Change nothing.
3. Press Ctrl+S.

You hear the file’s name when it opens, and a save sound when it saves. The file is exactly what it was before: the same way of storing letters, the same line endings, and the same ending, with or without a blank last line.

Next time you want it, you do not need Ctrl+O at all: Alt+Shift+1 reopens the last document you opened, and Alt+Shift+0 lists all your recent ones.

2. Find out where you are.

1. Press F6. You land in the status bar.
2. Arrow left and right. Each cell says its name and its value: Line, Column, Words, Encoding, Line Endings, Format, Typing Mode, and the rest.
3. Press Escape. You are back in your document, in the same spot.

3. Find out what a window or a control is for.

Press F1, anywhere. You hear what window you are in, in one sentence, and then what the thing you are on does.

4. Take a lesson.

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+F1.
2. Arrow to a lesson in the tree and press Enter.
3. Read the step. If you would like the app to do the step for you, press Try it. Then press Next.

5. See every key QUILL Lite has.

Press Ctrl+F1. Type part of a name to narrow the list.

Writing and editing

6. Make a heading.

1. Put the cursor anywhere on the line.
2. Press Ctrl+Alt+2 for Heading 2. Levels 1 to 6 are Ctrl+Alt+1 to Ctrl+Alt+6.
3. Ctrl+Alt+0 turns it back into ordinary text.

In a Markdown file this writes ## . In HTML it writes <h2>...</h2>. In a rich text document you get a real heading style. Arrow off the line and back onto it, and you hear “Heading 2” followed by the heading’s words.

7. Select a whole paragraph without counting.

Press Ctrl+Shift+H. You hear “Selected paragraph” and how many words.

8. Select something that does not line up neatly.

1. Press F8 where you want the selection to start.
2. Move however you like: arrows, Ctrl+End, a search, Ctrl+G, a bookmark. You do not hold anything down.
3. Press Shift+F8 when you get there.

You hear how many words you selected and which lines it covers.

9. Get back a selection you just lost.

Press Ctrl+Shift+F8. Whatever you last had selected comes back, however you selected it.

10. Move a line up or down.

Press Ctrl+Shift+Up or Ctrl+Shift+Down. If the line cannot move, you are told, for example “Already the first line”, so you are never left wondering.

11. Move a whole section, with its heading and everything under it.

• One step at a time: Alt+Shift+Up or Alt+Shift+Down.
• Somewhere far away: press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F5 (Move Section To…) and choose where it goes from a list.
• Several at once: press Alt+Shift+O (Heading Organizer). Use Tab and Shift+Tab to make headings smaller or bigger, then close it.

Each of these is undone with a single Ctrl+Z.

12. Change the case of something.

Select it, then press Ctrl+Shift+U for upper case, Ctrl+Shift+K for lower case, Ctrl+Shift+T for title case, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+U for sentence case, or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+N to invert it.

13. Move a deleted paragraph somewhere else.

1. Put the cursor on the paragraph and press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Backspace (Delete Paragraph).
2. Go to where you want it.
3. Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Z (Restore Deleted Text).

Ctrl+Z would put it back where it came from. This puts it where you are now.

Finding things

14. Find a word, and hear how many there are.

1. Press Ctrl+F.
2. Type what you are looking for. The count changes as you type, and your screen reader reads it for you.
3. Ctrl+Down and Ctrl+Up let you hear the next and previous match while you stay in the box. Enter takes you to the match in your document.
4. Afterwards, F3 and Shift+F3 keep going forward and back.

15. Hear every match before you replace anything.

Press Ctrl+Shift+F3 (All Matches). You get every match, each with its line, its column and the words around it. Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F3 just counts them.

16. Find a character you cannot type.

1. Press Ctrl+F, then Tab to Search mode and choose Special characters.
2. Type \t for a tab, \u2014 for an em dash, or \N{NO-BREAK SPACE} for exactly that character.

17. Go to a line, a bookmark or a heading.

Press Ctrl+G. Arrow between Line, Bookmark and Heading at the top, then pick from the list below.

Keeping your place

18. Drop a bookmark and come back to it tomorrow.

1. Press Ctrl+Shift+B where you are. For a numbered one, press Ctrl+Shift+1 to Ctrl+Shift+9.
2. F2 and Shift+F2 move between your bookmarks. Alt+Shift+G lists them.

Bookmarks are kept for each file, and they are still there after you close the document.

19. Pop off to check something, then come straight back.

1. Press Ctrl+Shift+M (Set Mark) before you go.
2. Go anywhere.
3. Press Ctrl+M (Pop Mark) to come back.

Alt+Left also takes you back. Think of it as undo for moving around.

20. Skim a long document.

1. Ctrl+Alt+H and Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H move to the next and previous heading.
2. Ctrl+Alt+L lists all the headings.
3. Ctrl+Shift+F9 folds away the section you are in. Ctrl+Shift+F10 unfolds everything.

Spelling

21. Check the whole document.

Press F7. It starts where your cursor is, takes you through one word at a time, and carries on from the top when it reaches the end.

22. Fix the word you are on, without a dialog.

Press the Applications key (or Shift+F10). Press Down once to land on the first suggestion. Press Enter to replace the word.

23. Teach QUILL Lite a word.

Press Ctrl+Alt+F9 with the cursor anywhere in the word.

24. Hear every misspelling at once.

Press Alt+Shift+L. Each row tells you its line. Press Enter to go there.

Clipboards and reuse

25. Keep more than one thing on the clipboard.

1. Ctrl+Alt+Y puts what you selected into the next free slot in the tray. There are twelve slots. Alt+Shift+Y lets you pick the slot.
2. Ctrl+Alt+V pastes from any slot, even an hour later.
3. Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Y empties the tray.

26. Gather six things and paste them all at once.

1. Select something and press Alt+Shift+S. Do that for each piece. They all go onto one growing pile.
2. Ctrl+Alt+Shift+G pastes the whole pile.
3. Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C empties it.

27. Type something long by typing something short.

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+A (Manage Abbreviations). Add a short trigger and the text it should write.
2. In your document, type the trigger and a space.
3. Forgotten a trigger? Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Home (Snippets). It lists them all with a preview, the ones you use most at the top.

Making it yours

28. Change a key.

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Space (Keyboard Manager).
2. Find the command and press the key you want. You are told if another command already uses it.
3. Press Check for Problems before you leave, then Save.

29. Make QUILL Lite smaller.

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+F10 (Customize Features).
2. Choose Notepad in the Profile box. Every checkbox below changes to match straight away.
3. Read the description under the box, then press Save.

Choosing Recommended puts things back the way they came.

30. Silence every sound, right now.

Press Alt+Shift+M. Press it again to bring the sounds back. To change one sound at a time, press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+O (Sound Scheme).

What you learned, and where to go next

You can start QUILL Lite, type and save, and you know the four keys that help when you are lost: F1, F6, Ctrl+F1 and Ctrl+Alt+F1. You have also tried thirty everyday jobs: opening and saving, moving around, selecting, finding, spelling, clipboards and making the app your own. Every recipe is explained more slowly later in this guide, so when one catches your interest, look for it by name.

If you would like to go over this with the app keeping you company, Help > Tutorials has two lessons for it: Open a file, and give it back unchanged and What to press when you are lost.

When you are ready, Chapter 2, Finding your way around, shows you how your documents share one window and where the facts about them live.

Chapter 2: Finding your way around

You have typed something, and now you want to know where everything lives. QUILL Lite keeps all your documents inside one window and gives each one a number, so you can always get back to it. In this chapter we will look at that window, close several documents at once, walk along the status bar where the facts about your document live, flip the switches on the View menu, and find any command just by typing part of its name. Have QUILL Lite open while you read, and try each thing as you meet it.

Your documents are numbered

QUILL Lite opens your documents inside one window, and gives each one a number. Your first document is 1, the next is 2, and so on. A document keeps its number for as long as it is open, even if you close the one before it.

The number is how you get back to it:

One thing to know. Because your documents live inside one window, they do not appear in Alt+Tab. Alt+Tab shows QUILL Lite once. Use the four ways above to move between your documents. If a document seems to have disappeared, it has not: press Alt+1 or open the Window menu and it is there.

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

If you would like to practise this with the app guiding you, the tutorial Your documents are numbered opens a second file and walks you between them.

Opening a large file, or one on a network drive

A file of a megabyte or more, or any file on a network drive, opens without freezing the window. Here is what happens:

1. A new document window appears straight away. Its title has its number, the word “Opening” and the file’s name, and QUILL Lite says “Opening” and the name once.
2. While the file is loading, the window is read-only, so nothing you type can get lost.
3. When the file arrives, the text appears and your cursor is at the top, ready to read.

To cancel, close that window with Ctrl+W. If the file cannot be read, for example because the network drive went away or the disk is busy, QUILL Lite tells you why and asks whether to try again. Yes tries again. No closes the empty window.

Smaller files on your own computer open all at once, as you would expect.

Opening a second QUILL Lite

If you open a file from File Explorer while QUILL Lite is already running, it opens in the QUILL Lite you already have. That keeps all your documents, and their numbers, in one place.

If you really do want two separate QUILL Lite windows, one on each monitor for example, start it with the extra option --new-instance.

The two share one settings file, and they do not undo each other’s choices. When one saves its settings, it writes only the settings it changed. If both changed the same setting, the one that saves last wins. A setting you change in one window does not change the other window while it is open. It takes effect there the next time you start QUILL Lite.

The window

QUILL Lite opens maximized, filling the screen, the first time you start it. After that, it opens the way you left it. Make it smaller, and it opens at that size next time. Make it full screen again, and that is remembered too.

Full screen is the starting point because a small window can cut text off, or show only a few rows of a list. You can change it with one key, and QUILL Lite will not ask again.

All the QuillVille apps work this way: QUILL, Quill Radio, Cast, Weather, Audio Studio, Inkwell, the Converter, the Media Player and Beacon.

Closing a lot of windows at once

Window > Close Other Documents (Ctrl+Shift+F4) keeps the document you are in and closes all the others. QUILL uses the same key, so you only need to learn it once.

When some have unsaved changes

If any of those documents has changes you have not saved, QUILL Lite asks you about it. The question also tells you how many more documents are waiting, so you know right away whether this is one question or sixty-seven. You can answer:

• Save: save this document, then ask about the next one.
• Don’t Save: close this document without saving, then ask about the next one.
• Save All: save this one and every other one waiting, without asking again. A document that has never been saved will still ask where to put it.
• Don’t Save Any: close all the rest and lose their changes, without asking again. This cannot be undone.
• Cancel: stop. Whatever is still open stays open, and you hear how many documents closed before you stopped.

Pressing Enter chooses Save, so you never lose work by pressing Enter. If a save fails, for example because the disk is full or the file has become read-only, QUILL Lite stops there and does not close that document. Save All also stops, and you will be asked about each one again.

Coming back with Alt+Tab, and leaving

When you Alt+Tab back to QUILL Lite, it puts you back in the document you were working in, ready to type. If you were in the Find box, another control or an open menu, you stay there.

When you close QUILL Lite, it stops taking in new files to open before it closes its windows. Any files that were still waiting to open are opened the next time you start it. If you press Cancel on a save question while closing, QUILL Lite stays open and carries on as normal.

The status bar

The status bar is a row of small facts about your document: where you are, how long it is, what kind of file it is, and whether you have saved. It is the first place to go when you want to know something.

Here is how to use it:

1. Press F6. You land in the status bar. (In the menus this is Navigate > Status Bar.)
2. Press Left Arrow and Right Arrow to move along it, or Home and End to jump to either end. Each part says its name and its value.
3. Press Enter on a part to act on it. What Enter does is in the table below.
4. Press Escape to go back to your document, right where you left it.

Hiding the bar

View > Status Bar (Alt+Shift+B) takes the bar off the screen and puts it back, just like Notepad’s. You lose nothing while it is hidden. A few keys give you the same facts out loud:

• Ctrl+Shift+G speaks the counts for the whole document.
• Ctrl+Alt+W speaks the line widths: the longest line, which line that is, and the average. That is handy when you are writing for a braille display or a narrow window.
• Ctrl+G asks for a line number to go to, which is what the Position part would have told you.

If you press F6 while the bar is hidden, QUILL Lite tells you it is hidden.

Every part, in order

That is fifteen parts. Most of them explain themselves. A few are worth a closer look.

Status Message

Speech is gone the moment it is spoken. If QUILL Lite said something and you missed it, this is where you go to hear it again.

Typing Mode

Every Windows editor has an overwrite mode, where what you type replaces the letters already there instead of pushing them along. Most editors never tell you which mode you are in, so you find out by typing over a sentence you wanted to keep. This part tells you.

To switch, press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+W, or press Enter on this part.

The Insert key switches it too. QUILL Lite does not take the Insert key for itself, because your screen reader uses it. It just notices when you press it, so this part always tells you the truth.

Tab Mode

When you start, the Tab key types a tab character, just as it does in Notepad. Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+I and Tab indents the whole line instead, which is usually what you want when you are working on code. Shift+Tab outdents in either mode, so you can always take back a tab you did not mean.

Format

This tells you whether the document is plain text, Markdown, HTML or rich text. That one fact decides a lot: what Ctrl+B writes, what the heading keys write, which tag picker the Insert menu offers, and whether the List part has anything to say.

QUILL Lite guesses the kind from the file’s name. Press Enter here to move on to the next kind; you will hear its name. Ctrl+Alt+F6 takes you straight to the one you want. There is more in Four kinds of document, in Chapter 3.

List

When you arrive in a list, you hear something like “Bulleted list, 5 items”. You do not hear more on every arrow press, because that would be a lot to sit through. When you want to know exactly where you are, this part tells you which item you are on, for example “Bulleted list, 4 of 9, level 2”.

Encoding and Line Endings

These two decide whether your file opens properly on somebody else’s computer. You will rarely need to change them. But when a file arrives looking like nonsense, this is where to look.

In a rich text document they read “RTF (rich text)” and “Not applicable (rich text)”. A rich text file keeps its letters and its line breaks in its own way, so these two questions do not apply to it.

If a file came in a form QUILL Lite cannot write back, such as UTF-16 big-endian or the old Mac style of line ending, the list you get from Enter shows a keep as is choice and stays on it. That way you cannot convert a file by accident when you only opened it to read. There is more in How this file is written, in Chapter 3.

The View menu

The View menu has seven switches and three text sizes. Each switch tells you its new setting out loud when you press it, so you never have to go and check.

When you arrow onto one of these in the menu, its check mark tells you whether it is on, without changing it.

The two announcement switches belong to each document, not to the whole app. So you can have headings announced in a letter, and switched off in a settings file full of lines that start with #.

Overwrite Mode can also be changed from the status bar: press F6, arrow to Typing Mode, and press Enter. The Insert key switches it too, and QUILL Lite tells you what happened. It does not take that key for itself, because your screen reader uses it.

Making the text bigger or smaller

These change only how big the text looks on screen. Your file is not changed, and your screen reader says the same things.

Ctrl+Shift+. and Ctrl+Shift+, are something else. In a rich text document they change the font size of the text you have selected, and that is saved in the file.

What is in this document, in numbers

• Document Statistics (Ctrl+Shift+G) tells you the size of the whole document: characters, words, lines and paragraphs.
• Line Statistics (Ctrl+Alt+W) tells you about line widths. It is useful when you are writing to fit something, like a braille display, a narrow window, or a line limit in code.

Finding a command

Cannot remember where something is? Press Ctrl+Shift+P to open the Command Palette…. Type part of what you want, such as “sort”, “bookmark” or “print”, then choose it from the list and press Enter. You do not need to know which menu it is in.

Each command in the list shows its key beside it. That is a gentle way to learn keys as you go. If you have changed a key, the palette shows your key.

One box for everything: Go To Anything

Navigate > Go To Anything… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+A) is like the Command Palette, but it searches more. Type a few letters and the list shows matching commands, headings in this document, and bookmarks you have set, all together. Press Enter to run the command or go to the place.

It starts switched off. You can already do each of these with its own key: the Command Palette, the headings list (Ctrl+Alt+L) and the bookmark list (Alt+Shift+G). If you would rather have one key for all three, turn it on in Tools > Customize Features (Ctrl+Alt+F10).

Headings only show up here in a rich text document. In a Markdown or HTML file, use the headings list on Ctrl+Alt+L instead.

What you learned, and where to go next

Your documents share one window, and each has a number, so Alt+1 to Alt+9, Ctrl+Tab and the Window menu always find them, even though Alt+Tab does not. Big files and files on a network drive open without freezing. The window starts maximized and then remembers the size you choose. Ctrl+Shift+F4 closes every document except the one you are in, and Enter on its question always means Save.

The status bar is a row of facts you reach with F6, walk with the arrow keys and leave with Escape, and Enter on a part acts on it. The View menu turns things on and off and tells you the new setting, Ctrl+Shift+G and Ctrl+Alt+W give you the numbers, and Ctrl+Shift+P finds any command by name.

If you would like some practice, Help > Tutorials has Your documents are numbered, which walks you between two documents, and What to press when you are lost, which starts at the status bar.

Next, Chapter 3, Opening, saving and printing, explains the four kinds of document and how QUILL Lite gives your file back exactly as it came.

Chapter 3: Opening, saving and printing

QUILL Lite makes you one promise: open a file, change nothing, save it, and you get exactly the file you started with. This chapter is about that promise and everything around it. You will meet the four kinds of document and learn how to tell QUILL Lite which one you mean. Then you will see what happens when you save, how your work is kept safe if the computer stops, and how to get an earlier version back. Last come the documents QUILL Lite offers you when it starts, and printing.

Four kinds of document

Every document is one of four kinds. The title bar names the first two, and the status bar’s Format cell names all four.

Plain text is like Notepad. One font, no formatting, no markup. Anything you paste in arrives as plain text. Program files, settings files and logs are plain text, and plain text is what you want when another program is going to read the file.

Markdown is plain text with a few simple marks that mean something: # starts a heading, - starts a bullet, and ** makes a word bold. QUILL Lite types those marks for you (see Formatting, in Chapter 6) and reads them back, so as you move around it can tell you that you have arrived at a Heading 2 or walked into a list of five items.

HTML is the same idea written as tags: <h2>, <ul>, <strong>. Everything you can do in Markdown, you can do in HTML, in HTML’s own spelling.

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

QUILL Lite picks the kind from the file’s name. That is only a first guess, and you can change it:

A .txt file and a brand-new document start as Markdown, because if you type ## Notes into one, you almost certainly mean a heading. A program file like .py or a settings file like .conf starts as plain text, because there a # starts a comment and a - is an option. You would not want every other line announced as “Heading 1”.

Saying otherwise

You can always change the guess. Writing HTML in a scratch .txt file is a perfectly normal thing to do. There are three ways to choose:

• Alt+Shift+F steps through all four kinds: plain text, Markdown, HTML, rich text, and round again. Each one says its name, so keep pressing until you hear the one you want. This is the quickest way.
• Ctrl+Alt+F6 (Format > Document Language) lets you pick one from a list, and tells you what each choice will do before you choose.
• Enter on the status bar’s Format cell steps on to the next kind, just like Alt+Shift+F. The status bar is often where you notice the kind is wrong, so you can fix it right there.

Switching between plain text, Markdown and HTML changes nothing in your document. It only changes what the formatting keys type from now on. Switching to or from rich text really converts your document, so QUILL Lite asks you first.

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

The tutorial Four kinds of document, and how to say which lets you try each of these with the app guiding you.

What the conversion keeps

When you go out of rich text, your formatting is turned into Markdown, so you do not lose it. A Heading 2 becomes ## , a bold word becomes **bold**, and a bullet list becomes lines that start with - . The Format cell then says Markdown, and heading navigation, the headings list and the outline still find everything they found a moment ago. If your document holds something Markdown cannot show, such as a table, a picture or a footnote, QUILL Lite names it before it asks.

When you go into rich text, it works the other way. A Markdown document’s ## Title becomes a real Heading 1, **bold** becomes truly bold, and an HTML document comes across too. A plain text document is left exactly as it is. The asterisks in a shopping list are not meant as bold, so QUILL Lite does not guess.

What comes with you, both ways

Headings, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, superscript and subscript, font and size, text colour and highlight, bullet and numbered lists, links, code, block quotes, alignment, line spacing, indents, spacing before and after, named styles, page breaks, tables, pictures and horizontal lines.

Opening your rich text in Word

A rich text file from QUILL Lite opens properly in Word. Headings use Word’s own heading styles, and Quote, Title, Subtitle and Caption use the names Word knows. So Word’s style box says Quote, instead of just showing text that looks indented and italic.

Your file’s name

Your file keeps its name. But rich text cannot be saved into a .txt file, so the next time you press Ctrl+S, QUILL Lite offers notes.rtf instead of notes.txt, with the name already filled in. Just press Enter to accept it. That way the name always matches what is inside.

Saving

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

QUILL Lite makes you one promise: open a file, change nothing, save it, and you get exactly the file you started with. Nothing gets 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 in different ways. QUILL Lite 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. QUILL Lite keeps yours.
• Whether the file ended with a blank line. If it did not, it will not suddenly start.

You can hear the first two in the status bar (F6). When you really do want to change them, for instance when somebody needs a copy of an old file in a newer format, use Tools > File Encoding and Line Endings (Ctrl+Alt+E). The change takes effect the next time you save.

The tutorial Open a file, and give it back unchanged lets you see this promise for yourself, with the app guiding you.

When a file is not UTF-8, which many older Windows files are not, QUILL Lite tells you once as it opens: “Opened as Windows-1252, not UTF-8.” That is all it does. Every byte of the file is read, and a save puts every byte back.

When another program changes your file

QUILL Lite keeps an eye on every file you have open. When something else writes to one, such as Word saving a document, a sync tool bringing down a newer copy, or an AI assistant rewriting a plan while you read it, QUILL Lite notices within a second or so.

If you have not changed the document yourself, and you have turned on Reload automatically when you have no unsaved edits, it simply reads the file again. Your cursor stays on the same line, and you hear once: “Reloaded plan.md: changed by another program.”

Otherwise it asks you, once for each change:

• Keep Mine leaves your document exactly as it is. Enter and Escape both give this answer, because doing nothing to your text is the safe choice. The next time you save, your version replaces the one on disk, without another question.
• Reload from Disk reads the file again and keeps your cursor on the same line. If you had unsaved changes, they are replaced.
• Save As… saves your version under a new name and leaves theirs alone.

The question has a checkbox, such as Do not ask me again for .md files. Check it and QUILL Lite remembers your answer, Reload or Keep Mine, for every file of that kind. That is handy when a tool rewrites the same file every few seconds. To take every remembered answer back, open Preferences and press Forget remembered file-change answers, then OK. A remembered Reload never throws away unsaved edits; QUILL Lite asks instead.

If you are looking at a different document when the change happens, QUILL Lite waits and asks when you come back to that one. It also waits while any other window, such as Preferences or a Save question, is open.

If the file is deleted or moved away, QUILL Lite tells you once, keeps your text, and marks the document as not saved, so you can use Save As to keep it somewhere.

You can change all of this in Preferences, under When another program changes the file:

• Watch the open file for external changes is on to begin with. Turn it off and QUILL Lite only checks when you save.
• Reload automatically when you have no unsaved edits is off to begin with. Turn it on and an unchanged document is reloaded without asking. An answer you asked QUILL Lite to remember still comes first.
• Ask before discarding unsaved edits on a conflict is on to begin with. Turn it off and QUILL Lite says nothing when a file you have changed is changed or deleted on disk, and leaves your text exactly as it is.
• External-change debounce (milliseconds) is how often QUILL Lite looks, so a program that writes a file in several steps is dealt with once. The default is 750.

These are QUILL’s settings too, with the same names, and QUILL asks the same question.

Save checks once more

Right before Ctrl+S writes your file, QUILL Lite checks the file on disk once more. If another program changed it since you opened it or last saved it, an AI assistant rewriting a plan while you read it, say, QUILL Lite stops and asks instead of writing over that change:

• Save As… keeps both: yours under a new name, theirs untouched. Enter gives this answer.
• Reload from Disk shows the version on disk and throws away your unsaved edits.
• Overwrite saves your version over theirs.
• Cancel, or Escape, saves nothing.

QUILL asks the same question.

How this file is written: encoding and line endings

Tools > File Encoding and Line Endings… (Ctrl+Alt+E) is one window for both of those things. It is the same window QUILL opens from File > File Format…. Nothing in it is applied until you save, and the window tells you so.

Encoding

This is how the letters are stored. You can choose:

• UTF-8, for anything new.
• UTF-8 with BOM, for the Windows tools that expect it.
• UTF-16.
• Windows-1252, which many older .txt files use.

Line endings

You can choose:

• CRLF, which Windows programs write. A new QUILL Lite document starts with this.
• LF, which Unix, macOS and most programming tools expect.

A file that is something else

Some files use a way of storing text that neither list offers, such as a UTF-16 big-endian file, or a file whose lines end the way old Macs did. Such a file keeps what it has. You see a keep as is row at the top of the list, and it is already chosen. So if you open this window and just press Enter, nothing in the file changes.

Reopen with Encoding

Now and then an old file’s accented letters come out wrong, because it was written in an encoding nobody can guess from the file alone, such as Cyrillic Windows-1251. Press Reopen with Encoding… in this window, pick the encoding the file was written in, and QUILL Lite reads the same file again from disk that way. If you have unsaved changes it asks first, because reopening throws them away. Nothing on disk changes, and if the file is not valid in the encoding you picked, QUILL Lite says so and leaves your document alone.

After a reopen the file saves back in that same encoding. To turn it into UTF-8 instead, open this window again, choose UTF-8, and save. The button is there for a plain text file you opened from disk; QUILL has the same one.

When a character will not fit

Older files can only store a limited set of letters. If you type an em dash, a curly quote or an emoji into a file that cannot hold it, QUILL Lite asks you before it saves:

3 characters cannot be saved as Windows-1252. Save as UTF-8 instead?

• Yes saves the file as UTF-8 and keeps every character. The Encoding cell in the status bar changes to UTF-8, because from now on that is what the file is.
• No saves it the way it already was, and those characters become question marks. Sometimes that is what you want, for instance when another program has to read the file.
• Cancel stops, and nothing is saved.

Saving an HTML page as Markdown

When you press Ctrl+Shift+S, the list of types includes Markdown (*.md). If the document you are saving is HTML, choosing Markdown really converts it as it saves:

• A heading becomes #.
• Bold becomes **bold**.
• A list becomes lines that start with -.
• Links keep both their words and their address.

QUILL Lite says “Converted HTML to Markdown”, and the document in front of you changes to match the file you just saved.

Tags that Markdown cannot show are dropped, but their words stay, so nothing you typed disappears. If the conversion would leave nothing at all, for example a page that is only a comment, QUILL Lite keeps your text exactly as it was and tells you, instead of saving an empty file.

If the save fails, say because the file is locked or the disk is full, the document in front of you is left alone. It is still HTML, and Ctrl+Z still works as before. The same is true when you turn a rich text document into plain text: QUILL Lite asks, saves the plain file, and only then removes the formatting from the window.

Saving a plain text or Markdown document as .md changes nothing at all. A rich text document is not offered Markdown, because QUILL Lite would have to guess which bold lines you meant as headings. Save it as plain text first (QUILL Lite asks before it removes the formatting), and then the Markdown choice is there.

If something goes wrong

While a document has changes you have not saved, QUILL Lite keeps a spare copy of it about every thirty seconds. That copy is kept beside your file, never on top of it.

If QUILL Lite or your computer stops unexpectedly, your work is offered back the next time you start, in its own document. It comes back the way it was. A file stored in an older encoding, or with Unix line endings, is still that same kind of file after it is recovered.

If a spare copy cannot be read, for example because of a damaged disk or another program holding the file, QUILL Lite tells you and leaves it where it is. It is offered again next time, because it is still the only copy of that work.

When you save, or close normally, the spare copy is deleted. So you are only ever offered work you actually need.

What you are offered, and what is tidied away

Before the recovery window opens, QUILL Lite clears out three kinds of copy, and tells you it did:

• Copies that are identical to each other. A crash can save the same work several times, and that is still just one document.
• Copies nobody has come back for in thirty days.
• Untitled documents, if you have turned those off in Preferences.

If everything it found was one of those, no window opens. Instead you hear “Tidied up unsaved work from last time”, so you know nothing was lost.

The recovery window

The window lists what is left, one row each, with a checkbox. There is also a read-only What this would do field you can arrow through. There are six buttons:

• Restore Checked brings back the ones you have checked.
• Restore All brings back everything.
• Not Now changes nothing, and offers the same list next time.
• Discard Checked throws away the ones you have checked.
• Discard Everything throws away everything.
• Never Offer Untitled is for you if you use QUILL Lite as a scratchpad and do not want yesterday’s throwaway notes back.

You can change your mind about that last one later. In Preferences, turn on Offer untitled unsaved work back after a crash.

Going back to an earlier version

There is also a timestamped backups option, in Tools > Customize Features. When it is on, QUILL Lite keeps a dated copy every time you save. This is for getting back the paragraph you deleted an hour ago, not for crashes. It starts switched off, because it does fill up a folder over time.

Once it is on, File > Earlier Versions… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E) lists your saved copies, newest first, like “Today at 4:12 PM, 2,341 words”. Up to twenty are kept for each document. After that, the oldest go.

The word count helps you tell copies apart. Two saves a minute apart sound almost the same, but a version that is suddenly two thousand words shorter is usually the one you are looking for.

You can bring one back in two ways:

• Restore puts that version into the window you are in. It does not save, so your file is untouched until you decide. Ctrl+Z undoes it, so a 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 alone. Use this when you just want to see what it said yesterday.

If you had backups switched on before version 1.0, those older copies are in the list too.

A web page you can share

File > Export as HTML… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+End) saves a copy of your document as a single web page. Its styles are inside it, it has no scripts, and it says which language it is in, so you can email it or put it on a website as it is. Headings, lists and tables come out as real headings, lists and tables, task lists show as check boxes, and struck-out text is struck out. Your document stays as it was; only the copy is a web page.

If the document has notes written into the file, QUILL Lite asks whether to include them in the page, marked as notes. No is the default, so a note never ends up in a page by accident. QUILL has the same command on the same key.

Opening what you copied, a link, or a file you drag in

Documents reach you in all sorts of ways: a file in File Explorer, a path somebody pasted into a chat, a link in an email. QUILL Lite opens all three without a trip through the Open dialog. The idea comes from PlanCake, a small reading app by Andre of Oire Software.

Open from Clipboard (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Enter, on the File menu). Copy first, then press it:

• Files copied in File Explorer open, each in its own window. If you copied several, QUILL Lite tells you how many it opened.
• A file path copied as text opens that file, quotes and all. Several paths, one per line, open in turn.
• A web link goes to Open from URL, below.

If the clipboard holds none of those, you hear “The clipboard holds no file, path or link.” Ctrl+V still pastes.

Open from URL… (Alt+F, F). Type or paste a web address. QUILL Lite finds out the file’s name and size and asks before downloading anything, for example “Download plan.md from example.com? It is 12 KB.” Say Yes and a small window shows how the download is going; its Cancel button stops it. If something goes wrong, you hear one plain sentence instead of an error. A link to a file’s page on GitHub opens the file itself.

The download opens as a new, unsaved document named after the file. Save it wherever you like. The temporary copy is deleted as soon as it is read.

Drag and drop. Drag files from File Explorer onto the QUILL Lite window and they open. Text you drag into a document is still inserted where you drop it.

QUILL has the same three, on the same key.

Opening something you worked on recently

QUILL Lite remembers the documents you open, newest first, so getting back to one never means hunting through folders.

The quick way. Press Alt+Shift+1 to reopen the document you opened most recently, Alt+Shift+2 for the one before that, and so on up to Alt+Shift+9. The same list is on the File menu, under Open Recent: press Alt+F, then T. Each row says the file’s name first and then the folder it is in, so two files called “notes” are easy to tell apart.

The whole list. Press Alt+Shift+0, or choose File > Recent Documents…. A window opens with every document QUILL Lite remembers. Arrow to one and press Enter to open it. In the same window you can:

• Pin a document you come back to often (Alt+P). Pinned documents stay at the top of the list, however many others you open after them. On a pinned document the same button says Unpin.
• Remove from List (Alt+R, or the Delete key) takes a document off the list. The file itself is not touched.
• Open Containing Folder (Alt+F) shows the file in File Explorer, in its folder.
• Clear Unpinned… (Alt+L) empties the list. It asks first, and No is the answer if you just press Enter. Pinned documents always stay.
• Remember up to this many documents (Alt+U) sets how long the list is, from 1 to 50. Ten is where it starts.
• Forget missing files when the app starts (Alt+M) tidies away files that have been deleted from this computer. A file on a USB drive or a network share is kept, because it is usually just unplugged.

If a file has been moved or deleted, its row says “not found”. It stays in the window so you know what happened, and Remove from List tidies it away. The Open Recent menu leaves it out, so the quick keys only ever open something that is there.

QUILL has the same window on the same key. The two apps keep separate lists, so what you open in one does not show up in the other.

Reopening what you had open

When you start QUILL Lite, it can offer you back the saved documents you had open last time.

When it asks, and when it just opens them

If you only had one or two documents open, it simply opens them again. If there were more, or a file has moved, it asks you first. That way you are not faced with a pile of windows to sort through before you can start.

The Reopen Last Session window

The window lists what you had open, one row each, with a checkbox. Everything that can be opened starts checked. So pressing Enter opens all of it, and unchecking two means “all except those two”. If a file has gone, its row says so and you cannot check it.

The buttons

• Open Checked opens the checked rows and leaves the list as it is.
• Open All opens everything that is still on your computer, checked or not.
• Not Now opens nothing and changes nothing. You will be offered the same documents next time. Escape does the same.
• Forget Checked takes the checked rows off the list, so you are not offered them again. Clear the List does that for all of them. Neither one touches your files. Forgetting only changes what QUILL Lite offers you, and a line under the buttons reminds you of that.
• Never Ask Again opens the checked documents and stops asking from now on.
• Ask Me Next Time undoes Never Ask Again. You will be asked again, just like a new install: when there are several documents, or one whose file has moved. The checked documents open too.

Turning the question back on

Only one of Never Ask Again and Ask Me Next Time can be pressed at a time. The other is greyed out, not hidden, so when you land on it you can tell which way the setting is now.

If you pressed Never Ask Again and want the question back, open the window yourself with File > Reopen Last Session… (Alt+Shift+F12) and press Ask Me Next Time. That is the only place this setting lives. It is not in Preferences.

What you hear afterwards

QUILL Lite tells you what happened, for example: “Reopened all 3 documents”, “Reopened 1 of 2”, or “Forgot 2 documents. 1 still remembered. The files themselves are untouched.”

Opening it whenever you like

File > Reopen Last Session… (Alt+Shift+F12) opens the same window any time, not just at startup. So Not Now is always safe to press: you can come back to the list later, and tidy it without restarting. QUILL has the same window on the same key.

Printing

Press Ctrl+P to print. Press Ctrl+Alt+P for Page Setup. What you set there (paper size, orientation and all four margins) is remembered for next time.

Long lines are wrapped to fit the page, whatever your Word Wrap setting says, so nothing runs off the edge of the paper.

Rich text prints as rich text. A heading comes out as a heading, and a bold word comes out bold.

A plain text or Markdown document prints just as it reads. A Markdown heading prints with its # in front, the same as you hear it.

Print Preview (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+P)

Most print previews are a picture of the page, which is no help if you cannot see it. QUILL Lite’s Print Preview tells you what you actually want to know.

It tells you how many pages there will be, on what paper, and with what margins. Then it goes page by page and tells you what is at the top of each one. “Page 3 of 7: Installing” tells you where that section starts, without printing anything.

The page count is worked out for your real printer, so the number you hear is the number of pages you will get.

What you learned, and where to go next

Every document is plain text, Markdown, HTML or rich text. QUILL Lite guesses from the file’s name, and Alt+Shift+F or Ctrl+Alt+F6 let you change it. Only rich text really converts your document, and it asks first.

Ctrl+S saves your file back exactly the way it came in, with its encoding, line endings and ending kept, and Ctrl+Alt+E changes those on purpose. You know what happens when a character will not fit, how a spare copy keeps your work safe after a crash, and how File > Earlier Versions… brings back an older copy once backups are on. Alt+Shift+1 to Alt+Shift+9 reopen your recent documents, and Alt+Shift+0 shows the whole list, where you can pin the ones you keep coming back to. QUILL Lite offers your last documents back, only asks when there are several or something has moved, and Alt+Shift+F12 brings that window back whenever you want it. Ctrl+P prints, Ctrl+Alt+P sets up the page, and Ctrl+Alt+Shift+P tells you how many pages you will get and what starts each one.

The tutorials Open a file, and give it back unchanged and Four kinds of document, and how to say which let you try all of this with the app guiding you.

Next, Chapter 4, Moving around a document, shows you how to search, and how to jump straight to the place you want.

Chapter 4: Moving around a document

A long document is easy to get lost in when you cannot glance down a page. This chapter gives you the keys that take you straight to what you want. You will search for words and hear how many there are, look for characters you cannot type, jump to a line, a bookmark or a heading, and leave bookmarks that are still there tomorrow. And whenever you jump somewhere, there is a key that takes you back.

Finding things

These are the keys you will use most when you are looking for something:

When a search reaches the end of the document, it goes back to the top and keeps looking, and it tells you it has done so. That little message is worth listening for. It is how you know a document has only one match, and not none.

What is in the Find and Replace windows

The Find window (Ctrl+F) opens with your cursor in the box where you type what to look for. If you had something selected, it is already there; if not, your last search is. Tab past the box and you meet two checkboxes:

• Match case: when it is checked, Cat and cat count as different words.
• Whole word only: when it is checked, cat finds the word on its own and not the start of catalogue.

After those come the Search mode (more about that below) and the buttons. Find next is the one Enter presses, and Shift+Enter in the box finds the previous match, just like the Find previous button. Close, or Escape, puts the window away, and F3 still remembers what you were looking for.

The Replace window (Ctrl+H) has the same box and checkboxes, plus a Replace with box for what each match should become. Leave it empty to delete the matches. Its buttons are:

• Find next, which moves to the next match without changing anything.
• Replace, which changes the match you are on and moves on to the next one, so you can decide one at a time.
• Replace all, which changes every match in the document at once and tells you how many it changed.
• Close. Anything you have already replaced stays replaced, and Ctrl+Z takes it back if you change your mind.

Both windows stay open while you work, so you can go back to your document and return to them.

How many are there?

The Find window counts as you type. Type three letters and it tells you how many matches there are. Type a fourth and the number changes. Your screen reader picks up the new count on its own, so you do not have to ask.

Ctrl+Down and Ctrl+Up step through the matches while you stay in the search box. You can hear each one and still change what you typed. When you have the one you want, press Enter and you are back in your document, right on it.

You do not have to open the window to count. Count Occurrences (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F3) counts your current search from anywhere in the document.

All Matches (Ctrl+Shift+F3) shows every match in one list, in order, each with its line, its column and the words around it. Open it before you press Replace All. It lets you see everything you are about to change before you change it.

Searching for things you cannot type

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

Normal text

This is the everyday one. What you type is what it looks for, punctuation and all.

Special characters

This lets you search for characters that have no key. \t is a tab, \n is a line break, \u2014 is an em dash, and \N{NO-BREAK SPACE} is exactly what it says.

It pairs well with Describe Character. Say Describe Character tells you that you are standing on a no-break space. Special characters mode then lets you find every other one, or replace them all with an ordinary space.

Regular expression

This treats what you type as a search pattern. A . matches any character, * repeats the thing before it, [abc] matches any one of those letters, and ^ and $ are the start and end of a line.

If your pattern has a mistake in it, QUILL Lite tells you which character is wrong. That way you know the difference between “my pattern is broken” and “there really is nothing to find”.

Whole word, in every mode

Whole word works with all three modes. In regular expression mode it applies to the whole pattern, so cat|dog finds the word cat or the word dog, and does not find “dog” in the middle of “hotdogs”.

Going somewhere

Press Ctrl+G to open Go To. It works like Word’s Go To: one window, and you choose what to go to.

1. Press Ctrl+G.
2. At the top, arrow to Line, Bookmark or Heading.
3. The rest of the window changes to match. For a line you get a number box. For a bookmark or a heading you get a list. Bookmarks start with their number, and headings start with their level, so you can pick one out by its first word.
4. Press Enter to go there.

If you already know which kind you want, there are quicker keys. Alt+Shift+G goes straight to the bookmark list, and Ctrl+Alt+L goes straight to the heading list. Ctrl+G is the one to press when you are not sure.

Bookmarks

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

Bookmarks move with your text as you edit around them, so they stay on the right words.

If you would like to try bookmarks with the app guiding you, the tutorial Finding your way back walks you through them, along with the temporary bookmark and Go Back.

They are still there tomorrow

Close a document, open it again, and your bookmarks are right where you left them. So is the cursor. You do not have to do anything to keep them.

This is a real help in a long file. You cannot glance at a scrollbar to see where you are, so marking a few places and finding them again next time saves a lot of hunting.

A few things worth knowing:

• A document you have never saved is not remembered. It has no file name yet. Save it once and its bookmarks are kept from then on.
• Nothing extra is saved next to your file. No extra files appear in your folder. QUILL Lite keeps the list in its own settings folder.
• If the file got shorter while it was closed, for example because another program edited it, any bookmark past the new end is moved to the end.

If you switch bookmarks off in Tools > Customize Features, none of this is saved at all.

The one with no number

There is one more bookmark, and it works differently. Use it when you are about to look something up and want to come straight back:

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+J where you are.
2. Go and look at whatever you need.
3. Press Ctrl+Shift+J to come back.

It has no number, no name and no place in the list. Setting it again just moves it, without asking. It is forgotten when you close the document. It is meant for a quick trip, so it stays out of your way.

These are the same two keys QUILL uses.

Going back where you came from

These are Go Back and Go Forward, at the top of the Navigate menu. They are the same keys a web browser uses.

QUILL Lite remembers every jump you make: going to a line, following a heading, choosing something from the heading list or the bookmark list, and landing on a search result. Alt+Left takes you back to where you were before the jump. Think of it as undo for moving around. Press F3 to check a word somewhere else, then Alt+Left to come home.

They are always there, even if you switch headings and bookmarks off.

Unlike bookmarks, this history is only kept while the window is open.

What you learned, and where to go next

You can find text with Ctrl+F, narrow it with Match case and Whole word only, replace one match at a time or all at once with Ctrl+H, hear how many matches there are, see them all in one list, and search for characters you cannot type. Ctrl+G takes you to a line, a bookmark or a heading from one window. Numbered bookmarks are still there after you close the document, the temporary bookmark is there for a quick trip, and Alt+Left takes you back after any jump.

The tutorial Finding your way back lets you practise bookmarks, the temporary bookmark and Go Back with the app guiding you.

Next, Chapter 5, Selecting, copying and changing text, shows you how to take more than a few words at once, and what you can do with them. It also covers marks, a lighter kind of bookmark.

Chapter 5: Selecting, copying and changing text

Holding Shift and pressing an arrow is fine for two letters, and slow for four paragraphs. This chapter gives you better ways. You will select from here to there without holding anything down, take a whole word, line or paragraph in one key, and read a selection without risking it. Then you will keep more than one thing on the clipboard, move, sort and tidy whole lines, and get back text you deleted. Everything here tells you how much it took or changed, so you always know what you have.

Selecting

Holding Shift and pressing an arrow selects one character at a time. That is fine for two letters. For four paragraphs it is slow, and it is easy to lose track of how far you have got.

Edit > Selection gives you better ways. Each one tells you how much it took, for example “Selected paragraph, 41 words”. That way you know what you have before you press anything that might replace it.

If you would like to try this with the app guiding you, the tutorial Selecting more than a few words walks through each of these ways.

Start a selection and walk to the end of it

This is the one to learn first.

1. Put the cursor where you want the selection to start.
2. Press F8.
3. Move any way you like: arrows, Home, End, Page Down, or Ctrl with an arrow.
4. When you reach the end, press Shift+F8. QUILL Lite tells you how much you selected.

You do not have to hold anything down, and you do not have to count. Use it whenever what you want does not start and end neatly on a word or a paragraph.

A Shift that stays down (Alt+Shift+F9)

Extend Selection Mode is another way to do the same job. Try both and use the one you like.

1. Press Alt+Shift+F9. QUILL Lite says “Extend selection mode on” and tells you where you are.
2. Move with the arrows, Home, End, Page Down or Ctrl with an arrow. Each move makes the selection bigger, as if you were holding Shift. Your screen reader does not say “selected” on every key press, so it stays quiet while you work.
3. Press Alt+Shift+F9 again, or Escape, to stop.

If you type something that is not a movement key, it replaces the selection, just as it would if you had been holding Shift.

How is this different from F8? With F8, nothing is selected until you press Shift+F8, so in between you can use anything to get there: Find, Go To, a bookmark. Extend Selection Mode selects as you go, so what you hear is always what you have.

Ctrl+Shift+F8 is worth remembering. If an arrow key has just thrown away a selection that took you a while to build, press it to get the selection back, however you made it.

What you hear when something is selected

Every selection tells you two things, in the same order: what it took, and how many words. For example, “Selected paragraph, 41 words”.

When you finish an F8 selection, you also hear where it reaches, for example “Selected 120 words, lines 14 to 31”. It could start and end anywhere, so this tells you how far it went.

QUILL says exactly the same things, so you hear the same sentences in both editors.

Take a whole word, line or paragraph at once

You do not need to find where any of these start. Just put the cursor somewhere inside.

Growing goes word, line, sentence, paragraph, block, then the whole document, and tells you which one it took each time. Shrinking goes back the other way. So if you press Ctrl+Shift+X once too often, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+X puts it right.

Marks: where you were a moment ago

A mark is lighter than 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.

QUILL Lite keeps your last twenty marks. Marking the same place twice only uses one.

A mark moves with your text. Drop one on a paragraph, add three paragraphs above it, and Ctrl+M still takes you to that paragraph.

Every way of reaching a mark counts as a jump, so Alt+Left can take you back again, the same as after a bookmark or a Go To.

Two more

Ctrl+Shift+Y reads back what is selected. Use it to check you took what you meant to before your next key replaces it. A long selection is summarised instead of read out in full.

Ctrl+Alt+Q puts a second copy of the selection right after it. If nothing is selected, it copies the line you are on.

The ones Windows gives you anyway

These work in QUILL Lite the same way they do everywhere else, so they have no place on the menu:

Reading a selection without risking it

When you have a long selection and want to read it through, there is a small danger. If you arrow around your document while text is selected, the next key you type replaces all of it.

Alt+Shift+U opens the Review Buffer. It is a copy of what you selected, in its own window, and you cannot change it. Read it as slowly as you like. When you are done, press Escape. You are back where you were, and your selection is still there.

You will also find it at Edit > Selection > Review Buffer….

Copying and pasting more than one thing

The Windows clipboard holds one thing at a time. QUILL Lite gives you three more places to keep things, all in Edit > Clipboard.

The copy tray: twelve numbered slots

The copy tray holds twelve things, each in its own numbered slot. They stay there even after you close QUILL Lite.

• Ctrl+Alt+Y copies what you selected into the next free slot.
• Alt+Shift+Y lets you choose the slot yourself. Each slot in the list says what is in it now, so you never overwrite something without hearing it first. Picking your own number makes it easier to remember later.
• Ctrl+Alt+V pastes from any slot, even an hour later.
• Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Y empties the tray.

The collector: gather now, paste once

The copy tray has twelve numbered slots for things you want to keep. The collector is for something different: you are reading along and want to pick up several pieces as you go, without deciding where each one goes.

1. Select a piece of text and press Alt+Shift+S (Edit > Clipboard > Collect Selection). It is added to the pile. Do this as often as you like. Each piece goes on the end, and nothing is replaced.
2. When you are ready, move to where you want it all and use Paste Everything Collected (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+G). The whole pile goes in, in the order you collected it.
3. When you are done, press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C (Clear the Collector) to empty it.

If you used an older version, Collect Selection used to be on Ctrl+Alt+G. It moved because Google Drive for desktop takes that key for itself. If you find a key that does nothing, the Keyboard Manager can tell you when another program has taken it.

The clip library: things you want to keep

Select something and press Ctrl+Alt+M to keep it in your clip library. Ctrl+Alt+Shift+M opens the list so you can paste one back.

The library can also fill itself. In Preferences, check Keep everything I copy in the clip library. From then on, every copy and every cut you make in a QUILL Lite document is saved there, up to the last two hundred. It only sees what you copy in QUILL Lite, never in other programs.

It starts switched off, and here is why you might leave it that way: the library is a file on your computer. If you ever copy a password, it will be in there too.

Two more handy keys

• Ctrl+Shift+V pastes text without its formatting. Use it when something copied from a web page arrives with its own fonts and colours.
• Ctrl+F8 copies the whole document. You could press Select All and then Copy, but that leaves everything selected, and the next key you type would replace it all. Ctrl+F8 copies without selecting anything.

Working on lines

Edit > Lines holds everything you can do to whole lines. Most of these work on the line your cursor is on, so you do not need to select anything first.

Moving, copying and joining lines

• Move Line Up (Ctrl+Shift+Up) and Move Line Down (Ctrl+Shift+Down) move the current line past the one next to it. It is much quicker than cutting and pasting, and your cursor goes with the line.
• Duplicate Line (Ctrl+D) makes a copy of the line just below it.
• Join Lines (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+J) pulls the next line up onto the end of this one.

Deleting lines

• Delete Line (Ctrl+Shift+Delete) removes the whole line.
• Delete to Start of Line (Ctrl+Shift+Backspace) removes everything before the cursor on this line.
• Delete to End of Line (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Delete) removes everything after the cursor on this line.
• Delete Paragraph (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Backspace) removes the whole paragraph.

Each one tells you what it did. If there was nothing to do, it says that too, for example “Already the first line”, so you are never left wondering.

Putting lines in order, and tidying them up

These work on what you have selected. If nothing is selected, they work on the whole document.

To change the order:

• Sort Lines A to Z (Ctrl+Alt+S), or Sort Lines Z to A (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S).
• Reverse Lines (Alt+Shift+Z) turns the list upside down.
• Number Lines (Alt+Shift+N) puts a number in front of each line.

To clean up:

• Remove Every Blank Line (Ctrl+Alt+K) removes every empty line, including the ones between your paragraphs. A line with only spaces on it counts as empty. This is great for text from a web page that arrives double-spaced, but you probably do not want it on a letter.
• Remove Duplicate Lines (Ctrl+Alt+D) keeps one copy of each line.
• Trim Trailing Spaces (Ctrl+Alt+T) removes spaces at the ends of lines.
• Tidy Whitespace (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+T) shrinks runs of spaces and tabs, the kind that often come along with pasted text.

If you also use QUILL, it has these same commands, plus one more called Trim Blank Lines at the Ends. QUILL Lite has just the one blank line command.

Each of these is a single undo. One press of Ctrl+Z puts the whole sort back, not one line at a time.

Quoting, wrapping, and throwing lines away

These also work on what you have selected, or on the whole document if nothing is selected.

• Quote Lines (Ctrl+Shift+Q) puts > in front of each line, the way an email reply does. Remove Quote Marks (Alt+Shift+., Alt, Shift and the period) takes them off again.
• Hard Wrap Lines… (Alt+Shift+W) asks for a width, then rearranges the lines so none is longer than that. It keeps your paragraphs apart and never breaks a word. This really changes your file. View > Word Wrap is different: it only changes how the lines are shown.
• Delete Lines Containing (Alt+Shift+X) asks for some text, then removes every line that has it. The text is matched exactly as you type it. You hear how many lines went, and one Ctrl+Z brings them all back. This is a big help when you are trimming a long log file by ear.

Commenting lines out

Toggle Line Comment (Ctrl+/) turns the selected lines into comments. Press it again to turn them back. It says how many lines it changed.

QUILL Lite picks the comment mark from the file’s name:

• # in a .py, .yml, .ini or .conf file
• -- in a .sql file
• <!-- --> in HTML and Markdown
• // in anything else

QUILL uses the same marks, so a file commented in one can be uncommented in the other. A document you have not saved yet gets // . Once you save it with its proper name, the right mark is used from then on.

Tabs or spaces

Tools > Indenting has Convert to Spaces (Alt+F11) and Convert to Tabs (Alt+F12). They change only the indentation at the start of each line, and count four spaces to a tab. This is a common change to make to a file somebody else wrote.

Changing case

Tools > Change Case has five choices:

• UPPERCASE (Ctrl+Shift+U)
• lowercase (Ctrl+Shift+K)
• Title Case (Ctrl+Shift+T)
• Sentence case (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+U) puts a capital at the start and makes the rest small. Good for a heading that was typed in capitals.
• Invert Case (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+N) swaps every letter. Good for a sentence typed with Caps Lock on by mistake.

They work on what you have selected. If nothing is selected, they change the word your cursor is in, the same as Shift+F3 in Word. That keeps a slip of the finger small: a whole document in the wrong case sounds just the same when it is read aloud, so you might not notice.

Getting deleted text back somewhere else

Restore Deleted Text (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Z) puts something you deleted back where your cursor is now. QUILL Lite remembers your last three deletions. If the one you want is not the most recent, you get a short list with a preview of each.

This is different from undo. Ctrl+Z puts text back where it came from. This puts it where you are. So you can delete a paragraph, move down, and restore it there. That is a way to move text without using the clipboard, so whatever you had copied is still waiting for you.

It only remembers deletions made with the delete commands above, not every letter you backspaced over.

Indenting

Tools > Indenting has Indent (Ctrl+]) and Outdent (Ctrl+[). They move every line your selection touches, or just the line you are on if nothing is selected. You hear how many lines moved. If you edit code or settings files, you will use these a lot.

Asking how deep a line is

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

Your screen reader reads the words on a line, but not the spaces and tabs in front of them. In a Python file, a YAML file or a nested list, that indentation matters a lot. This command lets you hear it.

It also tells you when a line uses a different kind of space from the lines around it, for example a tab where the others use spaces. You cannot hear that difference any other way, and in a Python file it stops the program running.

Making Tab indent instead

When you start, the Tab key types a tab character, the way it does in Notepad. You can see this in View > Tab Key Inserts a Tab Character, which is checked. Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+I to clear the check mark, and Tab indents the whole line instead, telling you the new depth as it goes. That is usually what you want for code.

Shift+Tab outdents in either mode, so one key always takes back a tab you typed by accident. The Tab Mode part of the status bar tells you which mode is on.

Snippets (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Home)

Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Home opens Snippets…. (It was Alt+Shift+I before version 1.2, which is now Add Inline Note, the same as in QUILL.) It lists every abbreviation you have, the ones you use most at the top, with a preview of what each one writes. Pick one and press Enter, and it goes in at your cursor.

This is the easy way in when you cannot remember a short form. The six you use every day you will type from memory. The one you set up months ago, you can find here. Anything you add in Manage Abbreviations… shows up in this list too.

Abbreviations

An abbreviation is a short form that grows into a longer one. Type the short form, press Space, and the long text appears. It is great for your address, how you sign off, or anything else you type often.

• Ctrl+Alt+A opens Manage Abbreviations…, where you add and change them.
• Alt+Shift+A turns expanding on and off. Tools > Expand Abbreviations shows a check mark when it is on.

That on and off key is there for the moment an abbreviation has just grown into something you did not want. You can turn it off right away, without looking for a setting. It is the same switch as the Abbreviations box in Customize Features.

If you also use QUILL or Quill Inkwell, there is a switch in Preferences that lets all three share one list of abbreviations.

Undo, and getting text back

You already know the first two. The third one is worth learning. Ctrl+Z puts deleted text back where it came from, and Restore Deleted Text puts it where you are standing. So a deletion is never final, even after you have typed more.

Big changes are one undo

When a command changes a lot at once, one Ctrl+Z takes the whole change back. That includes sorting nine hundred lines, applying a heading, moving a whole section, going back to an earlier version of the file, or tidying all the spaces. One key did it, so one key undoes it.

What you learned, and where to go next

You can start a selection with F8 and walk to the end of it, use Extend Selection Mode, take a whole word, line or paragraph in one key, and grow or shrink what you have. Marks take you back to where you were a moment ago, and the Review Buffer on Alt+Shift+U lets you read a selection safely.

The copy tray holds twelve numbered things, the collector gathers several pieces to paste together, and the clip library keeps what you want to keep. Ctrl+Shift+V pastes plain text, and Ctrl+F8 copies the whole document without selecting it. Edit > Lines moves, sorts, tidies, quotes, wraps and deletes lines, Tools > Indenting and Tools > Change Case look after spacing and capitals, and snippets and abbreviations save you typing. Every big change is one Ctrl+Z, and Restore Deleted Text puts a deletion back wherever you are now.

The tutorial Selecting more than a few words walks you through the selecting keys, and finishes with the Review Buffer.

Next, Chapter 6, Formatting, headings and the Insert menu, shows you what to do with text once it is in.

Chapter 6: Formatting, headings and the Insert menu

The formatting keys are the ones you know from WordPad, and QUILL Lite makes each one write the right thing for the kind of document you are in. This chapter covers bold, lists and headings, how to hear that you are on a heading or in a list, how to skim a long document by folding it, and how to reshape it by moving whole sections. Then come links, and the Insert menu: the date, emoji, special characters, line breaks, and the Markdown and HTML tag pickers.

Formatting

The formatting keys are the ones you know from WordPad. Ctrl+B is still bold, Ctrl+I is still italic. What changes is that QUILL Lite gives you the right kind of bold for the document you are in.

One key, the right answer for your document

In a Markdown document, bold is two asterisks. In HTML it is a tag. In rich text it is real bold. So when you press Ctrl+B, QUILL Lite writes whatever bold means in the document in front of you. Headings work the same way.

Here is how it feels in practice:

1. Select a word and press Ctrl+B. The word is wrapped in bold.
2. Or press Ctrl+B with nothing selected. The markup goes in empty, and your cursor lands in the middle of it, so you can type the bold words straight away.

In Markdown and HTML you hear what was written, for example “Bold in Markdown”. That tells you two asterisks appeared, which is what actually happened.

In HTML, bold is written as <strong> and italic as <em>. Screen readers can treat those as important text, which plain <b> and <i> do not give them.

Applying a heading replaces the old one. Press Ctrl+Alt+2 on a line that says ### Notes and you get ## Notes. If an HTML heading has an id=, it is kept, so links pointing at that heading still work.

Alignment, line spacing and font are for rich text only. If you try one in another kind of document, QUILL Lite tells you it cannot run there.

Lists

Ctrl+Shift+L works in rich text and in Markdown. It goes round in a circle, like WordPad’s list button: bulleted list, numbered list, no list, then back to the start. Each stop says its name, so keep pressing until you hear the one you want.

In rich text, the bullets and numbers are drawn for you and renumber themselves. In Markdown, QUILL Lite writes - or 1. at the start of the lines you selected, and only those lines.

Keys that only work in rich text

Underneath, every QUILL Lite document uses the same Windows editing box that WordPad uses. That box has some keys of its own: Ctrl+U underlines, Ctrl+E, Ctrl+L, Ctrl+R and Ctrl+J change alignment, Ctrl+= and Ctrl+Shift+= raise and lower text, and there are a few more. In a rich text document they all work as you would expect.

In a Markdown, HTML or plain document, those keys have nothing to do. So QUILL Lite catches them and tells you, once per key in each document:

Underline has no meaning in a plain text document.

After that, pressing the same key again stays quiet, so you are not told the same thing over and over. Your document is never changed behind your back.

The formatting keys at a glance

The heading keys are also in Format > Headings. The number in the menu is the number you press.

How big each heading is

In rich text, a heading is bold text at its own size: 20, 16, 14, 12, 11.5 and 10.5 point for levels 1 to 6. Ordinary text is 11 point. These are the same sizes QUILL uses, so when somebody opens your document in Word, the headings still look like headings. Every level has its own size, so QUILL Lite can always find every heading again.

Taking it all off: Normal Text

Ctrl+Shift+N is Normal Text. It is the quick way back to plain, ordinary text when you are not sure what is applied. One press:

• takes off bold, italic, underline and strikethrough,
• puts the size back to ordinary body text,
• clears the colour and the highlight,
• sets the paragraph back to left aligned and single spaced,
• and takes it out of any list.

One Ctrl+Z puts it all back if you change your mind. The typeface stays as it is. To change that, use Format > Editor Font. This is the same key Word uses for the same job.

In a Markdown or HTML document, Ctrl+Shift+N takes the heading marks off the line instead.

Asking what is here

Ctrl+Shift+D is the key worth remembering. It tells you what you are standing in, for example “Arial, 16 point, heading 2, bold”. When you cannot see the page, this is how you find out how your text looks.

Moving between headings

These work in every kind of document. In rich text they find the heading sizes listed above. In Markdown they find lines that start with #. In HTML they find <h1> to <h6>. A # inside a fenced code block is not treated as a heading.

Skimming a long document with folding

When a sighted person gets a long document, they scroll and glance to see what is in it. Folding gives you the same quick overview by ear.

Try it like this:

1. Open a long Markdown document.
2. Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Down to move from section to section.
3. Each time, you hear the heading, whether it is folded, and how many lines are under it, for example “Installing, expanded, 34 lines”.

Folding never hides your text. A folded section reads exactly the same when you arrow through it, and Find still finds things inside it. Think of a fold as a note to yourself that says “I have dealt with this part”. You hear it as you pass by.

Folding works in Markdown documents, where a heading line starting with # marks where each section begins.

If you would like to practise this with the app guiding you, the tutorial Skimming something long walks through it step by step.

Hearing that you are on a heading

When you arrow onto a heading, QUILL Lite says the level, for example “Heading 2”.

Your screen reader cannot tell you this in an editor, because Windows editing boxes have no way to mark a paragraph as a heading. So QUILL Lite says it for you, and keeps it short:

• Just the level. Your screen reader is already reading the line, so you do not hear the words twice.
• Once, when you arrive. Moving around inside the heading says nothing more. Leave and come back, and you hear it again.
• In rich text and in Markdown alike.

When you apply a heading yourself, you hear that once, not twice. And opening a document whose first line is its title does not greet you with “Heading 1”.

Turning heading announcements off

Sometimes you just want to read a document as text. Press Ctrl+Alt+F3 (View > Announce Headings) to turn the heading cue off, and press it again to turn it back on. You hear which way it went: “Headings will not be announced”, or “Headings announced on arrival”. QUILL Lite remembers your choice, but it is meant to be flipped whenever you need it.

When a # is not a heading

In a .md or .txt file, or a new document you have not named yet, a line starting with # is a heading. In a .py, .sh, .ini, .yml or .conf file, a # starts a comment, so QUILL Lite says nothing and lists nothing. In an HTML document, headings are <h1> to <h6>, and those are the ones QUILL Lite reads and writes.

Hearing that you are in a list

When you arrow into a list, QUILL Lite says something like “Bulleted list, 5 items”. Go a level deeper and you hear “Level 2, 3 items”. Arrow out and you hear “Out of list”.

On a web page, your screen reader tells you about lists. In an editor, a list is just lines of text, so without this a nested outline would sound like a run of lines starting with a dash. You would be left counting spaces by ear to know the level.

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

In a definition list you also hear “Term” and “Definition” as you move between them, so you always know which part you are in.

Items are counted at your own level, inside your own list. Say a list has three items and the second one has four sub-items. You hear “3 items” at level one and “4 items” at level two, never “7”. Two sub-lists under two different bullets count as two separate lists.

What it never says

• Nothing as you move down a list. Your screen reader is already reading each item.
• Nothing about - - - or ***. Those are dividing lines, not lists.
• Nothing inside a fenced code block. A - in a code sample is part of the sample.
• Nothing in a plain text document. Ordinary writing is full of hyphens, and you do not want to hear about every one.

Turning list announcements off

Press Ctrl+Alt+F5 (View > Announce Lists). It has its own switch, separate from headings. When you are reorganising an outline, the levels help. When you are proof-reading, you may prefer quiet. You hear which way it went: “Lists will not be announced”, or “Lists announced as you enter them”.

Which item you are on

The spoken cue does not tell you which item you are on, because hearing that on every arrow press would be too much. The status bar’s List cell does. It says something like “Bulleted list, 4 of 9, level 2”, and you can check it whenever you like. Press Enter on that cell to turn the spoken list cue off and on.

All of them at once: the Heading Organizer

Alt+Shift+O opens Heading Organizer…: every heading in your document in one list. It is the easiest way to see and change the shape of a document, because the list reads the shape back to you as you work.

1. Arrow through the list. Each row says its level and its text, for example “Heading 2: Installing”.
2. Press Tab to demote the heading you are on, or Shift+Tab to promote it.
3. Use Move Up and Move Down to move a heading, together with everything under it, past its neighbour.
4. Use Rename to change a heading’s words without moving it.
5. Use Validate to check the result. It makes sure the document starts at Heading 1 and never skips a level on the way down, which is what screen readers rely on.
6. Press Apply when you are happy.

Beside the list there is a preview of the section under the heading you are on, which helps when two headings have similar names.

Nothing changes in your document until you press Apply. Everything you did counts as one change, so one Ctrl+Z puts it all back. QUILL has the same window.

The Heading Organizer works in Markdown, HTML and rich text documents. In rich text it moves each heading with its formatting, so bold and sizes come along.

Rearranging headings one at a time (Format > Structure)

These keys save you from cutting and pasting to reorganise a document. Selecting a section by hand means finding exactly where it ends by ear, which is easy to get wrong. Alt+Shift+Up moves the whole section in one press and tells you what happened.

A “section” is the heading you are in plus everything under it, down to the next heading at the same level or higher. So moving a Heading 2 brings its Heading 3s along with it.

Where a moved section lands

The move keys always move. If there is no heading at the same level next to yours, the section simply trades places with whatever is next to it, the same way Word’s outline view does on these keys. The first section inside a parent moves up above the parent’s own heading.

A moved section keeps its level. Press the other key and you are back exactly where you started. To change a level, use Alt+Shift+Left and Alt+Shift+Right. You can move a section and then promote it.

You hear where the section ended up, for example “Section moved below Soup. Now 2 of 3 at this level.” That tells you where it sits in the outline, which your screen reader cannot tell you.

Sometimes a section has nowhere to go. In a document where every heading sits inside the one before it, everything below you is inside your own section. QUILL Lite tells you so and suggests what to do: “Bottom of Heading 1. Everything below is inside this section. Alt+Shift+Left promotes Heading 3 to make it a sibling.” The key it names is your own, so it is still right if you have changed it.

Select Section (Alt+Shift+F5)

Alt+Shift+F5 selects the section you are in, with every subsection, stopping just before the blank line that separates it from the next one. Then press Ctrl+X and Ctrl+V to put it anywhere you like: elsewhere in this document, in another document, or in another program.

You hear how much you selected, for example “Selected Bread and 1 section under it, 7 lines”, or “Selected Bread, 4 lines” when nothing is nested inside. That answers the question “did it take the sub-headings too?”

Move Section To… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F5)

Pressing Alt+Shift+Up forty times is no way to move a section across a long document. Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F5 asks where you want it to go instead. It asks two questions, each answered from a list you can type into.

1. Which heading? Every heading in the document, in order, one per row, for example 3 of 7, level 2 - Bread. The position comes first, so two sections both called “Notes” are easy to tell apart. Type to narrow the list; the order stays the same as you type. You start in the search box, and Enter there takes you into the results.
2. Before it, after it, or inside it? Pick one of three rows. Note that After it puts your section below that heading and everything under it.

The whole move is one change, so one Ctrl+Z undoes it. You hear where the section landed: “Moved Salad before Bread. Now 1 of 3 at this level.”

Inside it is the only choice that changes levels. Your section becomes the last one under the heading you picked, and it and everything under it go one level deeper. You hear the new level: “Moved Bread inside Soup, now Heading 3. Now 1 of 2 at this level.”

There are two things it will not do, and it tells you why:

• A section cannot move inside itself. If you pick a heading that sits under the one you are moving, you hear “Sourdough is inside Bread, so Bread cannot move into it. Promote Sourdough first if you want them side by side.” Those headings stay in the list, so you are never left wondering where one went.
• Nothing goes deeper than Heading 6, because Markdown has no deeper level. It tells you so and offers After it instead.

Press Escape at either question to change nothing. Nothing is announced, because nothing happened.

Good to know about all six keys

• Promoting a Heading 1 leaves it a Heading 1. It never turns into ordinary text.
• Moving and selecting sections need a Markdown or HTML document, where the heading is written in the text. In rich text a heading is a font size, so there is nothing to move, and QUILL Lite tells you so. Promoting and demoting work in both.
• These keys are the same in QUILL. Learn them once and they work in both editors, and you hear the same words in each.

The tutorial Skimming something long ends with rearranging a document, if you would like to try these keys with some guidance.

Checking off tasks

A task list is a list whose items start with a box: - [ ] for something to do and - [x] for something done. AI-written plans are full of them, and Ctrl+Alt+I (Markdown Tag…) can insert one.

Put the cursor on a task and press Ctrl+Alt+Enter (Format > Toggle Task Done) to check it. Press it again to uncheck it. You hear what changed and how many tasks in that list are done, for example “Checked: Write the tests. 3 of 7 tasks complete.” Select several tasks first to check them all at once. Ctrl+Z takes it back. On a line that is not a task, QUILL Lite says so and changes nothing. This is the same key as in QUILL.

Links

To add a link, press Ctrl+K. A box opens asking for the address and the words to show.

• If you select some words first, they are already filled in for you.
• If you leave the words empty, the address itself is shown as the link.

QUILL Lite writes the link the right way for your document: [text](address) in Markdown, and <a href="address">text</a> in HTML. In a rich text document, the link becomes a real link in the text, with no brackets to see.

The Insert menu

The Insert menu is for anything you put into your document other than typing.

Insert sits just before Format on the menu bar, the same as in Word. You put something in, then you format it.

Emoji (Alt+.)

Press Alt+. to open the emoji picker. You can 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 you can browse by category, starting with Favourites and Recent.

Every emoji has a written description of what it shows. You arrow through a list, and the description sits in a pane beside it, so you know exactly what you are about to send.

When you insert one, QUILL Lite says its name. Screen readers do not all read emoji the same way, and some say nothing at all, so this is how you know it went in.

Emoji work in every kind of document, rich text included.

The two tag pickers

There are two tag pickers, one for Markdown and one for HTML.

Markdown Tag appears only in Markdown documents. In a plain or rich text document it is not on the Insert menu at all, and if you press Ctrl+Alt+I there, QUILL Lite just says “Markdown tags are for Markdown documents.”

HTML Tag stays on the menu in every document, but it is greyed out unless the document is HTML, and your screen reader tells you so when you arrive on it. If you press Ctrl+Alt+O anyway, QUILL Lite tells you what kind of document you are in and that Ctrl+Alt+F6 is how to change it.

In both pickers, if you have text selected, the tags go around it. If you do not, the cursor lands between the opening and closing tags, ready for you to type.

Markdown Tag (Ctrl+Alt+I)

This 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 a few letters to narrow the list. If you choose Link or Image, it asks you for the address next.

HTML Tag (Ctrl+Alt+O)

This offers 111 tags and 20 whole form fields. You can search by what a tag does as well as by its name. Type “dropdown” and you find both a finished, labelled dropdown and the bare select tag. Type “glossary” and you find <dl>. Type “acronym” and you find <abbr>. Type “subtitles” and you find <track>.

When you choose a bare tag, QUILL Lite asks if you want to add attributes, for example class=note; id=summary; aria-label=Summary. If you do not need any, just press Enter on the empty box to skip it.

Whole form fields, wired up

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

This saves you the fiddly part. The connections between a label and its field are invisible on the page. A missing for, a radio group without a shared name, or two fields with the same id all look fine until somebody tries to use the form. These fields arrive with all of that already done.

Two things make this even easier:

• Select a word first and it becomes the label. The id is made from the same word, so the two match. Select “Postcode”, choose Form field: text, and you get a Postcode field with id="postcode" and for="postcode".
• It never repeats an id. QUILL Lite checks your document first. If you insert a second email field, its id is email-2, so the two fields never get mixed up.

The bare tags are all still in the list, just below the form fields, for when a single tag is what you want.

Typing things there is no key for

Insert > Special Character… (Ctrl+Shift+F2) opens a picker with 357 characters that your keyboard has no key for. There are two ways to find one.

Search for it

The window opens in the search box. Type part of a name, such as dash, euro, acute, arrow or apostrophe. Everyday words work too, even when they are not the official name: gbp, sterling, copyright, eszett, micro. Press Enter to move into the results.

You can also type a code point. 2014, U+2014 or d8212 all bring up the em dash first. This works for any character at all, even one that is not in the 357.

Browse a group

Clear the search box and you can browse fifteen groups: 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.

Choosing and inserting

The results list has three columns: the character, its name and its code point. As you arrow, the Description pane below shows the same detail Character Details… gives for a character already in your document. The code point is handy when two names sound alike: “Thin space” is U+2009 and “Hair space” is U+200A.

Press Enter to insert the character you are on. QUILL Lite then tells you what it put in, for example “Inserted, U+2014 Em dash”. Many of these characters are invisible on the page, so hearing it is how you know it worked.

QUILL has the same picker, on the same key.

Ending a line without starting a paragraph

Insert > Line Break (Shift+Enter, the same key as in Word) ends the line you are on and starts a new one, without starting a new paragraph.

This matters mostly in Markdown. A blank line between two lines makes two paragraphs, usually with a gap between them. A line break keeps them in the same paragraph, one under the other. That is what you want for an address, a poem, or a few short lines that belong together.

QUILL Lite writes the break the way the Markdown line break style setting says, and tells you which one it used. The standard choice is a backslash at the end of the line. The other choice is two spaces at the end of the line, which you cannot see or hear, and which some programs remove when they save. If you have ever added two spaces to the end of a line and nothing happened, that is probably why.

QUILL has the same command on the same key.

What you learned, and where to go next

The formatting keys write the right thing for each kind of document. Ctrl+Shift+N takes all formatting off, and Ctrl+Shift+D tells you what formatting you are standing in. You can move between headings, hear when you arrive on a heading or walk into a list, skim with folding, and reshape a document with the Heading Organizer and the Structure keys. Ctrl+K adds a link written the right way for your document. The Insert menu puts in the date, emoji, special characters, line breaks and Markdown or HTML tags, and tells you what went in each time.

For a guided walk through headings, folding and rearranging, try the tutorial Skimming something long. To see how the kind of document changes what these keys write, try Four kinds of document, and how to say which.

Next, Chapter 7, Checking your writing, covers spelling, the thesaurus and the dictionary.

Chapter 7: Checking your writing

WordPad never had a spell checker. QUILL Lite has the same one QUILL uses, and it is made to be heard rather than seen: a short sound when you finish a word it does not know, the letters spelled out when you want them, and the Applications key to fix the word you are on. This chapter covers all of that, then the thesaurus and the dictionary for finding a better word, and finally how to find out exactly which character your cursor is on.

Spell check

QUILL Lite has a spell checker, the same one QUILL uses. WordPad never had one. You can check as you type, check the whole document, or fix one word at a time.

Checking the whole document

Press F7 to check the whole document. Here is what happens:

1. QUILL Lite finds the next misspelled word and shows you suggestions.
2. Arrow through the suggestions.
3. Choose what to do: change this word, change every one like it, skip it, or add it to your dictionary so it is never questioned again.

The check starts where your cursor is, just as in Word. When it reaches the end of the document, it tells you, then carries on from the beginning. If you would rather it simply stopped at the end, you can turn that off in Preferences.

The spelling keys

Alt+Shift+F7 and Ctrl+Alt+F9 work from anywhere in a word, not only from its first letter.

Hearing the letters

Ctrl+F7 takes you to the next mistake and selects it, so your screen reader reads the word. Then, after a short pause, QUILL Lite spells it out. That matters because “receive” and “recieve” sound exactly the same. The letters tell you what is wrong. If you do not need the spelling, just press your next key and it stops.

Every misspelling in one list

Alt+Shift+L lists every misspelling at once, with the line each one is on. Press Enter on a row to go there. This is handy when you want to know how many mistakes there are, or pick which one to fix first. Words you have chosen to ignore are left out.

While you type

When you finish a word that is not in the dictionary, you hear a short falling blip, and the status bar shows which word it was. “Finish” means you typed a space, a comma or a new line after it, so you are never interrupted in the middle of a word. It is a sound rather than speech, so it does not talk over the sentence you are writing.

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

If you would like to try spelling with the app guiding you, the tutorial Spelling, without a red squiggle walks through typing a mistake, fixing it, teaching a word and checking the whole document.

Spelling Announcements

The Spelling Announcements window has twelve settings in three groups. QUILL has the same twelve settings under Spelling in its Settings window, so setting them up once sets up both.

While you are typing

Whether the sound plays at all, whether the word is spoken too (off to begin with), and how long to wait before the same word is mentioned again. Zero means every time.

Spelling a word out

Whether words are spelled out at all, and how:

• Letters are the fastest.
• The phonetic alphabet (romeo, echo, charlie) is clearer when B, D, E, P, T and V all sound alike, such as with a fast voice, a poor speaker or a noisy room.
• Both is good for learning a new word.

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

There are three pauses before a word is spelled out, one for each place it happens:

• in the F7 check, where you have stopped to decide, the pause is longer;
• when moving between misspellings, it is shorter;
• in a list of suggestions, where you are arrowing, it is shorter again.

You can switch each one off on its own.

The word you are on: the Applications key

This is the quickest way to fix a word as you go:

1. Put your cursor in a word QUILL Lite thinks is misspelled.
2. Press the Applications key (or Shift+F10).
3. Press Down Arrow once. You land on the first suggestion.
4. Press Enter to use it.

No window opens and your cursor stays where it was. A sighted person spots a red squiggle and right-clicks it. For you, the Applications key is the squiggle, and the first thing it offers is the answer.

The menu is always laid out the same way:

1. The suggestions, at the top.
2. A separator, then one row called Spelling Actions for “wrold” (with your word in it).
3. The Thesaurus and Dictionary submenus for the word (see below).
4. When your cursor is on a web address, two rows for it: Open followed by the address, which opens it in your web browser, and Copy Link Address. They are there for a plain address, a Markdown link and an HTML link alike, and they are simply not in the menu when there is no link.
5. The everyday rows: Undo, Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete, Select All.

Only the number of suggestions changes. Everything after them stays in the same order, so you can learn it once.

Inside Spelling Actions

A word you ignore is ignored everywhere: you stop hearing about it as you type, Ctrl+F7 stops going to it, and Alt+Shift+F7 stops offering suggestions for it. Ignoring lasts until you close the document. To keep a word for good, add it to a dictionary.

Thesaurus and Dictionary on any word

The Applications key menu has two more submenus on any word, spelled right or not. They come after the spelling rows and before the everyday rows, and both name the word they are about, so you always know what they will do.

• Thesaurus for “running” opens on the best replacements. Press Enter on sprinting and it replaces running. QUILL Lite looks the word up as run, then gives you the replacement back in the -ing form, with the same capitals as your word. Below the first meaning, each other meaning has its own submenu (for example “As a noun: …”), then an Opposites submenu, then Say Word Summary, which tells you what the thesaurus knows without opening anything, and More in Thesaurus…, which opens the full thesaurus window.
• Dictionary for “running” starts with Look Up “running”…, the dictionary that works without AI (see Dictionary, later in this chapter). When AI help is on, it then offers the twelve questions the AI dictionary can answer about the word as it is used in this sentence: Define in Context, Synonyms That Fit, Simpler Word, More Formal Word, More Vivid Word, Opposites, Is This the Right Word?, Use It in a Sentence, Where It Comes From, How to Say It, Rhymes, and the Word Explorer, which answers all of them at once. Last comes Find the Word For…, the reverse dictionary. If AI help is on but you have no key and no ChatGPT sign-in, the submenu has one row that tells you so and opens the account window.

If you have selected a single word, that word is used instead of the one at the cursor. There is no Thesaurus row on a number or on empty space.

On a word that is spelled correctly, there is no Spelling Actions row at all, just the thesaurus, the dictionary and the everyday rows.

QUILL has the same menu in the same order, with one extra dictionary for its projects.

When it stays quiet

Some files are not writing at all. They hold settings and instructions for programs, full of made-up words and abbreviations that no dictionary knows. Checking those as you type would give you a stream of warnings that are all wrong.

So QUILL Lite does not check those files as you type. It recognises them by the kind of file they are, and tells you once when you open one, so you know nothing is broken.

If you do want checking in one of them, press Ctrl+Alt+F7. It changes only the document you are in. Tools > Spelling shows a check mark beside Check While Typing so you can always see which way it is set.

F7 always works, in every file. If you ask for a check, you get one.

Your dictionary

Words you teach QUILL Lite are kept in your own dictionary, in QUILL Lite’s folder. If you also use QUILL, one setting in Preferences lets both share the same list, so a word you teach either one is known to both.

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

Thesaurus

The thesaurus helps you find a different word for the one you have. Press Shift+F7, the same key as in Word and QUILL, or choose Tools > Thesaurus…. It opens on the word you are on, or the word you selected. If your cursor is not on a word, it asks you for one.

It is the same thesaurus QUILL uses, and it comes inside QUILL Lite. Nothing is downloaded and nothing is sent anywhere.

It finds the word you mean

A thesaurus lists plain forms of words: run, not running; happy, not happier. QUILL Lite works your word back to its plain form for you (running to run, studies to study, happier to happy, stopped to stop) and tells you so in the title, for example “running (as run)”, and in each meaning’s row, for example “verb, from run: sprinting, dashing, …”.

Replacements come back in the right form

Choose sprint for running and your document gets sprinting. Choose glad for Happier and you get More glad, because QUILL Lite knows which words take -er and which take more. It knows irregular verbs too: replacing sought with seek gives you sought. If it is not sure of a form, it gives you the plain word rather than guess.

Using the thesaurus window

1. You start in the Senses list. There is one row per meaning, with the part of speech first. Type n to jump to the nouns, or v to the verbs.
2. Press Tab to reach the words for the meaning you picked. You get replacements first, then broader: words, then opposite: words, each labelled.
3. Press Enter, or choose Replace, to put the word in place of yours. The selection is then cleared, so your next keystroke cannot type over it.

Other choices:

• Copy puts the word on the clipboard instead, and tells you so.
• Escape closes the window and changes nothing.
• If you typed the word into the thesaurus rather than starting from your document, Replace is not available and Copy is the default.

A quick summary without opening anything

Say Word Summary (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+[) tells you what the thesaurus knows about a word, without opening a window. You hear something like: “running, looked up as run: 27 meanings as a verb, 6 as an adjective, 3 as a noun. First: sprinting, dashing, … Opposites: standing, …”. It is also in the Thesaurus submenu of the Applications key menu. It is a good way to decide whether the full window is worth opening.

Checking your word lists

Tools > Spelling > Dictionary Status… (Alt+Shift+;) tells you how many words are in your personal dictionary and in this document’s own list, where each file is kept, and whether the thesaurus is there.

Turning it off

The thesaurus and dictionary are one switch in Customize Features, called Dictionary and thesaurus. It is on to begin with, and off in the WordPad and Notepad profiles.

Dictionary

QUILL Lite has two dictionaries. The first, Look Up, works without AI. The second uses AI to answer questions about a word as it is used in your sentence.

Look Up: the dictionary without AI

To open it, press Alt+F10 (Tools > Look Up Word…), or choose Look Up “word”… at the top of the Dictionary submenu on any word. It is the same Look Up window QUILL has.

1. You start in the Result, a read-only box you can arrow through. It gives the word, then a labelled section for each kind of answer.
2. Under it, Words you can use lists every synonym, opposite, related word and rhyme, each saying which it is.
3. Press Enter, or choose Replace Word, to put the selected word in place of yours.

You can also choose Copy to copy the selected word (or the whole result, if nothing is selected), or Add to Dictionary to teach the word to your spelling dictionary.

Without the internet

When you are offline, Look Up gives you synonyms, opposites and related words from the word list inside QUILL Lite. Nothing leaves your computer.

With the internet, when you say so

There is a checkbox called Use online sources. It is off until you check it. When it is on, the word, and only the word, never your sentence or your document, is sent to three free services that need no account and no key:

• the Free Dictionary, for definitions with examples,
• Datamuse, for more synonyms, opposites, rhymes and related words,
• and Wikipedia, for a short summary with a link to the article.

You see the offline answer straight away and hear “Looking up online”. When the online answer arrives, it replaces the result and you are told. If Wikipedia has no real article for the word, there is simply no encyclopedia section.

QUILL Lite remembers your choice, and so does QUILL if the two share settings, so you are not asked again. Uncheck the box and you are offline again from the next lookup.

The AI dictionary

The rest of Tools > Dictionary, and of the Dictionary submenu on a word, uses AI to read the sentence your word is in. The offline thesaurus knows every meaning of bank, but it cannot tell which one your sentence means. These twelve questions send the word and the sentence it is in (never the rest of your document) and answer in plain words written to be listened to. Where it helps, you also get a list of choices, each with a reason.

The answer window

1. You start on the answer, so your screen reader reads it to you.
2. Press Tab to reach Choices: one line per replacement, with a note.
3. Press Enter, or choose Use This Word, to put the selected word in place of yours (or at the cursor, for Find the Word For). One Ctrl+Z takes it back.

Other buttons:

• Copy Choice and Copy Answer copy to the clipboard.
• Ask Something Else… closes the answer and opens the Dictionary submenu again on the same word.

If you typed over the word while the answer was on its way, Use This Word is not available and tells you why. Copy still works.

What you need for it

The AI dictionary works with your ChatGPT subscription or your own AI key, from OpenAI or Google Gemini. It does not use QUILL’s free AI service, because a dictionary gets asked many times a day and would use up the free allowance quickly. If you have neither, every row tells you so and opens the account window. All of these rows switch off together when you turn off AI help in Customize Features. Chapter 10, AI help, explains how to connect a key or sign in.

Inline notes

An inline note is a comment you attach to a line or a selection: a question, a reminder, or what you think of a plan somebody sent you. They are on Tools > Inline Notes, on the same keys as in QUILL.

• Alt+Shift+I (Add Inline Note…) adds a note to the selected text, or to the line you are on if nothing is selected. The Note on line at the top shows the start of that text, so you can check you are in the right place before you save.
• Alt+Shift+J and Alt+Shift+K (Next Inline Note and Previous Inline Note) move to the next or previous note and read it to you. They go round from the end to the start.
• Alt+Shift+H (Speak Inline Note) reads the note you are on. Press it twice quickly to change or delete the note.
• Alt+Shift+Delete (Delete Inline Note…) deletes the note you are on. QUILL Lite reads you the note and asks first; No is the default.
• Alt+Shift+Enter (List Inline Notes…) shows every note in the document: the note, the line it is on, the text it is about, and whether it is private or in the file. Enter goes to a note, Delete deletes one and F2 edits one. The buttons let you Remove All of them (you are asked first), Copy All of them as plain text, or Export them to a Markdown or JSON file.

A note follows its text as you edit. If the text is deleted, the note is not lost: the list shows it at the end, marked “the text it was on is gone”, so you can read it and remove it.

Private notes and notes in the file

Normally a note is private. It is kept in QUILL Lite’s own folder, the document is never changed, and nobody else sees it. That works in every kind of document.

In a Markdown or HTML document, you can check Write this note into the file instead. The note goes into the document as a hidden comment on its own line, right after the text it is about:

Back up the uploads folder.
<!-- quill-note: And the database dump. -->

The file is still a proper Markdown or HTML file, and web pages hide the comment. But anyone who opens the file in a text editor, or an AI assistant you give it to, can read your note. That is the way to review a plan an AI assistant wrote for you: leave your notes in the file and hand it back. Because the note is part of the text, Ctrl+Z takes back adding, changing or deleting it.

The check box remembers your choice for each document. To start every new note in the file, turn on Write new inline notes into the file in Preferences. It is off unless you change it.

Notes from the command line

A script, or an AI assistant working in a terminal, can read and clear the notes in a file without opening a window:

• QuillLite.exe --notes list plan.md prints every note, its line and the text it is about. Add --json for a list a program can read.
• QuillLite.exe --notes check plan.md says how many notes are left.
• QuillLite.exe --notes clear plan.md removes them all and saves the file.

The exit code is 0 when it worked (or, for check, when no notes are left), 3 when check finds notes still there, 1 when the file cannot be read or written, and 2 when the command is mistyped. Private notes never appear here.

What is this character?

Press Ctrl+Shift+C to hear exactly which character your cursor is on: its name, and how it behaves when you search.

This helps more than you might think. Your screen reader says “space” for several different characters that sound the same but act differently. One of them is often the reason a search will not find text that is plainly there.

For the full details, press Ctrl+Alt+C. It opens a window you can read line by line.

What you learned, and where to go next

F7 checks the whole document, Ctrl+F7 hops between mistakes and spells each one out, and the Applications key fixes the word you are on, or opens or copies a web address your cursor is on. You can quiet or tune the spelling sounds, and teach QUILL Lite your own words. Shift+F7 opens the thesaurus and puts a better word in place, already in the right form, and Say Word Summary tells you what it knows without opening anything. Alt+F10 looks a word up, offline or online as you choose, and the AI dictionary answers questions about a word as it is used in your sentence. Ctrl+Shift+C names the character under your cursor, which helps when a search will not find something you know is there.

To practise spelling with the app guiding you, try the tutorial Spelling, without a red squiggle.

Next, Chapter 8, What you hear, explains what QUILL Lite says out loud, the sounds it plays, and how to catch a message you missed.

Chapter 8: What you hear

QUILL Lite talks to you through your screen reader, and plays small sounds when things happen. This chapter explains what it says and what it leaves to your screen reader, how to make it say less, a few keys that answer quick questions, how to silence or change its sounds, and how to catch up on something you missed while your attention was elsewhere.

Speech

QUILL Lite talks through your screen reader, NVDA or JAWS. It has no voice of its own, so you never get two voices talking over each other.

What it says, and what it leaves to your screen reader

QUILL Lite tries to say as little as it can. Your screen reader already tells you window titles, where focus has moved, the names of buttons and what you have selected. QUILL Lite only tells you the things only it knows: that a save happened, that a search went back to the top, that bold went on, that four things were replaced.

Hearing a message again

Everything QUILL Lite says also goes into the first part of the status bar. If you missed something, press F6 to hear it again. The guided tutorial What to press when you are lost shows you this.

If no screen reader is running, QUILL Lite does not speak at all, but every message is still in the status bar.

If it says too much

If you hold a key down, QUILL Lite can talk faster than anybody can listen. To calm it down, go to Preferences > Shortest gap between spoken messages. It is a number of milliseconds. Anything QUILL Lite would say sooner than that after its last message is skipped. Zero, the default, says everything as it happens. You do not lose anything by raising it: the status bar still gets every message, and F6 reads it back.

What formatting is here?

Press Ctrl+Shift+D (Format > Describe Formatting at Cursor) to hear the formatting where your cursor is. It is a quick way to check what a sighted reader would see at a glance.

What you hear depends on the kind of document:

• In a rich text document you hear the real formatting, for example “Arial, 14 point, bold, centred.”
• In a Markdown document it reads the markup around your cursor. Inside **bold** it says bold, and on a ## line it says Heading 2.
• In a plain text document it tells you it is plain text, because there is no formatting to describe.

Two smaller questions

• Ctrl+Shift+C (Describe Character) names the character under the cursor. Use it to tell a hyphen from a dash or a minus sign, which most screen readers read the same way.
• Ctrl+Alt+Shift+V (Describe Indent Depth) tells you how far the current line is indented, and whether with tabs or spaces.

How big is this document?

Press Ctrl+Shift+G (View > Document Statistics) to hear the size of the whole document, for example “1,240 words, 7,315 characters, 96 lines.”

The same numbers are in the status bar, but this is quicker than going there to find them.

Ctrl+Alt+W (Line Statistics) does the same for just the line you are on, or for what you have selected.

Sounds

QUILL Lite plays small sounds to let you know things happened. You can silence them all at once, or change them one by one.

Quiet mode

Alt+Shift+M turns every sound off at once. Press it again to bring them back. It is one key so you can reach it in a hurry: on a phone call, in a quiet room, or when you have simply heard enough beeps for today.

Tools > Quiet Mode has a check mark that shows whether it is on. QUILL shares the same setting, so making one quiet makes both quiet.

If you only want to change one sound, use the Sound Scheme instead.

Every sound, in a list you can hear

Tools > Sound Scheme… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+O) lists every sound QUILL Lite can make. As you arrow through the list, each one plays, so you can hear what it is. If you would rather move through the list quietly, clear the checkbox under the list.

Each row tells you the event, whether it is on, which sound file it plays, and how long the sound is. The buttons work on the row you are on:

Saving and sharing your sounds

Save As Scheme saves your whole set of sounds under a name you choose. A scheme is just a folder of sound files, so you can copy it, back it up, or give it to a friend.

Restore All Defaults puts every sound back as it was and turns them all on. The original sounds are never changed, so you can always get back to them with one press.

QUILL uses the same Sound Scheme window and the same schemes, so a scheme you make in one shows up in the other.

Activity and Repeat Last Result

Sometimes QUILL Lite tells you something while your attention is elsewhere, and you miss it. These two commands let you catch up.

Activity (Shift+F9)

Help > Activity… (Shift+F9) is a list of everything QUILL Lite has told you about in this session, newest first. That includes things like a settings file that could not be saved, a save that worked after an earlier one failed, or work that finished after you closed the window that started it. Each row is one sentence: whether it worked, what it was, and when.

Press Enter on a row to take its first action. The buttons below the list say what the selected row offers, and are dimmed when it offers nothing:

• Retry tries the same thing again. For a settings file that could not be saved, that means saving it again, so if your disk was full and you have since made room, one key fixes it.
• Open Folder opens the folder in File Explorer with the file selected, so you can check whether the disk is full or the folder is read only.
• Copy Details copies the selected result as text, ready to paste into a message to support.
• Clear List empties the list for this session.

Opening a large file, or one on a network drive, shows up here too. You see it while it is still opening, and then as Opened or Could not open. So if a slow file finished opening while you were busy elsewhere, you can find out how it went.

All your document windows share one list. If a save failed while you were in a different document, you will still find it in Activity from any window. The list stays on your computer, and it never contains any of your document text.

Repeat Last Result (F9)

Help > Repeat Last Result (F9) says the most recent important thing again. That is the last thing QUILL Lite itself told you, not the last thing your screen reader read. It also tells you what Activity can do about it. If nothing has happened yet, it says so.

When a settings file cannot be saved

QUILL Lite tells you once, and keeps your changes for the rest of the session. In Activity, that row offers Retry and Open Folder. When a later save of the same file works, QUILL Lite tells you that too, so you know the problem is over.

What you learned, and where to go next

QUILL Lite speaks through NVDA or JAWS and only tells you what your screen reader cannot. Every message is kept in the status bar, so F6 brings back anything you missed. A few keys answer quick questions about formatting, a character, indent depth and the size of your document. Alt+Shift+M silences every sound, and Sound Scheme on Ctrl+Alt+Shift+O lets you hear, change or switch off each one and save your own set. Shift+F9 opens Activity, the list of everything QUILL Lite has told you this session, with buttons to retry or look into a problem, and F9 repeats the last important message.

The tutorial What to press when you are lost shows you how to hear a message again.

Next, Chapter 9, Writing by voice, shows you how to dictate instead of typing.

Chapter 9: Writing by voice

Dictation lets you write by talking. Press Ctrl+F11, say a sentence, and pause. When you pause, your words appear in the document at the cursor. You hear a short, soft tone, and QUILL Lite reads the words back so you know they came out right. Then it keeps listening, so you can go straight on to the next sentence. To stop, press Ctrl+F11 again or say “stop dictation”. If you would rather hold Ctrl+F11 down while you talk and let go to stop, you can turn that on; see Holding Ctrl+F11 to talk, below.

You do not have to say punctuation. The speech engines that come with QUILL Lite put in full stops, commas, question marks and capital letters for you. When you want a particular mark, just say it, like “comma” or “new paragraph”. What you say always wins.

It all happens on your own computer. Nothing is downloaded, nothing you say is sent anywhere, and no recording is kept. Your words are recognised, written into your document, and then forgotten. (If you have your own OpenAI key, you can choose to have OpenAI recognise your speech instead. That is off unless you turn it on, and “OpenAI dictation, with your own key” explains exactly what it sends.)

This chapter starts with your first dictation. Then it covers what you can say, starting and stopping with your voice, making dictation fit you, talking to the AI, writing down a whole meeting as it happens, dictating into other programs, turning a recording into text, and what to do when something goes wrong. Near the end, “Dictating well” gathers the habits that make the biggest difference, with two short paragraphs to practise on.

Getting started

Your first dictation, step by step

1. Put the cursor where you want the words to go. If you select some text first, the first thing you say replaces it.
2. Press Ctrl+F11. The first time after you open QUILL Lite, it takes a second or two to get ready. Then you hear two rising tones and “Dictation on”.
3. Say a sentence the way you would say it to a friend, and pause.
4. A moment later the sentence is in your document. You hear the soft tone, and the words are read back to you.
5. Keep going. You do not need to press anything between sentences.
6. When you are finished, press Ctrl+F11 or say “stop dictation”. You hear two falling tones and “Dictation off”.

Your words are written once you have been quiet for a little under a second. That means taking a breath in the middle of a sentence will not cut it in two. If a pause does split a sentence, and the next part starts with a word like and, but, which or to, QUILL Lite takes out the full stop the pause put in, and the sentence carries on. The same happens when the first part ends on a word no sentence ends on, like the or very. If you often stop to think, you can make the pause longer too; see “Longer pauses, and sentences you finish later” below.

Holding Ctrl+F11 to talk

Press Ctrl+F11 to start dictating and press it again to stop. That is all most people ever need, and it is how dictation starts out.

If you prefer to hold the key while you talk, like the button on a walkie-talkie, turn on Hold the dictation key to talk; a quick press still turns it on and off in More Dictation Settings. Then:

1. Put the cursor where you want the words.
2. Press and hold Ctrl+F11. You hear the two rising tones and “Dictation on” straight away.
3. Keep holding the keys, and say what you want to say.
4. Let go. Dictation writes your last phrase, then you hear the two falling tones and “Dictation off”.

With that turned on, a quick press still works just the same: dictation turns on and stays on until you press Ctrl+F11 again. QUILL Lite tells the two apart by how long you hold the keys. Half a second or more is a hold.

Stopping never cuts you off. If you press or let go of Ctrl+F11 while you are still finishing a sentence, dictation waits for that phrase, writes it, and then stops.

What you hear

You can change any of these in Dictation Settings, and you can change or silence any tone in Tools > Sound Scheme. Two things always speak, though: a problem, and the answer to a command you gave.

The soft tone plays only once your words are really in the document, so when you hear it, you know they arrived. If you have the words read back, they come a quarter of a second after they are written, so your screen reader does not talk over them.

Hearing the punctuation that went in

When your words are read back, the punctuation is read too, by the same names you would use to dictate it. If you say “hello comma world period”, you hear “Hello comma world period” back, and you know the comma really went in. A sentence that ends in a question mark ends with “question mark”, a quotation starts with “open quote”, and a new paragraph is read as “new paragraph”. This happens whatever punctuation level your screen reader is set to, so a full stop the engine put in for you is never silently missing or silently there.

A few things stay quiet because they are part of a word or a number. The apostrophe in don’t, the hyphen in well-known, and the full stop or comma inside 3.5 or 1,000 are not read out. A web address is read the way you would say it: example.com is “example dot com”. When you dictate in Spanish, the marks are read with their Spanish names, like “coma” and “punto”.

Only the read-back says the names. The status bar and a braille display show the real characters, for example “Dictated: Hello, world.” If you would rather hear the words alone, open More Dictation Settings and uncheck Say punctuation marks in the read-back (Alt+S). It starts checked.

Use headphones if you have the read-back on. Through speakers, the microphone can hear the read-back and write it down a second time. If you use speakers, set “After each phrase is written, give me” to a sound only.

Choosing a speech engine

You choose the engine in Dictation Settings. The first two come with QUILL Lite. Larger models you download for better accuracy are listed there too; see “Better accuracy: optional speech models” below.

The dictation keys

Everything here is also on Tools > Dictation, so you can find it by walking the menu too.

Saying things

Punctuation and layout

You can say these anywhere in a sentence:

• Punctuation: “period” or “full stop”, “comma”, “question mark”, “exclamation point”, “colon”, “semicolon”, “ellipsis”, “apostrophe”, “open quote” and “close quote”, “open single quote” and “close single quote”.
• Brackets: “open parenthesis” and “close parenthesis”, “open bracket” and “close bracket”, “open brace” and “close brace”.
• Joining: “hyphen”, “dash”, “slash”, “backslash”, “underscore”.
• Symbols: “at sign”, “hash sign”, “dollar sign”, “percent sign”, “ampersand”, “asterisk”, “plus sign”, “minus sign”, “equals sign”.
• Layout: “new line” ends the line, “new paragraph” leaves a blank line, and “tab” or “tab key” types a tab.

QUILL Lite puts the spaces where they belong. There is no space before a comma, one after a full stop, and none at the start of a line. The first word of each sentence gets its capital letter. You decide what “dash” writes in Dictation Settings: an em dash, a spaced en dash, or two hyphens.

Sometimes you want the word itself. Say “literal” first: “literal new line” writes new line, and “literal comma” writes comma.

There are more marks for Markdown and code, like “backtick”, “tilde” and “vertical bar”, and words that start a heading or a list item. They are in “Letters, numbers and symbols”, a little further on.

Commands

A command works only when it is the whole phrase, said on its own after a pause. If you say “delete that line of text” in the middle of a longer sentence, it is just written as words.

Fixing what you just said:

Moving the cursor: “go to beginning of line”, “go to end of line”, “go to top”, “go to end of document”, “go to start of paragraph” and “go to end of paragraph”. You can also go to, select or correct any words you can see in your document; see “Moving and selecting by voice”.

Capitals and spaces: “caps on” and “caps off”, “all caps on” and “all caps off”, “no space on” and “no space off”. See “Letters, numbers and symbols”.

Copying, clips and snippets: “copy all”, “show clips”, “show snippets”, “paste clip three”, “insert snippet” and a name. See “Snippets and clips by voice”.

Dictation itself: “start spelling” and “stop spelling” (see “Spelling a word”), “switch to Spanish” (see “Switching between English and Spanish”), “dictation context” and a name (see “Dictation Context for This Document”), “what can I say” (opens the full list), and “stop dictation”.

The commands that change your last phrase only work while it is still exactly as it was written. If you have typed into it since, QUILL Lite leaves it alone and tells you, so your own typing is never changed by mistake.

Correct that: choosing another guess

Sometimes the engine was not sure what you said, and had a second idea. Say “correct that” straight after the phrase, and you hear up to three other guesses, numbered, for example: “1: right to Ann. 2: write two Ann. Say choose and the number.” Then say “choose one”, “choose two” or “choose three”, and that guess takes the place of what was written. You hear “Changed to:” and the new words.

Only Windows speech recognition keeps other guesses. Moonshine, Whisper, the optional models and OpenAI give one answer each, so with them “correct that” tells you there is nothing to choose from. Say “scratch that” and say it again, or add a correction in My Words and Phrases so it comes out right next time.

To fix a word further back, say “correct” and the word itself, like “correct Ann”. The word is selected, and what you say next takes its place. “Moving and selecting by voice” explains how.

Spelling a word

Some names the engine will never get right. For those, say “start spelling”. Until you say “stop spelling”, everything you say is written as letters:

• Say letters by name, like “bee” or “see”. The phonetic alphabet works much better, though: alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot, golf, hotel, india, juliet, kilo, lima, mike, november, oscar, papa, quebec, romeo, sierra, tango, uniform, victor, whiskey, x-ray, yankee, zulu.
• Say “capital” before a letter for a capital, and “space” for a space.
• Numbers are written as digits: “one”, “two” and so on.

For example, say “start spelling”, then “capital bravo alpha delta”, then “stop spelling”, and you get Bad. Each letter is read back as it is written, so you hear a wrong one straight away. Say “scratch that” to take back the last run of letters.

Letters, numbers and symbols

Some things are not words at all: an email address, a file name, a heading mark, a shout in capitals. This section is about writing exactly the characters you want.

Spelling an email address or a web address

While you are spelling, punctuation goes in with no spaces around it, so an address comes out whole. Say “start spelling”, then “juliet alpha yankee dot sierra mike india tango hotel at sign echo x-ray alpha mike papa lima echo dot charlie oscar mike”, then “stop spelling”, and you get jay.smith@example.com. (Plain letter names work too: “jay dot smith at sign example dot com”.)

While you are spelling, “dot” and “point” both mean a full stop. Outside spelling they are just words, so “the main point” stays as you said it.

Say “all caps” while spelling, and the letters after it are capitals until you say “no caps” or the phrase ends. “All caps november alpha sierra alpha” writes NASA.

Spelling one word, without spelling mode

For a single word, you do not need to start and stop spelling mode. Say “spell” and the letters, all in one breath: “spell bravo alpha delta” writes bad, and dictation carries straight on in words. This only happens when “spell” is the first word of the phrase and the rest is letters. A sentence like “spell it out for me” is written as words.

Spelling over what was just written

When the engine has just written a name wrong, say “spell that”. The last phrase is selected, and the next thing you say is spelled out letter by letter and put in its place. It works for that one next phrase only, then dictation goes back to words. For example, you say “my friend Siobhan”, it comes out my friend Shivon, you say “spell that”, and then “capital sierra india oscar bravo hotel alpha november”.

Capitals and spaces that stay on

These last until you turn them off, or until dictation stops. The Dictation part of the status bar shows which are on, and Dictation Status (Alt+F9) tells you too.

For example: say “no space on”, then “my summer notes”, then “no space off”, and you get mysummernotes. Outside spelling, “dot” is a word, so for the full stop in a file name or an address, spell that part: “spell dot tango x-ray tango” writes .txt. For a whole address, spelling mode is usually quickest.

Marks for Markdown and code

You can say these anywhere in a phrase:

Starting a heading or a list item

These count only as the first words of a phrase. If the cursor is not at the start of a line, a new line comes first.

So “heading two Our plans for spring” starts a level two heading, and “bullet buy more coffee” starts a list item. In the middle of a sentence they are ordinary words: “the heading two lines down” is written just as you said it.

Moving and selecting by voice

You can move around your document by saying the words you want to get to. These work with every engine, and they are said at the start of a phrase, followed by words that are already in your document.

And these, said on their own: “select sentence” (or “select this sentence”), “select line”, “select paragraph”, “go to start of paragraph” and “go to end of paragraph”.

Where it looks. QUILL Lite looks first in the text before the cursor, nearest first, because that is usually what you have just said and want to change. If the words are not there, it looks after the cursor.

How it matches. Capitals, punctuation and accents do not matter, and numbers match both ways, so “select two cats” finds 2 cats. Your corrections in My Words and Phrases are applied first, so a word the engine always mishears is still found.

What you hear. One short sentence: “Selected: the cat”, “Before the cat” or “After the cat”. If the place is three lines or more from where you were, the line is added, like “Selected: the cat, line 40”, so you know you have travelled.

If the words are not there. What you said is written as ordinary text, and you hear “Not found, written as text.” Say “scratch that” to take it away. That way a sentence that happens to start with “select” or “correct” is never lost.

The exact commands still come first: “select that” selects your last phrase, and “go to top” goes to the top, as before.

A small example. You dictate “The meeting is on Tuesday at ten.” Then you remember it moved. Say “correct Tuesday”, hear “Correcting Tuesday. Say the new words”, and say “Thursday”. The sentence now reads The meeting is on Thursday at ten.

Snippets and clips by voice

The things you keep for reuse can be reached by voice too: the twelve Copy Tray slots, your snippets (the abbreviations in the Snippets gallery, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Home), and copying.

Said on their own:

Said at the start of a phrase, with words after:

Finding the snippet you mean. You do not need the name exactly. Capitals, punctuation and spaces do not matter. An exact name wins first, then a name that starts with what you said, then a name containing your words. If several match, you hear how many and the Snippets gallery opens so you can choose. If none match, you hear “No snippet called” and what you said, and nothing is written. In QUILL Lite, “insert snippet” and “insert abbreviation” both reach the same library, so use whichever comes to mind.

One phrase, one undo. A snippet or a slot goes in as one dictated phrase. Ctrl+Z or “scratch that” takes the whole thing back. The read-back keeps it short: you hear “Snippet sign off” or “Pasted slot 3”, not the whole text read out.

These are commands, so they do not work while Just write what I say is on.

The full list of what you can say

While you are dictating, say “what can I say”. You can also press Dictation Commands… in Dictation Settings. A window opens with every phrase dictation understands, including your own phrases and your wake phrase. Read it with the arrow keys, and press Escape to close it.

The same list is also its own document, the Dictation commands file (dictation-commands.md), next to this guide. It is made from the very table dictation reads, so it always matches what QUILL Lite understands. It has every way of saying each thing, the Spanish punctuation words, and the spelling alphabet in one place, and it is a good page to keep open beside you for the first week or two.

Starting and stopping with your voice

The wake phrase

If you would rather not reach for the keyboard, you can start dictation by voice. In Dictation Settings, turn on Listen for the wake phrase while dictation is off. Then say the wake phrase to start. It is “Quill dictate” unless you choose something else.

• Say the wake phrase, pause, and start talking. Or say it and carry straight on: “Quill dictate, dear Sam, thank you for your letter” starts dictation and writes Dear Sam, thank you for your letter.
• “Stop dictation” (or Ctrl+F11) stops writing and goes back to waiting for the wake phrase.
• The wake phrase only counts at the start of what you say. If you say “I told Quill to dictate this” while chatting, nothing starts.
• It forgives a near miss. “Quil dictate” still works.

Choosing your own wake phrase. Type any phrase in the Wake phrase box. It needs at least two words. Pick something you would not say in passing; a name and a verb works well. QUILL Lite will not accept a single word, so dictation does not start by accident.

What happens with your microphone. While the wake phrase is on, the microphone is open whenever QUILL Lite is the window in front. Anything it hears that does not start with the wake phrase is dropped straight away. It is never written, kept or sent anywhere. When you switch to another program, the microphone closes, and dictation stops if it was running. When you come back to QUILL Lite, it listens for the wake phrase again. It never listens while QUILL Lite is in the background, so it will not pull you away from whatever else you are doing. The wake phrase is off until you turn it on.

The wake phrase works with Moonshine, Whisper and Windows speech recognition. It does not work with Windows voice typing, because Windows runs that itself.

The stop phrase

Say “stop dictation” on its own, after a pause, and dictation stops. You can add your own words too. Type them in the Stop phrase box in Dictation Settings, and saying them stops dictation just the same. “Stop dictation” keeps working either way.

• The stop phrase counts only when it is everything you said in that breath. If you say “I will stop dictation for today” in the middle of a paragraph, it is written down, not obeyed.
• Like the wake phrase, it forgives a near miss, and it needs at least two words so ordinary talk does not stop you by accident.
• With the wake phrase on, stopping takes you back to listening for the wake phrase. That way you can start and stop without touching the keyboard at all.

Making dictation fit you

Your own words and phrases

You can teach dictation the words you use. Press Alt+Shift+F10 (Tools > Dictation > My Words and Phrases…), or press the My Words and Phrases… button in Dictation Settings. A window lists everything you have taught it, one line each. Whatever you change is used from your very next phrase. There are three kinds:

• Words. Names, jargon and acronyms, spelled the way you want them. When the engine writes something that sounds or looks close, it is fixed to your spelling. Add Tucson, and “tuxon” becomes Tucson. Add Word… asks for the word.
• Phrases. Something short you say that writes something longer. Add Phrase… asks what you will say (my email address) and what it should write (your address). Press Enter in the second box for a new line, so a signature can be two lines.
• Corrections. Something the engine keeps getting wrong, and what to write instead. Add Correction… asks what it writes now (quill light) and what it should write (QUILL Lite). Corrections work on every phrase, with any capitals, on every engine.

Edit… (or Enter on a line) changes the one you are on, and Remove takes it out. Each change is saved straight away and read back to you. If you like working in a file, Open the File… opens the same list as a plain text file called dictation.md.

Your own phrases show up in the “what can I say” list along with everything else.

Choosing the microphone

Dictation Settings lists every microphone by name. The first choice uses whatever Windows is using as the default recording device. Choose a named microphone if you always want that one, whatever the default becomes. If the microphone you chose is unplugged, QUILL Lite tells you when you start dictation. It never quietly listens on a different one.

Talking in one long run: Just write what I say

Some people think out loud in one long run and pause wherever the thought pauses. Normally, each pause ends a phrase: it gets a full stop, a tone plays, and the words are read back. If that gets in your way, turn on Just write what I say: nothing happens at a pause in Dictation Settings. Then a pause does nothing at all:

• No full stop just because you paused. Your words carry on as one sentence until you say “period”, “question mark” or another mark. Moonshine and Whisper still put in marks inside what you say.
• No tone and no read-back after each phrase, so nothing talks over you.
• No voice commands. “Scratch that” or “select that” said on its own is written as words. Punctuation and layout you say, like “comma” or “new paragraph”, still work. So does the stop phrase, so you can always stop by voice.

Your words are still written as you go, and Ctrl+Z still takes back one phrase at a time. Turn it off again when you want the commands back.

The finer choices

• Automatic punctuation (Moonshine and Whisper). When it is on, the engine puts in full stops, commas and question marks for you. When it is off, it adds none, and you say every mark, just as with Windows speech recognition.
• Pause before a phrase is written. Short (half a second), Normal (under a second), Long (about a second and a half), Longer (2 seconds) or Longest (3 seconds). If dictation cuts you off while you are still thinking, choose Long, and go further if you need to; see “Longer pauses, and sentences you finish later” just below. Windows speech recognition uses the same length.
• Remove filler words like um and uh. Hesitations like um, uh, erm and hmm are left out. Real words are never removed.
• Stop dictation after silence. Never, or after 1, 5 or 10 minutes of hearing nothing, so dictation is not left writing in an empty room. With the wake phrase on, it goes back to waiting for the wake phrase instead. You hear why it stopped, for example “Dictation off after 5 minutes of silence.”
• Test Microphone. This button is beside the microphone list. Press it, wait for “Speak now”, and talk for four seconds. You hear how loud the microphone was (almost nothing, quiet, working, or very loud). With Moonshine or Whisper, you also hear exactly what the engine understood. Nothing is kept. The result stays in the box beside the button, so you can read it again.

Longer pauses, and sentences you finish later

Everybody stops to think sometimes. If dictation keeps writing half a sentence while you are still looking for the next word, give yourself more time. In Dictation Settings (Alt+Shift+F6), set Pause before a phrase is written to one of the two longest choices:

• Longer (2 seconds; words appear later)
• Longest (3 seconds; words appear later still)

Every phrase then waits that long after you stop talking before it is written. That is the trade: more room to think, and a little longer to wait before you hear your words back. Start with Longer. Move to Longest only if Longer still cuts you off.

Even on the usual setting, QUILL Lite tries not to break a sentence you have not finished. If a phrase ends on a word that no sentence ends on, the full stop the engine put there is taken back, and your next phrase joins on. These are words like a, an, the, of, to, in, on, at, by, for, with, from, into, about, and, but, or, my, your, his, her, its, our, their, very, really and so. Say “this is a very”, stop to think, then say “good test”, and you get one sentence: This is a very good test.

A full stop you said is never taken back. If you say “period”, you meant it.

Dictation Context for This Document

Some engines do better when they know what you are writing. A letter to your bank, a note to a friend and a page of computer instructions use very different words. Dictation Context for This Document… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+PageUp, in Tools > Dictation) lets you tell it, in a sentence.

The window has:

• This document is: a box where you describe it in your own words, like “A letter to my landlord about the boiler” or “Notes from the Tuesday book club”.
• Start from a saved context: a list of contexts to start from. Yours come first, then five starters: Formal letter, Note to a friend, Technical writing, Meeting notes and Story.
• Also save it as a context named: type a name here to keep this one for other documents.
• Who uses it: a read-only line that tells you which parts of QUILL Lite will use what you wrote.

The context is remembered for this document, so next time you open it, it is already there. An untitled document keeps its context until you close QUILL Lite.

Who uses it. OpenAI dictation, with your own key, uses it to understand you better. Tidy Dictated Text (Ctrl+F3) uses it too, alongside your My Dictation Instructions, so a tidied letter sounds like a letter. The engines on your own computer cannot use a context, and the window tells you so when one of them is chosen. It costs nothing to write one anyway, ready for when you tidy.

By voice. Say “dictation context” and the name of a saved one, like “dictation context meeting notes”, and that context is used for this document.

Privacy. The context only goes where your speech or your text is already going: to OpenAI when you use OpenAI dictation, and to the AI when you use Tidy Dictated Text. It never goes anywhere on its own.

Dictation Settings, every option

Open Tools > Dictation > Dictation Settings… (Alt+Shift+F6). The window has two columns. The left side is about what is heard and written. The right side is about starting and stopping.

Three buttons sit below the options. Dictation Commands… opens the full list of what you can say. My Words and Phrases… saves your settings and opens the window described in “Your own words and phrases” above. More Dictation Settings… (Alt+A) opens the window below.

More Dictation Settings, every option

Press More Dictation Settings… (Alt+A) in Dictation Settings. What you change here is saved when you press OK in Dictation Settings.

Dictating in Spanish

You can dictate in Spanish. It’s new, so think of it as something to try, and let us know how it goes.

To switch it on, open Dictation Settings (Alt+Shift+F6), move to Dictation language, choose Spanish, and press Enter. To go back, choose English the same way. There is a quicker way too, described next.

Switching between English and Spanish

If you write in both languages, you do not need the settings window at all.

• By key: press Ctrl+Shift+F11 (Switch Dictation Language, in Tools > Dictation). Each press switches between English and Spanish, and you hear “Español.” or “English.”
• By voice, in English: say “switch to Spanish” or “Spanish dictation”.
• By voice, in Spanish: say “cambiar a inglés” or “dictado en inglés”. You can leave the accent off; “cambiar a ingles” works just as well.

You can switch while dictation is running. The engine starts again in the new language, which can take a moment the first time. The very first switch to Spanish while you are using Moonshine takes a little longer, because Whisper has to get ready. After that, both stay ready until you close QUILL Lite, so switching back and forth is quick.

The language you choose is saved, so the next time you dictate, you start in the language you used last. QUILL Lite never guesses the language from what you say; it is always your choice. Dictation Status (Alt+F9) tells you which language you are in.

What works in Spanish

What works now:

• Your words come out in Spanish, accents and all. QUILL Lite uses Whisper’s multilingual speech model for this. It comes with QUILL Lite, so there is nothing to download. Moonshine only knows English, so in Spanish you get Whisper whichever of the two you chose.
• Windows speech recognition needs Spanish installed in Windows: add Spanish (Spain or Mexico) in Windows Settings, Time and language, Speech. If it isn’t there, dictation tells you when you start.
• The wake and stop phrases become “Quill dicta” and “deja de dictar”. If you typed your own, yours stay.

Commands stay in English for now. “Scratch that”, “select that”, “new paragraph” and the others work just as they do in English. The one exception is switching back: “cambiar a inglés” and “dictado en inglés” work in Spanish. More Spanish commands will come once a native speaker has checked them.

Punctuation. With automatic punctuation on (the usual setting), Whisper adds the commas, full stops and question marks for you, so just talk. The Spanish punctuation words only work when automatic punctuation is off, or with Windows speech recognition. That’s because “coma” and “punto” are everyday words too, and nobody wants “que coma” turned into a comma. When they are on, you can say:

• “coma” for a comma, “punto” (or “punto y seguido”) for a full stop, and “punto y aparte” for a full stop and a new paragraph
• “punto y coma”, “dos puntos” and “puntos suspensivos”
• “abrir interrogación” and “cerrar interrogación” for the question marks at each end, and “abrir exclamación” and “cerrar exclamación” the same way
• “abrir paréntesis”, “cerrar paréntesis”, “abrir comillas”, “cerrar comillas”
• “guion”, “guion largo” and “arroba”
• “nueva línea”, “nuevo párrafo” and “tabulador”

Say “literal” first to write the word itself: “literal coma” writes coma. Say “what can I say” while dictating to see the full list.

It’s new, and your feedback helps. If a word keeps coming out wrong, or something doesn’t work the way you expect, use Help > Get Help from Support and tell us what you said and what was written.

Better accuracy: optional speech models

Dictation works the moment you install. If you want more accuracy, you can download a larger model.

These are the same local models VS Code offers for its own dictation, plus the rest of the Whisper family. They are free, they are optional, and they run on your computer’s processor; no graphics card needed. Your voice never leaves the computer: the only thing that comes over the internet is the model itself, once, when you ask for it. Nothing downloads on its own, and the built-in Moonshine stays your engine until you choose another.

To download one:

1. Open Dictation Settings (Alt+Shift+F6) and press Better Accuracy: Speech Models… (Alt+B).
2. Arrow through the list. Each row says what the model is good for, how big it is, and whether it is already here. Details (Alt+T) says more: what it is better at, its languages, its download and disk size, which computers suit it, whether this computer should keep up, its published accuracy, its licence, and the folder it will be saved in.
3. Press Download… (Alt+D). A question tells you where the model comes from, how big it is, its licence and where it will be saved. Answer Yes to start. On a metered connection you are asked about that first.
4. You hear “Downloading”, then every quarter of the way. Cancel Download (Alt+L) stops it. What has arrived is kept, so pressing Download again carries on from there, even after you close QUILL Lite.
5. When it says the model is downloaded, press Use for Dictation (Alt+U), then OK in Dictation Settings. Or choose the model in the Speech engine list yourself: downloaded models are listed there with “(downloaded)” after the name.

Every file is checked against a fingerprint (a checksum) we recorded when we added the model. If a file does not match, it is deleted and you are told, so a damaged or changed download can never be used.

Where the models go. One folder for QUILL and QUILL Lite on the same computer, so a model downloaded in one is there for the other: %LOCALAPPDATA%\QuillVille\Dictation\models. In a portable copy, models are saved inside the portable folder, so everything travels together (data\dictation\models in the portable folder). Before a download starts, QUILL checks there is room on that drive and tells you if there is not.

To remove one, choose it in Speech Models and press Remove (Alt+R). It frees the space for both programs. If dictation is using it, choose another engine first.

Will my computer keep up? When Speech Models opens, it spends about two seconds timing the built-in Moonshine on this computer, then works out how each model should do here. The details then say one of three things: it should keep up comfortably; it should keep up but uses more of the processor, so your screen reader may answer a little more slowly while you dictate; or it “may lag behind your speech on this computer”. You can still download any of them. Large models on a dual-core computer with 8 GB of memory are only for when you can wait.

If a downloaded model goes missing (you removed it, or the drive with a portable copy is not there), dictation does not stop and does not change engine silently. It says, in one sentence, that it is using the built-in engine instead, and carries on.

Nemotron shows your words as you speak. It recognises while you talk, so the words heard so far appear in the status bar and on a braille display, and each phrase goes into the document when you pause. See “Seeing the words while you speak”. The other models write each phrase when you pause.

The list, in our suggested order

The order is our suggestion, not a measurement: VS Code’s own models first, then the rest of Whisper, smallest first.

English only, or many languages? The Whisper models ending in “.en” (and Distil-Whisper) only know English, and are a little more accurate in English than the many-language model of the same size. The many-language ones also dictate Spanish. If you only dictate English, choose a “.en” one.

How accurate are they?

These are the figures each model’s makers publish. A word error rate is the share of words a model gets wrong on a recorded test set; lower is better. Test sets differ, so compare numbers only within one line.

• Nemotron 3.5 ASR Streaming: 7.91 percent on FLEURS English and 4.11 percent on FLEURS Spanish, at the chunk size this download uses (NVIDIA’s model card, huggingface.co/nvidia/nemotron-3.5-asr-streaming-0.6b).
• Parakeet Unified: 1.63 percent on LibriSpeech test-clean and 3.11 percent on test-other (huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-unified-en-0.6b).
• Parakeet TDT v3: 4.85 percent on FLEURS English, 3.45 percent on FLEURS Spanish (huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3).
• Whisper, on LibriSpeech test-clean (OpenAI’s Whisper paper, Appendix D, arxiv.org/abs/2212.04356): tiny 7.6, base 5.0, small 3.4, medium 2.9 percent; English-only tiny.en 5.6, base.en 4.2, small.en 3.1, medium.en 3.1. On Spanish (Common Voice 9): tiny 30.3, base 19.6, small 10.3, medium 6.9 percent. That Spanish column is the biggest reason to choose a larger Whisper if you dictate Spanish.
• Distil-Whisper and large-v3, average over short recordings the models were not trained on (the Distil-Whisper model card, huggingface.co/distil-whisper/distil-small.en): large-v3 8.4, distil-large-v3 9.7, distil-medium.en 11.1, distil-small.en 12.1 percent. OpenAI publishes no figure for large-v3-turbo; it describes it as much faster than large-v3 with a small drop in quality.
• Moonshine: base 10.07 percent against tiny’s 12.66, averaged over the Open ASR Leaderboard’s English test sets (Moonshine AI, github.com/moonshine-ai/moonshine).

What each is better at, in plain words: the bigger models cope better with accents, fast speech, a noisy room, names and long sentences; all of them put in punctuation and capitals for you. For Spanish, any of the many-language models beats the built-in tiny by a wide margin.

What we measured on our own test computer (5 October 2026), with QUILL’s benchmark: twelve sentences and two commands read by Windows’ own computer voice, one processor thread, a 12-core desktop with 8 GB of memory. A computer voice is easy to understand, so every model scored about the same (3 to 5 percent of words, mostly “7:30” written as “seven thirty”), and every model heard both commands. What the run does show is cost:

Nemotron, fed at live pace, showed its first words about 1.7 seconds into each sentence. Its memory is for dictation alone; the benchmark, which also loads a second copy to time that, peaked at 1.5 GB.

Seconds of computing per second of speech is on one thread; dictation uses two, and 0.25 is the budget we hold the built-in engines to so your screen reader always has room. Memory is the most the program used while dictating.

When the built-in model is still the better choice: on an older or dual-core computer, on battery, with a clear voice and a good microphone, or when your screen reader must never slow down. Moonshine tiny uses about a twentieth of a second of computing per second of speech and about 200 MB of memory; the large downloads use six to eighty times that.

Nemotron or Parakeet: which should I try?

Both are NVIDIA models of about 0.6 billion parameters, both are free, and both run here on the processor alone, with your voice staying on your computer. The difference is when they listen.

• Nemotron 3.5 ASR Streaming is built for live dictation. It recognises while you speak, in short slices, and NVIDIA designed it for low delay. It writes punctuation and capitals itself, and knows English, Spanish and many other languages. Its words appear in the status bar and on braille while you talk, and each phrase is written when you pause. It decides whether a sentence was a question once it hears the next one, so a full stop it wrote can turn into a question mark a moment later. About 682 MB.
• Parakeet recognises each finished phrase after you pause. Nothing appears until you stop, but having the whole phrase at once can give slightly more accurate final text in some conditions. It writes punctuation and capitals itself, including question marks.
  • Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 knows English, Spanish and 23 other European languages. About 670 MB.
  • Parakeet Unified 0.6B is newer and English only. NVIDIA trained it to work both while you speak and on a finished phrase; QUILL uses it on the finished phrase. About 663 MB.

On our test computer, on one thread, Parakeet Unified needed 0.33 seconds of computing per second of speech, Parakeet TDT 0.34 and Nemotron 0.40; each used about 800 MB of memory. Nemotron, fed at live pace, had its first words about 1.7 seconds into each sentence.

Rule of thumb: for writing as you go, try Nemotron; for dictating a paragraph and then checking it, try Parakeet.

How to tell which is more accurate for you

The published figures come from other people’s voices. Yours is the one that matters.

1. Download one model, choose it, and dictate the way you normally do for a day.
2. Each time a phrase comes out wrong, note it. Recent Phrases (Shift+F11) shows what was written, so you can compare.
3. Switch to another model in the Speech engine list and do the same.
4. Keep the one that made fewer mistakes, and remove the other to free the space.

If you like a more exact answer, QUILL’s benchmark measures any model on your own recordings. Record ten sentences as 16 kHz mono WAV files, write what you said in a transcripts.txt beside them (one line per file: the name, a tab, the words), and run python scripts/dictbench.py <folder> --model nemotron in a copy of QUILL’s source. It prints the share of words wrong, which marks were written, the speed, the memory and how long the model took to load.

OpenAI dictation, with your own key

If you have your own OpenAI key, you can have OpenAI recognise your speech instead of your computer. It is very accurate, punctuates well, gets names right that it has never met, and can show your words while you speak. It is off unless you choose it, and your computer’s own engines stay the default.

Before you choose it, please know this: what you say is sent to OpenAI. While dictation is on with this engine, each phrase you speak goes over an encrypted connection to OpenAI, with your own key, and the words come back. OpenAI bills your account for it. Nothing goes through QUILL’s servers, and QUILL keeps no copy of your voice. OpenAI’s own policies apply to what it receives; read them at openai.com/policies. Silence is never sent, only the speech dictation heard. The built-in engines never send anything anywhere.

What you need: your own OpenAI key, saved in Use My Own AI Key (see the AI help chapter). QUILL’s free AI is never used for dictation. OpenAI dictation does not work in Safe Mode.

Adding your key from here. You don’t have to go looking for it: in Dictation Settings (Alt+Shift+F6), choose More Dictation Settings…, and under “OpenAI, with your own key” press Add or Change OpenAI Key… (Alt+K). Your settings are saved, Use My Own AI Key opens, and once you paste your key, OpenAI appears in the speech engine list. You can also open Use My Own AI Key any time with Alt+F2.

Setting it up, step by step:

1. Open Dictation Settings (Alt+Shift+F6).
2. In Speech engine, choose OpenAI (your own key; sends your speech to OpenAI). It is only in the list on a computer where an OpenAI key is saved.
3. A question says exactly what is sent. Read it, then choose Yes to agree, or No to keep the engine you had. If you just press Enter, the answer is No, and nothing is sent.
4. More Dictation Settings opens with the cursor on OpenAI speech model. QUILL Lite asks OpenAI which speech models your key can use and lists them, newest first. The newest is already chosen.
5. Press Enter to close More Dictation Settings, and Enter again to save Dictation Settings.
6. Press Ctrl+F11 and talk, just as before.

Which model? The list comes from OpenAI, so it is always current, and models OpenAI is retiring are left out. On the day this was written it held two:

• gpt-live-transcribe writes as you speak. The words heard so far appear in the status bar and on braille, and each phrase arrives very soon after you pause.
• gpt-transcribe sends each phrase when you pause, and the words arrive a moment later.

If your model goes away. If OpenAI stops offering the model you chose, More Dictation Settings tells you once, and leaves the choice empty so you can pick another. If you are dictating when it happens, dictation stops and tells you. It never moves to a different model on its own.

Your words help. The names and terms in My Words and Phrases are sent with your speech as words to expect, so they come out spelled your way.

To stop sending your speech, choose another engine in Dictation Settings, or turn off Let OpenAI dictation send my speech to OpenAI in More Dictation Settings.

What it costs. OpenAI charges your account by the minute of speech. QUILL keeps no count; your OpenAI account’s usage page has the real figures.

What you might hear:

• “OpenAI dictation needs your own OpenAI key. Save one in Use My Own AI Key, in the AI menu, first.”
• “OpenAI dictation is not switched on.” Choose OpenAI in Dictation Settings and agree to the question.
• “OpenAI could not be reached. Check the internet connection.” That phrase is lost, and dictation keeps listening.
• “OpenAI did not accept the saved key.” Check your key in Use My Own AI Key.
• “The OpenAI model … is no longer available to your key.” Choose another in More Dictation Settings.

While you dictate

Knowing what dictation is doing

• The status bar has a Dictation part. It says Off, Listening, Hearing you, Writing, Spelling, or Waiting for wake phrase. With Nemotron or OpenAI it says Hearing and the words so far. Press F6 to reach the status bar and arrow to it. Press Enter there to start or stop dictation.
• Tools > Dictation > Dictation On is checked while dictation is writing.
• The tones and the words tell you when it starts and stops.
• Dictation Status (Alt+F9) tells you everything at once, in one sentence. See the next section.

Dictation Status

Press Alt+F9 (Tools > Dictation > Dictation Status) any time, whether dictation is on or off, and QUILL Lite tells you in one sentence what dictation is doing. Nothing changes; it only answers. For example:

• “Dictation is off. Moonshine, in English.” when it is off, so you know what you will get when you press Ctrl+F11.
• “Dictation on, Whisper, in Spanish.” while you are dictating. If capitals or no-space are switched on, or you are spelling, that is added, so you always know why your words are coming out the way they are.
• “Waiting for the wake phrase, Quill dictate.” when the wake phrase is listening.
• “Live transcript: 12 minutes, 1,840 words.” while a live transcript is running.

It is the quickest answer to “is it still listening?” and “which language am I in?”, and it never moves your cursor.

Seeing the words while you speak

With most engines, your words appear when you pause. With Nemotron (an optional download, see “Better accuracy: optional speech models”) or OpenAI dictation, QUILL Lite knows the words while you are still saying them, and shows them to you:

• The status bar shows the words so far after the word Hearing, for example “Hearing: Can you send me the”.
• If you use a braille display, the same words appear on it as they arrive.
• They are not in your document yet, because the engine may still change its mind as it hears more. When you pause, the final words go into the document, and the preview goes away.

You do not hear these words spoken, so nothing talks over you while you talk. If you would like to hear them, open More Dictation Settings and set While you speak, the words heard so far to Show it, and say new words quietly. You then hear the new words every couple of seconds, never the same ones twice. Choose Do not show it to turn the preview off.

Nemotron also gets its punctuation right at the end of a sentence now. It decides whether a sentence was a question once it hears the next one, so a full stop it wrote at your pause can turn into a question mark a moment later, when you carry on talking.

Where the words go

Your words go into the document you started dictation in, at the cursor. Each phrase, with its punctuation and capitals, is one step for Ctrl+Z. So “scratch that” and Ctrl+Z always take back the same thing, even when the phrase replaced a selection. With the wake phrase, the words go into whichever document is in front when you say it.

Your words go where you were when you started speaking. If you move the cursor, or even switch to another window, while a phrase is still being recognised, it is still written where you were speaking. Your cursor is put back where you moved it, and you hear “Written where you started”, with the document’s name if you were somewhere else by then. If that spot has changed in the meantime, the words go at the cursor in that document instead, and you are told.

After that, dictation stops by itself if you close that document, switch it between plain and rich text, or speak while another program or a dialog is in front. QUILL Lite tells you why it stopped.

There is only one microphone. So if dictation is running in one document and you press Ctrl+F11 in a second document, dictation moves there and tells you: “Dictation moved to Letter.txt”.

Dictation will not start in a document you cannot change, such as the read-only copy Compare opens. You hear “This document is read-only, so dictation cannot write here.” and the microphone stays closed.

Cancelling a phrase with Escape

While a phrase is being heard (the Dictation part of the status bar says “hearing you”), press Escape to throw it away. Nothing is written, the words heard so far go too, and you hear “Cancelled”. Ctrl+F11 still stops dictation and keeps what you said. When nothing is being heard, Escape does what it always does.

Dictating into Find, Replace and the AI question box

You can dictate into more than your document. Press Ctrl+F11 in the Find box, either Replace box, the question box of the AI pad, or the message box of the AI Conversation window, and you dictate into that box. It uses the same engine and the same words, and Escape still cancels a phrase. “New line” and “new paragraph” become a space in a one-line box, and commands that move around a document do nothing there. Press Ctrl+F11 again to stop.

Recent phrases

Press Shift+F11 (Tools > Dictation > Recent Phrases…) to see the last twenty phrases you dictated, newest first. Arrow to one and press Enter (Insert Again) to write it at the cursor as one undo step, or press Copy to put it on the clipboard. This is your rescue if “scratch that” took away one phrase too many. The list lasts only until you close QUILL Lite.

Talking to the AI

You can have a spoken conversation with AI help. Open the AI Conversation window (see “Having a conversation” in the AI help chapter). The cursor is already in Your message.

1. Press Ctrl+F11 and ask your question.
2. Pause. Your message is sent, and you hear “Working.”
3. The reply is read aloud. While it is being read, the microphone does not listen, so the reply is never taken as your next message.
4. When the reply has been read, just carry on talking. If you want to speak before it has finished, press Escape: you hear “Listening.” and you can talk straight away.
5. Press Ctrl+F11 again when you are done.

While you are in that box, dictation uses its Talking to AI settings, and it goes back to your usual ones by itself when you leave:

• A longer pause (about a second and a half), so a breath does not send half a question.
• Filler words removed, because the AI does not need them.
• Automatic punctuation on.
• “Just write what I say” does not apply here, because the pause is what sends your message.

All four are in More Dictation Settings, under Talking to the AI. If you would rather check each message before it goes, set Send a dictated message to the AI to When I press Enter. Then pause as often as you like, and press Enter when the message is right.

Each message costs the same as a typed one: one request on QUILL’s free AI, or nothing extra beyond your own key or plan.

Live transcripts

Ordinary dictation is for writing: you speak, pause, hear your words, and carry on. A live transcript is for listening: a lecture, a meeting, a talk, a long voice memo you are speaking out loud. You start it, and QUILL Lite writes down everything it hears until you stop it.

Starting and stopping a live transcript

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+PageDown (Tools > Dictation > Start or Stop Live Transcript).
2. A new, untitled document opens, and the transcript is written into it. It never writes into the document you were working on.
3. Let it run. You can go back to your own document, or to another program altogether, and the transcript carries on.
4. To stop, press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+PageDown again, or Ctrl+F11. You hear how much was written, for example “Live transcript stopped, 1,840 words.”

The very first time, you hear one sentence: “Please record other people only when they have agreed.” It is said once, and never again.

How a transcript differs from dictation

A transcript is built to stay out of your way for an hour or more:

• No commands. Everything heard is written down as words. If the speaker says “scratch that”, that is what goes in the transcript. The one thing that still works is your stop phrase.

• No tone and no read-back for each phrase, so nothing talks over the speaker or over you.

• No wake phrase, and it never stops on silence, so a quiet stretch in a meeting does not end it.

• Filler words are left out, and automatic punctuation is on, whatever you chose for dictation.

• Paragraphs come from pauses. When the speaker stops for four seconds or more, the next words start a new paragraph.

• Time stamps, if you like. Check Time stamps in live transcripts in More Dictation Settings, and each paragraph starts with the time in square brackets, like this:

  [10:42] Thank you all for coming. The first thing on the list is the budget.

Working while it runs

The new words always go at the end of the transcript, wherever you are. So you can go back into the transcript, read what was said a few minutes ago, even add a note of your own in the middle, and your cursor stays where you put it while the new words keep arriving at the bottom.

To check on it, look at the Dictation part of the status bar, which says something like “Live transcript: 12 minutes, 1,840 words”, or press Alt+F9 for Dictation Status, which says the same thing aloud.

Keeping it

When you stop, the transcript stays open, untitled and not yet saved. Press Ctrl+S to save it wherever you like. Until you do, QUILL Lite’s usual recovery protects it the same way it protects any document you have not saved yet, so a power cut does not lose the meeting.

A live transcript listens to your microphone only. It cannot yet hear sound your computer is playing, such as the other side of a video call coming through your speakers; for a recording you already have, use “Transcribing an audio file”, below.

Dictating into other programs

You can dictate into almost any program on your computer: an email, a web form, a chat window, another word processor. This is called Dictate Anywhere, and it is done by Quill Inkwell, the small QuillVille program that also expands your abbreviations everywhere.

What you need first

Quill Inkwell must be installed. It is a separate, free member of the QuillVille family. If it is not on your computer, QUILL Lite tells you so: “Quill Inkwell is not installed with this copy.” Install Inkwell first, then come back to these steps.

Setting it up, step by step

1. In QUILL Lite, open Dictation Settings (Alt+Shift+F6) and set it up the way you like it: engine, microphone, language, pause and so on.
2. Press More Dictation Settings… (Alt+A).
3. Press Dictate in Other Programs… (Alt+O). Your settings are saved, handed to Quill Inkwell, and Inkwell starts. You hear “Quill Inkwell is starting with your dictation settings. Choose the Dictate Anywhere key in its File menu.”
4. If you have not chosen a key yet, Inkwell opens its key chooser for you. Choose a key you will remember and that no other program uses. You can change it later in Inkwell with File > Dictate Anywhere Key….

Until you choose a key, there is none. Inkwell never takes a key on your computer without asking.

Using it

1. Go to the other program and put the cursor where you want the words.
2. Press your Dictate Anywhere key, speak, and pause. Each phrase is typed where the cursor is, just as if you had typed it.
3. Press the key again, or say “stop dictation”, to stop.

You can also turn it on and off from Inkwell’s own Dictation menu, with Dictate Anywhere.

What works there, and what does not

The engines, your own words and phrases, and most of what you can say all work the same way they do in QUILL Lite:

• Punctuation and layout, like “comma” and “new paragraph”.
• Spelling, “spell” and a word, capitals and no-space.
• Switching between English and Spanish.
• “Scratch that”, which takes your last phrase back with Backspace, as long as you are still in the same window.

Some commands need to read the text of the document, and Inkwell cannot read another program’s text. So “select”, “go to”, “correct”, “select sentence”, clips and snippets are answered with a sentence that starts “That works in QUILL’s own documents”, and nothing is typed.

For your safety, Dictate Anywhere will not type into a password box. It also will not type into a program running as administrator when Inkwell is not, into QUILL Lite’s or QUILL’s own windows (use Ctrl+F11 there, which does much more), or into Inkwell’s own window. Each time, you hear a sentence saying why.

What you hear

In other programs, your screen reader already says each character as it is typed, so Inkwell starts with a tone only after each phrase, rather than reading the words back as well. You can change that.

Inkwell keeps its own copy of your dictation settings. To change them, open Inkwell’s Dictation menu and choose Dictation Settings…. It is the same window you know from QUILL Lite. Or set things up in QUILL Lite and press Dictate in Other Programs… again to hand them over once more.

Inkwell uses the My Words and Phrases list that the full QUILL editor keeps, so if you also use QUILL, a name you taught it there comes out right in your email too. Dictate Anywhere is off in Safe Mode.

Transcribing an audio file

Sometimes the words you want are already in a recording: a voice note from your phone, an interview, a lecture, a meeting somebody recorded for you. QUILL Lite can listen to the recording and write down what was said, using the same speech engines you dictate with. It works in the background, so you can keep writing while it listens, and it tells you when it is done.

Your first transcription, step by step

1. Press Shift+F5, or choose Tools > Dictation > Transcribe a Recording…. The Transcribe a Recording window opens with the cursor in Recording.
2. Type the full path of the file, or press Browse… (Alt+B) and choose it. You can also drag a file from File Explorer and drop it on the window.
3. Check Language spoken in the recording (Alt+L): English or Spanish.
4. Check Speech model (Alt+M). The most accurate model on your computer is already chosen for you. Just below it, About this model and this recording says what the model is good for, how long the recording is, and about how long it should take on your computer, for example “The recording is 12 minutes long. With NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3, transcribing it should take about 6 minutes on this computer.”
5. There is no output-location choice. QUILL Lite saves the finished transcript privately. Activate its completion notice in Notifications to open it in a new document; it does not insert text into the document you were editing.
6. Press Enter. You hear “Transcribing meeting.mp3 in the background.”
7. Carry on with whatever you were doing. The status bar shows how far it has got, and every quarter of the way you hear it quietly: “meeting.mp3: 25 percent”. When it is done you hear one sentence, such as “Transcribed meeting.mp3: 12 minutes, 1,804 words, in 6 minutes, in a new document.”

That is all there is to it. The rest of this section explains the choices.

What the text looks like

The text is written the way dictation writes it: full stops, commas, question marks and capital letters put in by the speech engine, with the spacing tidied between sentences. A few more things happen on the way:

• Paragraphs. A new paragraph starts wherever the recording goes quiet for two seconds or more. If somebody talks for more than two minutes without a long pause, the next pause of any length starts a new paragraph, so you never get one enormous block.

• Timestamps, if you want them. Timestamps are off unless you turn them on. Check Add timestamps (Alt+T) and every paragraph begins with the hours, minutes and seconds where it was said, like this:

  [00:01:23] The budget for the spring term is nearly final.

  It makes it easy to find a passage again in the recording.

• Your own words. The corrections in My Words and Phrases are used, so a name the engine always mishears comes out your way.

• Filler words. If you have Remove filler words turned on in Dictation Settings, the ums and ahs are left out here too.

• Spoken punctuation. In a recording, somebody who says “new paragraph” or “comma” usually means the words, so they are written as words. If you recorded yourself dictating on purpose, check Obey spoken punctuation and commands (Alt+O): then “comma”, “period”, “new line”, “new paragraph” and “scratch that” work just as they do when you dictate. Commands that move the cursor are ignored, because there is no cursor in a recording.

Which model for which recording

The Speech model list shows every model on your computer, most accurate first: the two that come with QUILL Lite, and any you downloaded in Dictation Settings, Speech Models (see “Better accuracy: optional speech models” earlier in this chapter). Here is how to choose:

• Voice notes and dictated letters. One clear voice, close to the microphone. Moonshine tiny is built in, is the fastest by far, and does this well. Whisper tiny is the one to try if Moonshine mishears an accent.
• Interviews and meetings. Several voices, people interrupting, someone further from the microphone. A downloaded model is worth it here. Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 is our first choice: it is the most accurate model we offer and among the quickest of the big ones. Whisper small, medium or large-v3-turbo are good too, just slower.
• Lectures and talks. One voice, a long time, and plenty of special words. Parakeet again, or a Whisper model. Before you start, add the speaker’s names and terms to My Words and Phrases, and you will spend less time correcting.
• Noisy rooms. A café, a car, a hall with an echo. The bigger the model, the better it copes: Parakeet, Whisper medium or Whisper large-v3-turbo. The two tiny models struggle with noise. OpenAI is very good with noise too, if you use your own key (see below).
• Spanish. Choose Spanish as the language first. The built-in Whisper tiny knows Spanish, and so do Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3, Nemotron and the multilingual Whisper models. The list shows only the models that know the language you chose.

A model that is too slow for live dictation is fine for a recording: nobody is waiting at the end of each sentence. The estimate tells you the wait before you start.

How long it takes

How long depends on the model and on your computer. These are our estimates for a one-hour recording, worked out from the speeds we measured for each model, on a modest computer (two processor cores, 4 GB of memory) and on a more capable one (four or more cores, 8 GB or more):

For a real example: a three-minute recording took 10 seconds with Moonshine tiny, 20 seconds with Whisper tiny and 25 seconds with Parakeet on the computer QUILL Lite is developed on, plus a few seconds the first time while the model loads.

Transcribing uses two of your processor’s cores, the same as dictation, so your screen reader stays quick. The model is put away a few minutes after the last transcription finishes, which gives its memory back.

Where the text goes

• Saved privately until you open it. When transcription finishes, the transcript is saved without changing the document you were editing. Activate the completion notice in Notifications to open it in a new document; the Transcribe a Recording window has no destination picker.

Several recordings, checking on it, and stopping

• Several at once. In Browse, hold Ctrl and choose more than one file. They are transcribed one after another with the same choices, and each one opens in its own new document when it finishes. If one is already running when you start another, you hear “Added to the queue”.
• How far has it got? Press Shift+F5 again. At the top of the window, Transcribing now says which recording it is on, how far it has got, and how many are waiting. Press Escape to close the window and let it carry on.
• Stopping. In that same window, press Stop Transcribing (Alt+S). The recording being transcribed stops, any waiting ones are forgotten, and nothing is written into a document.
• If you missed the result sentence. Shift+F9 opens Activity, which keeps the transcription outcome and any failure reason for this session. To open the saved transcript, activate its completion notice in Notifications.

Which files it can read

MP3, M4A, AAC, WAV, Ogg, Opus, FLAC and WMA, and also the sound in an MP4 file and AIFF. QUILL Lite reads all of them itself, using parts of Windows that are already on your computer, so there is nothing extra to download and no other program to install. Files with copy protection, such as some bought audiobooks, cannot be read.

Privacy, and OpenAI with your own key

With the models on your computer, nothing leaves your computer. The recording is read, not copied, and nothing is kept afterwards except the text.

If you have your own OpenAI key saved in Use My Own AI Key, OpenAI’s speech models appear at the bottom of the list a moment after the window opens. OpenAI is very accurate, especially with several voices, accents and noise, but it sends your recording to OpenAI, so it is never chosen for you, and it is never offered in Safe Mode. When you choose it and press Enter, a question says exactly what will be sent. The answer is No unless you choose Yes, every time. If you agree:

• the speech in the recording is sent over an encrypted connection to OpenAI, about a minute at a time, with your own key, and the words come back;
• OpenAI bills your account by the minute of audio;
• the names in My Words and Phrases are sent as words to expect;
• nothing goes through QUILL’s servers, and QUILL keeps no copy;
• OpenAI’s own policies apply to what it receives; you can read them at openai.com/policies.

Please only send recordings you have the right to share, and that the people speaking in them have agreed to. The live model, gpt-live-transcribe, is not in this list: it is made for a microphone, not a file.

Messages you might hear

• “meeting.mp3 was not found.” The file was moved or renamed. Choose it again with Browse.
• “meeting.mp3 could not be read as a recording.” It is not one of the formats above, or it is damaged or protected.
• “meeting.mp3 was read to the end, but no speech was found in it.” The recording is silent, or very quiet. Nothing is written.
• “… could not be loaded, so this used the built-in engine.” A downloaded model would not load, so Moonshine did the work instead. Removing and downloading the model again in Speech Models may help.
• “Stopped transcribing meeting.mp3.” You pressed Stop Transcribing.
• “Could not transcribe meeting.mp3”, followed by the reason, for anything else. You hear the error tone, and the reason stays in Activity.

When something goes wrong

If the microphone drops

If the microphone is unplugged, a Bluetooth headset drops out, or the sound goes completely silent for a few seconds, you hear “The microphone stopped. Dictation is paused and will resume when it comes back.” Dictation stays on, writes nothing, and waits for the microphone. When it comes back you hear “Microphone back. Listening.” and you carry on. Meanwhile, the Dictation part of the status bar says “paused, microphone lost”.

If the speech engine itself stops answering, QUILL Lite quietly restarts it once, and you will not notice. If it fails again, dictation stops and tells you, for example “Moonshine stopped working. Try Whisper in Dictation Settings.”

On a modest computer

Dictation is built to be kind to an older computer, so your screen reader stays quick:

• Nothing runs while dictation is off. The speech model is loaded the first time you start dictation, kept ready while you use it, and put away a few minutes after you stop, which gives its memory back.
• If the computer cannot keep up. If an optional model you downloaded falls behind your voice, because the computer is busy or on battery saver, you hear “This computer is busy, so dictation switched to the faster built-in engine for now. Your choice in Dictation Settings is unchanged.” Dictation carries on with Moonshine. Next time you start, it tries your model again.

Messages you might hear

Dictation always tells you what happened and what to do. These are the usual ones:

• No microphone was found. Connect one and press Ctrl+F11 again.
• The microphone you chose is not connected. Plug it in, or choose another one in Dictation Settings.
• The microphone could not be opened. In Windows Settings, go to Privacy and security, then Microphone, and make sure desktop apps are allowed to use it.
• A speech engine is not included in this copy. Choose another engine in Dictation Settings. Reinstalling QUILL Lite puts the missing one back.
• With Windows speech recognition: no speech recogniser is installed. Add a speech language in Windows Settings, under Time and language, then Speech.
• “This document is read-only, so dictation cannot write here.” Dictate into a document you can type in.
• “Moonshine stopped working. Try Whisper in Dictation Settings.” The engine failed twice in one session. The first time, QUILL Lite restarted it for you without a word. Choose the other engine, and if it keeps happening, write to support.
• “Written where you started.” You moved while a phrase was being recognised, and it went where you were speaking. Nothing is wrong.
• “This computer is busy, so dictation switched to the faster built-in engine for now.” See “On a modest computer” above.
• OpenAI’s messages are listed in “OpenAI dictation, with your own key”.

If it keeps mishearing you

• Try Whisper instead of Moonshine, or the other way round.
• Use a headset microphone instead of a laptop’s built-in one.
• If you are using speakers, set the read-back to a sound only.
• Add names you use often to My Words and Phrases.

Turning dictation off completely

Dictation is on in every profile except WordPad and Notepad. You can switch it off in Customize Features like any other area. That removes the menu, the keys and the wake phrase.

Dictating well

Dictation gets much better with a few good habits. None of this is hard, and most of it you only set up once.

Your microphone and your room

• A headset microphone beats anything else. A microphone that sits a finger’s width from the corner of your mouth hears you clearly and hears the room hardly at all. A laptop’s built-in microphone hears the fan, the keyboard and the television.
• Keep it in the same place. Too close and your breath pops; too far and you sound thin. Find a spot and leave it there.
• Use Test Microphone in Dictation Settings once, when you first set up. If it says “quiet”, move the microphone closer or turn up its level in Windows. If it says “very loud”, the other way.
• Quieten the room if you can. Close a window, turn off music, move away from a humming fridge. Bigger models cope better with noise, but nothing copes as well as quiet.

How to speak

• Speak the way you would to a friend across the table: a normal pace and a normal voice. Shouting and slowing right down both make recognition worse, not better.
• Say a whole thought, then pause. A sentence or two at a time works best. The engine uses the words around a word to work out what you meant, so a full sentence comes out better than one word at a time.
• Think first, then speak. If you need to stop and think in the middle, that is fine, but it helps to know roughly what you will say before you start.

Choosing the pause

The pause is how long you have to be quiet before a phrase is written.

• Normal suits most people.
• If dictation keeps writing half your sentence while you are still thinking, choose Long.
• If you take long breaks in the middle of a sentence, or you are still getting used to dictating, try Longer (2 seconds).
• Choose Longest (3 seconds) only if Longer still cuts you off. Your words arrive a little later, but you have plenty of room.
• If you are quick and fluent and the wait feels slow, try Short.

Remember that a phrase ending on a word like the or very waits for the rest of the sentence anyway; see “Longer pauses, and sentences you finish later”.

Punctuation habits

• Let the engine do the ordinary marks. Moonshine, Whisper and the optional models put in full stops, commas and question marks for you. Talk naturally, and pause at the end of a sentence.
• Say a mark when it matters. A comma in a list, a colon before a list, a question mark on a question that does not sound like one. What you say always wins.
• Say “new paragraph” between paragraphs. A pause alone never starts one.
• Listen to the read-back. With Say punctuation marks in the read-back checked, you hear “comma” and “period” where they went in, so you know straight away whether your sentence is punctuated the way you wanted.

Fixing mistakes: the correction loop

You do not have to reach for the keyboard to fix most mistakes. Work through these from the top, and stop at the first one that does the job:

1. “Scratch that” takes back the phrase you just said. Then say it again, a little more clearly. This is the quickest fix of all.
2. “Correct” and the wrong word fixes something further back: “correct Tuesday”, then “Thursday”. Or “select” and the words, then say what should be there instead. See “Moving and selecting by voice”.
3. “Spell that” is for a name the engine will never get: the last phrase is selected and you spell it out. See “Letters, numbers and symbols”.
4. Recent Phrases (Shift+F11) is your rescue if you scratched one phrase too many. Arrow to the phrase and press Enter to put it back.
5. Tidy Dictated Text (Ctrl+F3) is for the end, not the middle. When you have dictated a long passage, select it and let the AI tidy the small slips all at once. Your My Dictation Instructions, and your Dictation Context for This Document, tell it how you like your writing.

And when the same word goes wrong again and again, stop fixing it and teach it: add it in My Words and Phrases (Alt+Shift+F10), and it comes out right from then on.

With your screen reader running

Two voices can tell you about your words: QUILL Lite’s read-back, and your screen reader.

• QUILL Lite’s read-back says the whole phrase once it is written, with its punctuation. It waits a quarter of a second so your screen reader can finish first. This is usually the most useful.
• Your screen reader may also say the words as they appear, if it is set to echo typed text or to read new text in the document. If you hear everything twice, turn one off. Many people keep QUILL Lite’s read-back and turn the screen reader’s typing echo down while dictating; others set “After each phrase is written, give me” to a sound only and listen to the screen reader instead.

Use headphones. Through speakers, the microphone can hear the read-back, or your screen reader, and write it down a second time. If you must use speakers, set the read-back to a sound only, and keep the screen reader’s voice down while you dictate.

Choosing a model

• Start with Moonshine, the one QUILL Lite comes with. For most voices it is quick and accurate.
• If it mishears your accent or your microphone, try Whisper, which also comes with QUILL Lite.
• For more accuracy, download one of the optional models (see “Better accuracy: optional speech models”). For writing as you go, try Nemotron; for dictating a paragraph and then checking it, try Parakeet.
• Judge with your own voice. Use one model for a day, then another, and keep the one that needed fewer fixes.

Dictating in Spanish

• In Spanish, the built-in choice is Whisper, and a larger model makes a big difference. If you dictate a lot of Spanish, Nemotron, Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 or a bigger Whisper is well worth the download.
• Let automatic punctuation do the marks. The Spanish punctuation words only work when it is off, or with Windows speech recognition.
• Switch with Ctrl+Shift+F11, or say “switch to Spanish” and “cambiar a inglés”. Dictation Status (Alt+F9) tells you which you are in.

On a modest computer

• Moonshine is the kindest to an older computer, and it is what you start with. It uses very little of the processor, so your screen reader stays quick.
• Close what you are not using while you dictate, especially a web browser with many pages open.
• Leave the big models for recordings. A model too slow for live dictation is fine for Transcribe a Recording (Shift+F5), where nobody is waiting at the end of each sentence.
• If an optional model falls behind, QUILL Lite moves to Moonshine for now and tells you. Nothing is lost.

Two short paragraphs to practise on

Put the cursor in a new, empty document, press Ctrl+F11, and try these. Pause where you see a full stop. Say the marks in quotation marks as words.

Practice one: punctuation. Say:

The book club meets on Thursday “comma” in the library “period” Please bring your copy “comma” your questions “comma” and a friend “period” “new paragraph”

What should come out:

The book club meets on Thursday, in the library. Please bring your copy, your questions, and a friend.

You should hear the read-back say the commas and full stops, and the new paragraph. If a comma is missing, say “scratch that” and say that phrase again.

Practice two: fixing a name. Say:

My neighbour Siobhan grows tomatoes and beans “period”

Listen to the read-back. The engine may well write the name some other way, say Shivon. If it does, say “correct Shivon” (whatever you heard), then “spell capital sierra india oscar bravo hotel alpha november”. What should come out:

My neighbour Siobhan grows tomatoes and beans.

Now add Siobhan in My Words and Phrases, scratch the sentence, and say it again. This time the name should come out right first time.

More practice: the tutorials

Help > Tutorials (Ctrl+Alt+F1) has five short dictation lessons in the Working in a document track, beside Write by talking. Each takes a few minutes and tells you what you should hear when you got it right:

• Punctuation and symbols by voice: saying marks, starting a heading and a list, and spelling a web address.
• Fix a word by voice: selecting and correcting a word you said, and spelling a name.
• Snippets and clips by voice: copying, pasting a Copy Tray slot, and putting in a snippet.
• Switch to Spanish and back: the language key and the voice commands.
• Make a live transcript: starting one, asking how it is going, and stopping and saving it.

What you learned, and where to go next

You can now dictate with Ctrl+F11, pressing it to start and again to stop, or holding it while you talk once you turn that on. You can fix what you said with “scratch that” or “correct that”, spell a hard name, and start and stop by voice with the wake and stop phrases. You know that your words go where you started speaking, how to see them while you talk with Nemotron or OpenAI, and how to talk to the AI out loud. You also know where to teach dictation your own words, what OpenAI dictation sends and how to turn it on or off, and what to do when the microphone or the engine has trouble. And with Shift+F5 you can turn a recording into text in the background, with whichever model suits it.

You can also hear the punctuation that went in, spell an address and type Markdown marks by voice, select, go to and correct any words you can see, and reach your clips and snippets without the keyboard. You can switch between English and Spanish with Ctrl+Shift+F11, give yourself a longer pause, tell dictation what a document is with Ctrl+Alt+Shift+PageUp, and ask what it is doing with Alt+F9. A live transcript (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+PageDown) writes down a whole meeting, and Quill Inkwell lets you dictate into other programs.

To practise with QUILL Lite beside you, open Help > Tutorials… (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and choose “Write by talking”, and then the five newer dictation lessons listed in “More practice: the tutorials”. Keep the Dictation commands file (dictation-commands.md) document handy too, or say “what can I say” while you dictate. To change the tones you hear, see Sounds in Chapter 8.

Next, Chapter 10, AI help, covers the AI pad, including Tidy Dictated Text, which cleans up a long dictated passage, and My Dictation Instructions, which tell it how you like your writing.

Chapter 10: AI help

AI help can summarize a passage, tidy your wording, answer a question about your document, translate, and more. It is off when you first install QUILL Lite. To use it you do two things: switch it on, and accept the privacy agreement. Doing only one of them is not enough. Switching on AI help, in Chapter 11, explains why there are two steps, and the three places you can find the agreement.

If you would like the app to walk you through it, the tutorial Asking a question about a document covers turning it on, connecting, asking and checking what you have left.

Once it is on, you have one window to work in, called the pad. It can do seventeen things, and two keys open it:

• AI Assistant (Ctrl+Alt+G) opens the pad where you are.
• Ask About This Document (Ctrl+Alt+Z) opens the same pad with Ask a question about the document already chosen, so you can go straight to typing your question.

There are also twelve questions you can ask about the word you are on, under Tools > Dictionary. They are explained in Dictionary, in Chapter 7.

Using the AI pad

What the pad looks like, top to bottom

1. What will be sent. A read-only box holding exactly the text that will go, and nothing else from your document. It is worth arrowing through it before you press anything.
2. Send this much. A chooser that appears when there is more than one sensible choice: what you selected, the paragraph you are in, or the whole section. The box above changes to match as you choose.
3. What do you want done? A list of the seventeen things the pad can do. Arrow through it, or press a letter to jump:

4. Your question. This box appears only for the three choices where you type something. For Have a conversation it is your first message, and you can leave it empty: the conversation window then opens ready for you. For Translate, you get a Translate into list instead, with twenty languages. Spanish is chosen until you pick another.
5. Send. Nothing leaves your computer until you press it.

A few things worth knowing about the choices:

• A general question is one question and one answer. The next question does not remember the last one. If you want it to remember, choose Have a conversation instead (see Having a conversation, below).
• Answers to a general question and conversation replies can be longer than the others: about 1,000 tokens, which is roughly 750 words.
• Any of the seventeen can be switched off on QUILL’s service from time to time. If the one you chose is off, the pad tells you when you press Send, and nothing is used.

What comes back, and what you can do with it

The answer arrives in a read-only box of its own. Under it are these buttons:

• Replace My Selection
• Insert Below
• Copy
• Try Again
• Follow Up, which carries on from this answer as a conversation.

The first two only appear when they make sense. For example, if you did not select anything, there is nothing to replace.

Nothing is changed in your document for you. Proofread, for instance, tells you what it found and leaves every character alone until you press Replace My Selection. You always get to read it first.

What is sent, and when

Text is only sent when you press Send in the pad, or send a message in a conversation. Then the text you asked about, either the selection or the document, goes to QUILL’s own service and the answer comes back. Nothing is sent while you type, nothing is sent in the background, and closing the pad without asking sends nothing at all.

Having a conversation

Have a conversation opens the AI Conversation window. You talk back and forth, and each reply knows what was said before it.

There are two ways in:

• Choose Have a conversation in the pad.
• Press Follow Up in any answer window to carry on from that answer. If the answer was about your document, the follow-up keeps sending the same passages, so you can keep asking about them.

What is in the conversation window

From top to bottom:

1. About this conversation. What goes with each message, and which service answers it.
2. Conversation. Everything said so far, newest at the end, as “You:” and “AI:” paragraphs. It is read-only. Press Shift+Tab from the message box to reach it.
3. Your message. This is where you start. Type, then press Enter to send.
4. The buttons: Send, New Conversation, Copy Last Reply, Insert Last Reply Below, and Close.
5. Status. Whether it is working, what answered, or what went wrong.

When a reply arrives, it is read aloud and added to the conversation. You stay in the message box, so you can answer straight away.

Nothing goes into your document unless you press Insert Last Reply Below, and Ctrl+Z takes that back like any other edit.

Long conversations on the free AI

Each message you send is one request, and conversations have their own monthly share: 40 of your 100 requests.

To stay within the size limit, each message carries as much of the conversation so far as will fit, newest first. That means a very long conversation slowly forgets how it began. The first time that happens, the window tells you: “The beginning of this conversation is no longer sent, to stay within the free limit.” Press New Conversation whenever you want a fresh start.

With your own AI key there is no such limit. The whole conversation goes with every message and is billed to your OpenAI account, so a long conversation costs more per reply. It is only shortened if it grows past what the model can read at once, and the window tells you if that happens.

QUILL’s free AI

Unless you choose otherwise, AI help runs on QUILL’s own free service. There is no account, no password and no email address to give. You connect each computer once, and then you have a monthly allowance.

Connecting this computer

1. Open Tools > AI > Connect or Sign Out (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F10). If you have just accepted the agreement and this computer is not connected yet, you are brought here automatically.
2. The window gets an eight-character code from QUILL and reads it out to you. The code is also in a read-only box, where you can arrow through it one character at a time. Say the Code Again repeats it, and Copy the Code puts it on the clipboard.
3. Press Open the Connect Page. Your browser opens with the code already filled in. Press Confirm on that page. If you prefer, you can type the code into the web address the window names on any other device with a browser, such as your phone.
4. Come back to QUILL Lite. The window changes to say you are connected, and you will hear that it worked. Your focus stays where it was.

Afterwards, the same window has Sign Out This Computer and Copy Support ID. Your support ID is what to give if you ever write to support about AI.

Each computer connects separately. Signing one out does not sign out the others.

What is recorded. When you use AI, the text you asked about goes to QUILL and on to the model that writes the answer. QUILL records how many requests you make and how big they were. It does not record what you wrote or what came back.

How much you can send at once

One request can be about 3,000 tokens. That is roughly 2,250 words or 12,000 characters, counting your document text, your question and the instructions together.

If what you chose is bigger than that, the pad tells you before anything is sent, in words rather than tokens: “that is about 4,000 words, and the free limit is about 2,250”. Select less and try again. Nothing is sent in the meantime.

The answer is capped at about 500 tokens, which is a few hundred words. For a general question it is about 1,000.

A long document still works. Ask About This Document does not send the whole file. It picks the three passages most likely to answer your question, each about 180 words and labeled with the heading it sits under, and sends those. So you can ask about a hundred-page document; the limit is on how much goes in one request, not on how long your document is. The pad shows you which passages it chose before anything is sent.

Checking what you have left

• Usage (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F9) shows what you have used and what is left. Look here before you run out, rather than finding out when a request is turned down.
• Help > About QUILL Lite shows the same allowance, and this computer’s support ID, under QUILL’s free AI. The numbers are fetched fresh each time, so give it a moment after About opens.
• Connect or Sign Out (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F10) connects this computer, or disconnects it. Signing out does not take back your agreement. Taking back your agreement does sign you out.
• Privacy Agreement (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K) always opens, whether AI help is switched on or not, and whether you have accepted or not. You can always read what you are agreeing to.

All of these keys are listed again in Every key, in one table, under Tools > AI.

Limits, and when they start again

The free AI is shared by everyone who uses it, so it has limits. Here is every one of them in one place.

Your allowance at a glance

These are the service’s current settings. They can change without an update to QUILL Lite, and Usage always shows the numbers that apply to you right now.

“Any one kind” means that Summarize, Rewrite, Proofread, Explain and Ask About This Document each have a monthly share of 60, so no single one can use up your whole month. The daily and hourly limits are there to catch something running away by mistake. Ordinary work stays well inside them.

When the counts start again

The service keeps time in UTC, not in your own time zone:

• The hour starts again on the hour.
• The day starts again at midnight UTC. That is 8 PM Eastern or 5 PM Pacific in summer, and an hour earlier in winter. So in North America, your new day’s requests arrive in the evening.
• The month starts again at midnight UTC on the 1st. Usage shows the exact date.

What counts as a request

One request is one press of Send that comes back with an answer. Try Again is another request.

A request that does not produce an answer is not counted. That includes one that was too long, one sent with no internet connection, one that hit a problem on the service, and one sent after a limit was already reached. Opening Usage or About never uses anything.

When you reach a limit

The AI window tells you which limit you reached and when it starts again. Your focus moves to that message, so you can read it again with the arrow keys. It ends with an error code, QUILL-AI-GATEWAY-QUOTA, which is useful to include if you write to support.

Nothing is used, nothing in your document changes, and the rest of the editor carries on as normal. Wait until the time it names, or ask for more (see Asking for more, below).

If the message says QUILL’s free AI is paused, it is not about you. The service has a spending limit for everyone together, and when that is reached, the free AI pauses for everyone until the 1st. This is rare, and you are told when it happens.

A new connection starts smaller

For its first 48 hours, a newly connected computer gets 15 requests. After that, the full allowance applies on its own. You do not need to do anything. This keeps people from connecting over and over to get a fresh allowance each time, and most people trying it out do not reach 15 on the first day.

While it applies, Usage and About say so and tell you exactly when it ends. Signing out and connecting again starts a new connection, so it never gets you more.

Computers that share an internet connection

A household, a classroom or a library usually shares one internet address. A few limits apply to that address as a whole: how many computers can be connected from it at once, how many new connections it can make in an hour, and a monthly total shared by every computer on it. They are generous for a home, and the exact numbers are not published. Signing a computer out frees up its place.

If a class or a computer lab runs into these limits, write to support. This is exactly the kind of thing they can help with.

Asking for more

1. Choose Get Help from Support in the Help menu (Ctrl+Alt+F2).
2. Say what you need and why: a course, a deadline, a book.
3. Send it. If this computer is connected, its support ID is added to the message for you, and that is all support needs to find you. There is no account name or password to give.

Support can raise your monthly allowance, and can end the smaller new-connection allowance early. The change applies from your next request. You do not need to sign out, reconnect or update anything, and Usage shows the new number the next time you open it.

Your support ID is also in Help > About QUILL Lite and in Usage, with a Copy Support ID button, if you would rather write from somewhere else.

Using your own OpenAI or Google Gemini key

If you have an OpenAI account or a Google Gemini key, you can use your own key instead of QUILL’s free service. Then every limit goes away: no monthly, daily or hourly allowance, no 2,250-word ceiling, and no smaller first 48 hours. You pay the provider for what you use.

Setting it up

Open Tools > AI > Use My Own AI Key (Alt+F2). The window has these parts, from top to bottom:

1. Provider. Choose OpenAI or Google Gemini. Everything else in the window follows this choice: where your text goes, which key, which models and whose prices. AI help uses the key saved for the provider you choose here, and never the other one. QUILL never guesses the provider from a key or a model name.
2. About this. A read-only box that says exactly where your text goes. Arrow through it once.
3. API key. Paste the key for the provider you chose. An OpenAI key comes from platform.openai.com, under API keys, and starts with sk-. A Gemini key comes from Google AI Studio at aistudio.google.com/apikey.
4. Model. A list of every model your key can use for text, filled in from your account once the key is checked. For OpenAI, Luna 6 comes first, then the other GPT-6 models. For Gemini, 2.5 Flash comes first, then 2.5 Pro. The rest follow by name. Each row says roughly what it costs, for example “gpt-6-luna, about $0.57 per 100 requests (estimate)”, so you can compare them just by arrowing down. Models that cannot answer in text, such as speech, transcription, image and embedding models, are left out.
5. Cost estimate. What the chosen model costs per request and per 100 requests, at the chosen provider’s prices. These are estimates to help you compare, not the provider’s actual prices. A typical request is about a page of text in and a paragraph back. The real prices are at openai.com/api/pricing and ai.google.dev/pricing.
6. Status. Whether a key is saved for the chosen provider, what the last test said, and whether a key for the other provider is saved too.
7. Test the Key. Checks the key with your provider, fills in the model list, then sends one tiny request to the chosen model and tells you whether it answered. That request costs a fraction of a cent.
8. Remove the Saved Key. Forgets the chosen provider’s key straight away, and AI help goes back to QUILL’s free service.

Press OK to save. QUILL Lite says “AI help uses your own OpenAI key, with no limits”, or “your own Google Gemini key”.

To change the model later, press Alt+F2 again. With a key saved, your models are listed straight away. Pick another and press OK.

There is no separate on or off switch. While a key is saved for the chosen provider, AI help uses it. Remove the key and AI help goes back to the free service, with its free allowance, at that moment.

You can save both keys. The Provider list decides which one is used. If you choose OpenAI, a saved Gemini key just sits there unused. The status line tells you it is there, and choosing Google Gemini is how you use it. Your text only ever goes to the company you chose.

With a Gemini key, Ask About an Image works too. Gemini’s models can read pictures. The free service and an OpenAI key cannot, so with a Gemini key, Ctrl+F5 works just as it does with a ChatGPT subscription.

What changes with your own key

• Your text goes straight from your computer to the provider you chose, OpenAI or Google, on your account. Nothing passes through QUILL’s servers, so QUILL records nothing at all, not even the request count it keeps for the free service.
• OpenAI or Google bills you for each request, under their own terms and privacy policy.
• While an answer is on its way, Send becomes Stop (Alt+S). Stopping closes a Gemini stream immediately; for another route it discards that request’s eventual answer. It never stops a request from another AI window.
• Usage (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F9) opens a different window. It shows which model is answering, that no allowance applies, and an Open My Usage button that takes you to the usage page of your OpenAI or Google AI Studio account, where your requests and charges are listed. There is no Sign Out and no support ID, because you do not need them. Help > About QUILL Lite likewise shows the model and that page’s address instead of the free allowance.
• You do not need to connect this computer, and you are not asked to accept the free service’s agreement. That agreement is about QUILL’s servers, and your text never goes there.
• The pad, its seventeen choices, and what comes back are all the same, down to the instructions sent along with your text.
• There are no limits. Nothing is turned down for being too long, the answer is not capped, and Ask a question about the document sends the whole document instead of the three best passages, so nothing is missed.
• You get warnings instead of limits. The About to send line tells you how many words are going and roughly what they will cost with the model you chose. That is an estimate, not your actual bill, and the answer costs extra. It also tells you when the text is more than the free service would accept, and, for something very large, that it may be more than the model can read at once. In that case, OpenAI turns the request down and charges nothing.

Where the key is kept

Your key is kept in Windows’ own credential store, not in a settings file. Once saved, it is never shown again: the box stays empty and says a key is saved. A portable copy of QUILL Lite keeps it in an encrypted file instead.

QUILL and QUILL Lite share the key. A key saved in either one works in both, and removing it in either removes it from both.

If a request fails

You hear what went wrong, followed by the error code QUILL-AI-OWN-KEY-FAILED, and the message names the provider. The usual causes are a mistyped key, a model your account cannot use, an account with no credit, or the wrong provider chosen for the key you saved. Test the Key tells you which one it is.

Using your ChatGPT subscription

If you already pay for ChatGPT (Plus, Pro, Team or Enterprise), QUILL Lite can use that plan for every AI command, and you never handle a key. You sign in once, in your browser, just as you sign in to ChatGPT itself.

From then on, the pad, its seventeen choices, Ask About This Document and conversations all run on your plan. There is no monthly allowance, no size limit and no per-request bill, and nothing passes through QUILL’s servers.

You also get two things the free service cannot do: descriptions of pictures, and web search when you want an answer about something current. Both are described later in this chapter.

Signing in

1. Open Tools > AI > Use My ChatGPT Subscription (Alt+F5).
2. Arrow through About this once. It says where your text goes and what it costs.
3. Status says “QUILL Lite is not signed in with ChatGPT” the first time.
4. Press Continue with ChatGPT. Your browser opens on OpenAI’s own sign-in page. Sign in as you would to ChatGPT. When the page asks whether QUILL Lite may use your plan, allow it.
5. Come back to QUILL Lite. The window says “Signed in with ChatGPT as” and your email address. You are done.

If the browser did not open, press Copy the Sign-In Address and paste it into any browser on this computer. Stop Waiting gives up without changing anything.

Once you are signed in

The same window then has:

1. Account. Who you are signed in as, and what that means.
2. Model. Every model your plan offers, read from your account when you sign in. The first one is chosen for you, so your next AI request works without coming back here. Arrow to another and it is saved as you land on it. Refresh Models reads the list again.
3. Allow web search. Off until you check it. When it is on, the model may look things up on the web through OpenAI to answer a question. When it is off, only what you send is used. It is saved as soon as you change it.
4. Open ChatGPT Usage. Opens ChatGPT’s own usage page in your browser. That is the place to see your plan’s limits and what you have left.
5. Sign Out. Press it twice. It asks OpenAI to cancel QUILL Lite’s sign-in and forgets it on this computer. AI help goes back to QUILL’s free service, or to your saved OpenAI key if you have one.
6. Forget on This Computer. Forgets the sign-in here without telling OpenAI. Use it on a computer that is offline, or when you have already removed QUILL Lite in ChatGPT’s settings. Otherwise QUILL Lite stays listed under Apps in ChatGPT’s settings until you remove it there.

Sign Out and Forget on This Computer only appear while you are signed in. Before that, the window just offers Continue with ChatGPT.

There is no separate on or off switch. While you are signed in with ChatGPT, every AI command uses your plan. Sign Out is how you stop. If you have both a ChatGPT sign-in and a saved OpenAI key, the ChatGPT plan is used first, since you have already paid for it. Remove either one and the other takes over straight away.

What changes on your plan

• Your text goes straight from your computer to OpenAI, on your account, under OpenAI’s terms and privacy policy. Nothing passes through QUILL’s servers, and QUILL keeps no copy.
• What you use counts toward your plan’s own usage limits, which OpenAI sets. When you reach one, QUILL Lite tells you in plain words, with the error code QUILL-AI-CHATGPT-LIMIT. Open ChatGPT Usage shows when it resets.
• Usage (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F9) opens this same window instead of the free allowance, since there is no QUILL count to show and your plan’s page is one button away. Help > About QUILL Lite shows the account and the model instead of the free allowance.
• You do not need to connect this computer to the free service, and you are not asked to accept the free service’s agreement, because your text never goes to QUILL’s servers. This window tells you where it does go.
• The pad, its seventeen choices, and what comes back are exactly the same, down to the instructions sent with your text. There is no size limit, so instead of turning anything down, the About to send line tells you how many words are going and that they count toward your plan.
• Conversations send the whole conversation with each message, so a long one remembers its beginning for as long as the model can read it.

Where the sign-in is kept

QUILL Lite keeps only a sign-in token, in Windows’ credential store (or an encrypted file in a portable copy), under QUILL Lite’s own name. QUILL Lite never sees your ChatGPT password.

Each QUILL app signs in on its own. QUILL Lite, QUILL and Quill Radio each appear separately under Apps in ChatGPT’s settings, and signing one out leaves the others as they were.

If a request fails

You hear what went wrong, followed by an error code:

• QUILL-AI-CHATGPT-SIGNED-OUT: OpenAI no longer accepts this computer’s sign-in. Choose Continue with ChatGPT again.
• QUILL-AI-CHATGPT-LIMIT: your plan’s usage is used up for now.
• QUILL-AI-CHATGPT-UNAVAILABLE: OpenAI is not letting other apps use plans just now.
• QUILL-AI-CHATGPT-FAILED: anything else. The sentence before the code says what to check.

Extras on a subscription or your own key

Ask About an Image

Tools > AI > Ask About an Image (Ctrl+F5) tells you what is in a picture. It could be a screenshot someone sent you, a photo of a letter, a chart in a report, or a restaurant’s menu from its website. Choose the file, ask a question or ask nothing, and hear what the model sees.

It needs your ChatGPT subscription, or a Google Gemini key as described above. Without one, it tells you so and opens the account window.

1. Press Ctrl+F5. The Ask About an Image window opens, with focus in Image file.
2. Type or paste the file’s full path, or press Browse (Alt+B) to pick it. JPEG, PNG, WebP and GIF pictures all work.
3. Your question (Alt+Q) is optional. Leave it empty to get a plain description written for a blind reader: what the picture is, what matters most in it, and every word of any text in it, written out exactly. Or ask something, such as “what does the sign say”, “is anyone smiling” or “what is the total on this receipt”. You get the answer first, then just the description that helps.
4. Press Enter for Ask. You hear “Working.” If the file is not really a picture, or is over 20 MB, you are told so here and nothing is sent. Otherwise the picture goes to the model.
5. The answer opens in the Image Description window, with focus on the text so your screen reader reads it. Insert Below puts it into your document under the paragraph you are in, which is handy for captioning a picture in something you are writing. Copy puts it on the clipboard, and Ctrl+Z takes an insert back.

Only the picture and your question are sent. Nothing from your document goes with them.

Tidy Dictated Text

Speech recognition writes what it heard, and that is not always what you meant: “their” for “there”, a name it has never met, two words run together, a comma where a period belonged, and every “um” you did not know you said. Tools > AI > Tidy Dictated Text (Ctrl+F3) fixes exactly those things and nothing else.

It works with a ChatGPT subscription or your own AI key, from OpenAI or Google Gemini. It is not available on the free service. Without either, it tells you so and opens the account window.

1. Dictate as usual (Ctrl+F11, talk, pause). When the paragraph is done, leave the cursor in it, or select exactly the part you want tidied.
2. Press Ctrl+F3. You hear “Working.” The selection, or the whole paragraph the cursor is in, goes to the model. It is asked to fix misheard words, punctuation and capital letters, and to remove fillers and false starts, while keeping your meaning, your wording and your order.
3. The Tidied Dictation window opens with focus on the corrected text, so you hear it first. Replace My Selection puts it where the dictated text was. Copy puts it on the clipboard. Escape keeps what you had. If you typed in that paragraph while waiting for the answer, Replace is not offered, and the window tells you why.
4. Ctrl+Z takes a replacement back in one step.

Nothing changes until you press Replace, and the model is told not to add anything. A tidied paragraph says what you said, spelled the way you meant it.

My Dictation Instructions

You can tell Tidy Dictated Text how you like your writing. Open Dictation Settings (Alt+Shift+F6), press More Dictation Settings… (Alt+A), then My Dictation Instructions… (Alt+I). A short file opens in QUILL Lite. Write one instruction per line, in plain words, and save it:

• Write numbers as digits.
• Use British spelling.
• QUILL is always written in capitals.
• Never change legal terms.

From then on, Tidy Dictated Text follows them. They go with the passage you tidy, and only then: never with every phrase as you talk. The AI is told that your dictated text is something to correct, never a request to answer, so “ask Sam to send the report” comes back tidied, not answered.

Web search

Most of what the AI does works only from what you send it. Sometimes, though, you need an answer about the world today: whether an event has been announced, what a word has come to mean this year, what a web page says right now.

With Allow web search checked in Use My ChatGPT Subscription, the model may search the web through OpenAI when a question needs it, and tell you what it found. This works for Ask a general question, Ask a question about the document and conversations. It is off until you turn it on, because a search sends your question somewhere else too, and that is your choice to make.

To turn it on:

1. Press Alt+F5.
2. Press Alt+W, or Tab to Allow web search.
3. Press Space. You hear “Web search is allowed.” It is saved straight away.

Press Space on the same checkbox to turn it off again.

What you learned, and where to go next

You now know how to open the AI pad, pick one of its seventeen choices, and decide whether to use what comes back. You know how to connect to QUILL’s free service and keep an eye on your allowance, and how to switch to your own key or your ChatGPT subscription when you want no limits, picture descriptions or web search.

If you would like to practise with the app guiding you, open Help > Tutorials… (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and choose Asking a question about a document. For the twelve word questions, see Dictionary in Chapter 7, and to get the most out of Tidy Dictated Text, read Chapter 9, Writing by voice.

Next, Chapter 11, Making QUILL Lite yours, shows you how to shape the app around you, including where AI help is switched on and off.

Chapter 11: Making QUILL Lite yours

QUILL Lite comes ready to use, and you never have to change a thing. But it is yours, and this chapter shows you how to shape it. You will find every everyday setting in one window, make QUILL Lite as small as Notepad or as full as you like with a profile, and change the key for any command. Nothing here is one-way, and you can always put things back.

Settings

All of QUILL Lite’s everyday settings are in one window.

Opening Preferences

Press Ctrl+, to open Tools > Preferences. It is one long column of controls, with OK and Cancel at the bottom.

• Tab moves down the column, and Shift+Tab moves back up.
• F1 on any control tells you what that one control does.
• Nothing you change is saved until you press OK. So Escape is always safe.

Finding a setting

A Find a setting box at the top searches the names of the settings, what your screen reader calls them, and their help text.

1. Type a word, such as “spelling”.
2. Press Down to reach Matching settings.
3. Arrow to the one you want and press Enter. Focus moves to that control.

Ctrl+F takes you back to the search box. In the search, Enter moves you to a setting; it does not save. Escape clears what you typed first, and closes the window if the box is already empty. Searching never changes a setting for you, and OK and Cancel work just as before.

Choosing the default document folder

Default document folder chooses where Open and Save As start when you are working in a new document. Leave it blank to use your Windows Documents folder, or type a path or use Choose default folder… to pick another existing folder. A document you already saved continues to use its own folder.

If your settings could not be saved

Sometimes Windows will not let QUILL Lite save your settings, for example if the disk is full. If that happens:

• Your new settings still work until you close QUILL Lite.
• QUILL Lite tells you, and the warning stays in the status bar’s Message cell. Press F6 to read it again.
• Free up some space, or fix access to the settings folder, then open Preferences again. QUILL Lite tries again by itself. You do not need to change anything or press OK.

When it works, the warning goes away. QUILL Lite also tries to save whenever you change a setting and when you exit normally. This warning is only about your settings. It does not mean your document was not saved.

Every setting, in order

Here is each control in the order you meet it.

Profile

Profile is the same four-choice box that Customize Features has, with the same description underneath. See Making QUILL Lite smaller (or larger), later in this chapter.

New documents are

New documents are: Plain text or Rich text. This only decides what Ctrl+N makes. New Plain Text Document (Ctrl+Alt+N) and New Rich Text Document (Alt+Shift+T) always make what their names say.

If you choose the Notepad or WordPad profile, this control changes to match, right in front of you. So you can see what the profile chose and change it before you press OK.

Theme

Theme: Dark or Follow the system. Follow the system is the default. It uses the colours you have already chosen in Windows, so if you have a high-contrast or dark setting there, QUILL Lite follows it. Choose Dark if you want QUILL Lite dark whatever Windows is set to.

The theme only changes the screen. The colours never go into your files, so nobody you send a document to will get grey text.

You can also switch dark mode straight from the View menu with Alt+Shift+D. It says “Dark mode on” or “Dark mode off”.

If you chose dark in an earlier version, you keep dark.

Startup and recovery

Reopen the documents I had open last time is on. Turn it off and QUILL Lite starts with only what you open yourself. This is not the same as recovering unsaved work after a crash, which happens either way.

Offer untitled unsaved work back after a crash is on. An untitled document has never been saved to a file, so this copy is the only one there is. Turn it off if you use QUILL Lite as a scratchpad and would rather it forgot.

Start with a blank document is on, just like Notepad and WordPad. If you always open an existing file, turn it off, so you are not handed an empty Untitled to close every time. Files you open by double-clicking, last session’s documents and recovered work all still appear. QUILL has the same setting under General.

Sharing with QUILL

Share QUILL’s abbreviation library is off. Turn it on and QUILL Lite uses QUILL for All’s list of short forms instead of its own, so a short form you add in either program works in both. It does nothing if QUILL is not installed.

Share QUILL’s dictionary of taught words is off. It works the same way for spelling: a word you teach in either editor is known to both.

Clipboard and updates

Keep everything I copy in the clip library is off. Turn it on and every Ctrl+C is saved in the clip library by itself, not just the ones you keep with Ctrl+Alt+M. It is handy, but the library will fill up on its own.

Look for updates when QUILL Lite starts is on. It looks once a day and only speaks up if there is something new. Ctrl+Alt+U checks whenever you like.

Spelling and autocorrect

Check spelling as I type is on. It is the same switch as Tools > Spelling > Check While Typing (Ctrl+Alt+F7), which is quicker to reach while you are writing.

Curl quotes as I type is off. It turns a straight quote into a matching curly one.

Turn two hyphens into an em dash is off. When you type the second hyphen of --, both become one long dash.

Both of these also need Autocorrect while typing switched on in Customize Features. Neither ever runs in a plain text, source code or settings document.

What you hear

When a command does something, give me: a sound, the action spoken, both, or nothing. This is how QUILL Lite tells you that a cut, copy, paste, undo or new selection worked. A sound is the default. Spoken words are easier while you are still learning the sounds.

Two things happen whatever you choose. If your sound pack has no sound for a command, QUILL Lite speaks instead of staying silent. And if a command could not do what you asked, QUILL Lite always says so in words.

When a search misses: has the same four choices, set separately. You often press F3 several times in a row, and hearing “Not found” spoken each time gets tiring fast, so many people pick the sound here. The words are always in the status bar too.

Say a heading’s level: before the text or after the text. Before means QUILL Lite says it all in one go, like “Heading 2, Installing”. You will still hear it after a jump, such as Ctrl+Home or landing on a search result. After means your screen reader reads the line and QUILL Lite adds the level afterwards, which is quieter when you are reading line by line.

Searching and wrapping

Searching carries on from the other end is on. When Find Next reaches the end, it starts again at the top and tells you so. Turn it off and it stops and tells you which end you are at. Then you know the word is not missing, you are just at the bottom.

Wrap long lines to the window is on. Turn it off and long lines run past the right edge of the window. Alt+Z on the View menu is the same switch.

Timing

Shortest gap between spoken messages (ms): from 0 to 2000. The default is 0, which says everything as it happens. A bigger number skips anything QUILL Lite would say too soon after the last thing. That helps if holding a key down makes your screen reader talk too much. You do not lose anything: every message still goes to the status bar, and F6 reads it back.

Copy unsaved work aside every (seconds): from 15 to 600, and 30 by default. This is how often a changed document is copied to the recovery folder. The copy is kept beside your file, never on top of it, and it is removed as soon as you save.

Editor font

Editor font: a read-only box showing the font and size, and a Change Font… button that opens the font chooser. When you pick a font, the box updates and QUILL Lite says the new font out loud. The same chooser is on Ctrl+Alt+F (Format > Editor Font), where Notepad has always kept it. It stays on the Format menu even if you switch rich text off.

AI help

Use QUILL’s free AI help is off. This one works straight away, without waiting for OK. Checking it shows you the whole agreement right then and saves your answer. Unchecking it takes your agreement back right then. If you decline the agreement, the check mark goes away again and QUILL Lite tells you so. See Chapter 10, AI help.

When another program changes the file

Watch the open file for external changes is on. Reload automatically when you have no unsaved edits is off. Ask before discarding unsaved edits on a conflict is on. External-change debounce (milliseconds) is 750. Forget remembered file-change answers takes back every “Do not ask me again” answer when you press OK. What each one does is in When another program changes your file, in Chapter 3.

What is not in here, and where it is instead

Some switches are on a key instead, because you change them while you are working:

People often look for that last one in Preferences. It lives in the window that asks the question. See Reopening what you had open, in Chapter 3.

Taking your settings with you

Tools > Back Up Settings… (Ctrl+Alt+F11) saves your settings to a .qsf file. Tools > Restore Settings… (Ctrl+Alt+F12) reads one back, for example on a new computer.

The backup holds your preferences. It leaves out the things that only make sense on this computer: your recent files, the documents QUILL Lite reopens at startup, the window size, and when it last checked for an update. The backup tells you how many file locations it left out.

When you restore, QUILL Lite tells you what happened: how many settings came across, how many are new since the backup was made (those keep their usual values), and how many it did not recognise. If the file has nothing QUILL Lite recognises at all, nothing is changed, so picking the wrong file cannot reset your editor.

QUILL has the same thing, as buttons in its Preferences window. The two use the same kind of file, but each one only reads its own backups.

Making QUILL Lite smaller (or larger)

QUILL Lite has a lot in it. You may not want all of it, and you do not have to keep it. Tools > Customize Features (Ctrl+Alt+F10) lets you switch whole parts of the app off.

When you switch something off, it leaves the menus and its keys stop working. It is really gone, not just hidden. So a smaller QUILL Lite is one with fewer things to arrow past and fewer keys to press by accident.

Profiles: four ways to say it in one word

You do not have to go through the checkboxes one by one. The Profile box at the top of the window offers four ready-made choices. Choosing one sets every checkbox below it straight away. There is no second button to press.

Nothing is saved until you press Save. So you can try a profile, look at what it would do, and change your mind.

Hearing what a profile does

Under the Profile box is a read-only description you can read line by line. It tells you two things. First, what the profile is. Then what it would do to your copy of QUILL Lite: how many of the 21 areas it keeps and which ones, which ones it removes, and anything else it changes. Notepad, for example, also makes Ctrl+N create a plain text document. Press F1 on the Profile box to hear the same thing.

When you choose a profile, QUILL Lite says a short version, like this: “Notepad profile: 2 of 21 features on. New documents will be plain text. Nothing is saved until you press Save.” Your screen reader already reads the profile’s name, and the longer description is there for you to read at your own pace.

Changing your mind

Custom puts everything back. If you arrow onto a profile you did not mean, choose Custom. Every checkbox goes back to how it was when you opened the window.

You will also hear the box say Custom as soon as you check or uncheck anything yourself. That is not a warning. Picking your own is exactly what the list is for.

After you choose a profile, the checkboxes are still ordinary checkboxes. You can change any of them. If you have changed a few and want to start the profile over, press Use Profile.

The same profiles in Preferences

The same four profiles are in Preferences too, at the top, with the same description underneath. So if you think of “make this like Notepad” as a setting, you will find it where your other settings are. The 21 separate checkboxes are only in Customize Features.

The four profiles at a glance

Here is each one at a glance, and then in more detail.

Recommended

This is what you get when you first install QUILL Lite. It keeps seventeen of the 21 areas: rich text, headings, Markdown and HTML, bookmarks, the line tools, the clipboard history, printing, abbreviations, the Selection submenu, spell check, the dictionary and thesaurus, Matches, Go Back and Go Forward, the Command Palette, Describe Character, text size and dictation.

Off: autocorrect, timestamped backups, Go To Anything and AI help. These four are not switched off because they are poor. They are off because you should choose them yourself:

• Autocorrect can change the quotes in a settings file and break it.
• Backups slowly fill a folder on your computer.
• Go To Anything is one more way to jump around, and the command palette, the headings list and the bookmark list already do that.
• AI help sends the text you ask about over the internet, and only you should decide to do that.

Choose this when you have been experimenting and want to get back to where you started.

Everything

All 21 areas on, including the four above. That includes AI help, which is the one area that sends anything off your computer, so only choose this profile if you are happy with that.

With Everything on:

• Autocorrect can straighten your quotes and turn two hyphens into a long dash. It does nothing else. It never capitalises sentences.
• Every save keeps a dated copy in your data folder.
• Go To Anything joins the command palette and the two lists.

Choose this if you would rather have it all and switch things off as they get in your way.

WordPad

Everything WordPad could do. Rich text you can format, print and spell check: bold, italic, underline, headings, alignment, bullets, indenting and line spacing, plus Find and Replace, printing and text size. Five of the 21 areas.

Off, all sixteen of the others. These are the writing tools around the formatting:

• No line tools (Edit > Lines) and no Change Case.
• No clipboard history or Copy Tray.
• No bookmarks, no abbreviations, and no Selection submenu.
• No Matches list, no Back and Forward, no Command Palette, and no Go To Anything.
• No Describe Character and no dictation.
• No dictionary or thesaurus (WordPad never had one).
• No autocorrect and no backups.
• No Markdown or HTML. Ctrl+B in a .md file goes back to meaning rich text bold, and QUILL Lite tells you so.
• No AI help.

Ctrl+N makes a rich text document. So choosing WordPad changes a setting as well as the checkboxes: new documents start as rich text.

One thing real WordPad did not have: the spell checker. It stays, because a word processor without one would just be a nuisance.

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

Notepad

The smallest QUILL Lite can be. Many people come to QUILL Lite to replace Notepad, and this is the profile for them. It keeps two of the 21 areas: printing and text size.

Off, all nineteen of the others: the Format menu and everything under it, headings, Markdown and HTML, bookmarks, the line tools, Change Case, the clipboard history, abbreviations, the Selection submenu, spell check, the dictionary and thesaurus, Matches, Back and Forward, the Command Palette, Go To Anything, Describe Character, dictation, autocorrect, backups and AI help. Nothing that Notepad does not have.

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

Some things stay, 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. Tools > File Encoding and Line Endings stays too. That is a big part of why people replace Notepad: so a file saves back exactly the way it arrived.

Choose this for settings files, logs, quick notes, and anything that must stay plain text with no hidden formatting.

Moving between them

You can always go back. Choose Notepad and then Everything, and it all comes back, including the Format menu and its keys. The only thing a profile does not undo is a setting you changed by hand afterwards. A profile only changes the things it says it changes.

Two things stay whichever profile you choose: Tools > Preferences and Customize Features itself. Otherwise you could switch off the very window you need to switch things back on.

Searching the list

There are 21 checkboxes, which is a lot to Tab through. Type in the search box below the Profile box and the list narrows as you type.

It searches what an area does as well as its name. Type “curly quotes” and you find Autocorrect. Type “dictionary” and you find Spell check. The line under the box tells you how many are left. Press Down from the box to go straight into the list.

The 21 areas

The last four start switched off. They are still in this list, so you can find them and switch them on whenever you like.

Why autocorrect, backups and Go To Anything start off

Curly quotes look lovely in a letter but can break a settings file. Backups slowly fill a folder. And Go To Anything does a job that the command search, the headings list and the bookmark list already share between them.

Switching on AI help

AI help is off for a different reason. Using it sends the passage you ask about over the internet, and that is your choice to make, nobody else’s. Its row in Customize Features tells you exactly what you are agreeing to before you switch it on. While the area is off, it has no menu, no keys, no sign-in saved on your computer, and makes no connection of any kind.

Switching it on is only the first step. Before anything is sent, QUILL Lite shows you the whole agreement: what is sent, what QUILL keeps, what it does not keep, what OpenAI does with it, and how to say no. Nothing happens until you accept.

If you switch the area on and then decline the agreement, the AI menu stays but nothing in it will send anything. QUILL Lite does not quietly switch the area back off for you.

You can reach the same agreement in three places. Use whichever you find first:

• Tools > AI > Privacy Agreement… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K). Read it, accept it, or take it back. Taking it back also signs this computer out.
• Preferences, where a check box says Use QUILL’s free AI help. Checking it shows the agreement. Unchecking it takes your agreement back.
• Customize Features, where switching the area on asks you straight away.

All three share one answer, so they always agree. If the agreement ever changes in a way that matters, such as what is sent or what is kept, you will be asked again.

How autocorrect works

Autocorrect has two rules, and switching the area on does not turn either of them on. The area decides whether autocorrect exists at all. Two check boxes in Tools > Preferences decide which rules run:

• Curl quotes as I type
• Turn two hyphens into an em dash

Both start off. So after you switch the area on, you also need to check the rule you want. They are separate because plenty of people want the long dash but not the curly quotes.

Neither rule ever runs in a plain text, source code or settings document, whatever the boxes say. A curly quote in a .json file would break it.

There is no third rule. QUILL Lite does not capitalise the start of a sentence, and never has.

What can never be switched off

Three things always stay. Tools > Preferences and Customize Features stay, so you can always get back to your settings. And File Encoding and Line Endings stays, because saving a file back exactly as it arrived is at the heart of QUILL Lite.

Changing what a key does

You can change the key for any command in QUILL Lite. Open Tools > Keyboard Manager… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Space).

1. The list shows every command and its key. Type part of a command’s name to find it.
2. Press Enter on the command you want.
3. Press the new key.
4. Press Save when you are done.

Finding out what a key already does

Want to know whether a key is free? Press Record a Key, then press the key. QUILL Lite tells you what it does now, for example “Ctrl+S is File > Save”, or tells you it is free. That is much quicker than reading through two hundred rows.

When a key is taken

If you choose a key another command already uses, QUILL Lite tells you which command has it and asks if you want to take it. If you say yes, that other command is left with no key until you give it one. That way two commands never share a key, which would leave one of them never working.

When another program has the key

Some programs take a key for the whole of Windows. Google Drive takes Ctrl+Alt+G, for example, and there are others. When that happens, the key never reaches QUILL Lite, even while you are typing in it. The command is fine; the key just goes to the other program.

QUILL Lite warns you about this. Record a Key says the key is “already claimed by another application running on this computer”, and the Keyboard Manager says so if you pick one. It is only a warning, so you can keep the key if you want it. It may work again when that other program is closed.

Windows does not tell QUILL Lite which program has the key, so it cannot tell you either.

What cannot be changed

• The Insert key cannot be used. Your screen reader needs it, and you would need it to get your key back.
• A key on its own, without Ctrl, Alt or Shift, cannot be used either. It would just type itself.

Putting things back

• Reset to Default puts the command you are on back to its original key.
• Reset Everything does that for every command, after asking you first.
• Nothing is saved until you press Save. Press Escape to leave with your keys just as they were.

Check for Problems looks over all your keys at once. It tells you about a key used twice, a key QUILL Lite cannot read, or a key Windows will accept but never actually send to a menu, which would leave it doing nothing.

Only the keys you changed are saved. That way, if a later version of QUILL Lite improves a key you never touched, you still get the improvement.

Making QUILL Lite your text editor

When you open a text file from File Explorer or your desktop, Windows opens it in Notepad. You can have it open in QUILL Lite instead. There are two ways, and you can use either one or both. Both are in Preferences (Ctrl+,), under Windows and your files, with a line that tells you which program opens in place of Notepad right now.

Choosing QUILL Lite in Default apps

Windows lets you choose which app opens each kind of file. QUILL Lite cannot make that choice for you, but it can take you straight to the right place.

1. Open Preferences (Ctrl+,) and, under Windows and your files, press Make QUILL Lite My Text Editor….
2. Read the short message, then press OK.
3. Windows Settings opens on the Default apps page for QUILL Lite. It lists file types such as .txt, .md and .rtf, each with the app that opens it now.
4. Choose .txt, pick QUILL Lite in the list that appears, and choose Set default.
5. Do the same for any other type you want QUILL Lite to open. Leave the rest as they are.
6. Close Settings with Alt+F4.

From now on, pressing Enter on a .txt file opens it in QUILL Lite. QUILL Lite is also in the Open with list when you press the Applications key on a file.

On Windows 10, Settings opens on the general Default apps page instead. Choose Choose default apps by file type, find .txt, and pick QUILL Lite.

To change your mind, go back to the same page and pick Notepad, or any other app, for that type.

Opening QUILL Lite instead of Notepad

Some programs open Notepad by name, and so does typing “notepad” in the Run box. Default apps does not change those. If you would like QUILL Lite to open every time anything asks for Notepad, check Open QUILL Lite instead of Notepad in Preferences, under Windows and your files. It is off until you turn it on.

Three things to know first:

• It changes Notepad for everyone who uses this computer, not just for you.
• Windows asks for administrator approval. If your account is not an administrator, somebody with an administrator password will need to approve it.
• To undo it, clear the same checkbox and press OK. The checkbox always shows whether it is on right now.

To turn it on:

1. Open Preferences (Ctrl+,) and, under Windows and your files, check Open QUILL Lite instead of Notepad. Then press OK.
2. Read the message and choose Yes.
3. Approve the Windows prompt that follows.
4. QUILL Lite tells you when it is done.

On Windows 11 there is one more step. The newer Notepad has a shortcut of its own, called an app execution alias, that can still open it. QUILL Lite offers to open the page where you turn that off. Choose Yes, find Notepad in the list, and turn it off. To get there yourself, open Settings, then Apps, then Advanced app settings, then App execution aliases.

When QUILL Lite opens in place of Notepad, you get the file Notepad was asked to open, or a new blank plain text document if there was none. If a program asked Notepad to print a file, QUILL Lite opens it instead, and Ctrl+P prints it.

If you uninstall QUILL Lite while this is on, the uninstaller puts Notepad back for you. If you use a portable copy, turn it off before you delete the folder.

What you learned, and where to go next

Preferences (Ctrl+,) holds your everyday settings in one column, and nothing is saved until you press OK. Press F1 on any control when you are unsure what it does. A few quick switches live on the View and Tools menus instead, and Ctrl+Alt+F11 and Ctrl+Alt+F12 back up and restore your settings.

Customize Features (Ctrl+Alt+F10) makes QUILL Lite as small as Notepad or as full as you like, in one step with a profile or one checkbox at a time. Nothing is saved until you press Save, and nothing is one-way. The Keyboard Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Space) changes any key, Record a Key tells you what a key does now, you are warned when a key is taken, and you can always put things back. The Keyboard reference at the end of this guide lists every key QUILL Lite ships with.

In Preferences, under Windows and your files, Make QUILL Lite My Text Editor takes you to the Windows page where you choose QUILL Lite for .txt and other types, and Open QUILL Lite instead of Notepad catches everything that still asks for Notepad by name.

If you are curious about AI help, the tutorial Asking a question about a document walks you through switching it on.

Next, Chapter 12, Your files, updates and QUILL for All, explains where QUILL Lite keeps things and how to get new versions.

Chapter 12: Your files, updates and QUILL for All

This chapter is about QUILL Lite’s place on your computer. You will learn where it keeps your settings and recovered work, how a portable copy keeps everything on the stick, and how to get a new version when one comes out. Then we will look at how QUILL Lite sits beside its bigger sibling, QUILL for All, and how to share what you have built up between them.

Where your files are kept

QUILL Lite keeps your settings, your recent files, your copy tray and any recovered work in a QUILL Lite folder inside your own Windows user folder. To find out exactly where, open Help > About QUILL Lite. It tells you.

This folder is separate from QUILL for All’s folder. QUILL Lite and QUILL are two different programs, so you can install or remove one without touching the other.

When you uninstall QUILL Lite, this folder stays. That way, if there is a recovered document you have not finished with, it is still there for you.

The portable copy keeps everything on the stick

The portable QUILL Lite is the .zip you unpack instead of installing. If that is the one you use, everything above works differently: all your settings and recovered work go into the data\QuillLite folder inside the bundle, right next to QuillLite.exe. Nothing at all is written to the computer you are plugged into. This happens from the very first time you start it. There is nothing to switch on.

If you used a portable copy before version 1.0

Older portable copies did not work this way. They kept their files in %LOCALAPPDATA%\QuillLite on whichever computer you were using, and they did not tell you. So if you have been carrying a portable QUILL Lite around, and something you were working on seems to be missing, look in that folder on the computer you used. Once you have what you need out of it, it is a good idea to delete that folder, especially if the computer is not yours.

Turning a portable copy back into an ordinary one

The data folder is what makes a copy portable. Delete the data folder from the bundle, and QUILL Lite goes back to keeping its files in your Windows user folder on this computer.

Keeping QUILL Lite up to date

To find out whether there is a newer QUILL Lite, open Help > Check for Updates… (Ctrl+Alt+U). Every app in the QUILL family uses this same key and the same window, so once you know it here, you know it everywhere.

If you already have the newest version, a small window tells you so. You always get an answer.

Help > About shows your version with a build number, such as 3.2.0 (build 2). The build number tells you which build of a version you have: when a fix comes out without a new version number, it is a newer build, and Check for Updates offers it.

When there is a new version

If there is something newer, the window opens on the release notes for that version, so you can read what changed. They are in a read-only box you can arrow through like a document. Press Tab to reach two buttons:

• Update downloads the new version and then offers to install it. Your settings, recent files and recovered work are kept whichever you choose:

  • Install and restart now (Enter) closes QUILL Lite, installs the update and opens QUILL Lite again.
  • Install when I close (Alt+C) lets you keep writing. The update goes in the next time you close QUILL Lite, and the next time you open it, you have the new version.

  A portable copy updates itself where it is. The new files replace the old ones in its folder, and its data folder is never touched.

• Close leaves everything as it is. Nothing is downloaded until you press Update.

While it downloads, you hear when it is a quarter done, half done and three quarters done, and then when it has finished.

The daily check

QUILL Lite also looks for a new version once a day, when it starts. It stays quiet while it looks, quiet if there is nothing new, and quiet if you are not online. You only hear from it when there really is a new version, and even then it just offers. Nothing changes until you say so.

If you would rather it did not look at all, turn off “Look for updates when QUILL Lite starts” in Settings. Ctrl+Alt+U still works whenever you want to check yourself.

Release channels

QUILL Lite comes in three flavours, and you choose which one your copy follows. They are called release channels.

• Stable is the version we recommend. It has been checked with JAWS and NVDA, and it is what most people use. Every copy starts here.
• Beta gets new features a few weeks early. It is mostly finished, but some things may not work right yet.
• Dev is the work in progress, sometimes several builds a week. Things will break. Only choose it if a developer asked you to, or you enjoy testing.

Choosing a channel

Open the Help menu, then choose Release Channel… (press Alt+H, then C). You can also get there from Settings, with the Change release channel… button under “Look for updates when QUILL Lite starts”.

Arrow through Stable, Beta and Dev. As you move, the box below tells you what each one means and what choosing it would do. Nothing changes yet. Press Switch to move, or Close (Escape) to leave everything as it was.

If you choose Beta or Dev, a short warning comes first: what could go wrong, how your settings are protected, and how to come back. Read it, check the I understand box, then choose Move to Beta (or Move to Dev). Stay on Stable, or Escape, changes nothing.

Beta and Dev versions aren’t signed, so when you install one, Windows SmartScreen may warn that it comes from an unknown publisher; that’s expected, and choosing More info, then Run anyway, installs it.

Before it moves, QUILL Lite saves a copy of your settings, keys and recent files list. If it cannot, it stays where it is and tells you why. Your documents are not copied, and updates do not change them. Then it checks for updates on the new channel straight away, and offers you the newest version there if there is one. Nothing is installed unless you say so.

When Quill Radio or QUILL Cast is installed too

QUILL Lite, Quill Radio and QUILL Cast run on one shared engine on your computer. When an app moves to Beta or Dev, it gets its own copy of that engine, so the apps you leave on Stable are never touched. You can still move several at once: check them under “Also move my other QuillVille apps on this computer” and choose Switch.

That second copy of the engine takes about 335 MB of disk space. It goes away by itself when your last app comes back to Stable. A portable copy carries its own engine, so it needs no extra space.

Updates on Beta and Dev

On Beta and Dev, QUILL Lite downloads a new version quietly when its daily check finds one, so it is ready when you are. It never installs anything without asking: when the download is done, it says so and shows you what’s new, and you choose when to install.

It waits instead of downloading on a metered connection, during Quiet Hours, and while Quill Radio is recording. Update History tells you why it waited. On Stable nothing changes.

If an update doesn’t start

After an update, QUILL Lite checks that the new version really opens. If it doesn’t open within two minutes, the update undoes itself and puts back the version you had. The next time QUILL Lite starts, it tells you so. Nothing of yours is changed, and Update History has the details.

To make this possible, QUILL Lite keeps a copy of the installer for the version you have: on Beta and Dev for as long as you have that version, and on Stable for a week or three starts after each update. That copy takes about 200 MB of disk space, which Stable gives back once the week or the three starts are up. After an update, the previous installer is kept until the new version has started three times, or for a week, and then it is deleted.

Coming back to Stable

Open Release Channel again and choose Stable.

• If the version you have is already a Stable one, you’re back straight away, and nothing is installed.
• If you have a newer Beta or Dev version, QUILL Lite checks whether Stable can read everything you have saved. If it can, choose Go back to (the Stable version) now, and QUILL Lite downloads Stable and offers to install it. Your settings come with you. If a few settings were only in Beta, they go back to their usual values, and the window tells you which.
• If Stable can’t read something yet, QUILL Lite says so and gives you two safe choices. Wait for Stable keeps the version you have, stops test versions, and moves you to Stable by itself as soon as Stable catches up. It tells you when that happens. Use the copy from (the day you joined) puts back the copy of your settings saved when you joined, then installs Stable. Anything you changed since then won’t be in it, but a copy of how things are right now is saved first, so nothing is thrown away.
• If there’s no saved copy, waiting is the only choice, and the window says so.

The Update History button in the same window shows what the updater has done for QUILL Lite. And switching sends nothing about you: the only thing QUILL Lite ever sends when it checks for updates is a request for the list of versions.

What QUILL Lite is not

QUILL Lite is a companion to QUILL for All. It is not meant to replace it.

If you want to convert documents, compare two documents, publish, or use braille tools, those are in QUILL. QUILL Lite stays a small, focused text editor on purpose.

Dictation

QUILL Lite has dictation: built-in speech recognition that writes each phrase when you pause. QUILL has the very same feature on the same keys, under Tools > Speech > Live Dictation. QUILL’s offline Locked Dictation, which records a passage and then transcribes it with a model you download, is only in QUILL.

AI

QUILL Lite has AI help, described in Chapter 10, AI help. It can summarize, rewrite, proofread and explain, answer a question about the document you have open, and a few more things that chapter walks you through. It is there so you can get through a long document, or check your writing, without having to read every line yourself.

Some of QUILL’s AI stays in QUILL: running a model on your own computer, the agents, and the picture description work. If you want those, QUILL has them.

Both programs are free, both are made for people who use a screen reader, and you can install them side by side.

Sharing what you have built up between them

QUILL Lite keeps its own settings, separate from QUILL’s. That way it starts small and simple, and removing it never takes anything away from QUILL. But the things you collect over time, like abbreviations and words you have taught the spell checker, are nice to have in both. So you can choose to share them:

• In Preferences, Share QUILL’s abbreviations and Share QUILL’s personal dictionary make QUILL Lite use QUILL’s copies. A short form you add, or a word you teach, in either editor is then there in both.
• In QUILL, Tools > Customize and Support > Bring My QUILL Lite Settings… does it all in one step. It adds your QUILL Lite abbreviations, dictionary, copy tray, clip library and bookmarks into QUILL, turns those sharing switches on for you, and copies your preferences and any keys you changed across once. Nothing already in QUILL is replaced, and nothing is removed from QUILL Lite.

A QUILL that feels like QUILL Lite

QUILL also has a QUILL Lite profile (in QUILL, Preferences > Profiles and Features). It makes QUILL show just these nine menus, and makes Ctrl+N create a plain text document, the way QUILL Lite does. It is there for the day you want one of QUILL’s extra tools but would like everything to still feel familiar.

What you learned, and where to go next

Your settings and recovered work live in your own user folder, and Help > About QUILL Lite tells you where. A portable copy keeps everything on the stick instead. Ctrl+Alt+U checks for a new version, shows you what changed, and lets you install now or when you close. QUILL Lite also checks quietly once a day, and you can turn that off in Preferences.

QUILL Lite is the small editor, and QUILL for All is the big one. They work side by side, and you can share your abbreviations, dictionary and more between them. If you are setting up a new computer, Taking your settings with you, in Chapter 11, shows you how to bring your settings along.

Next, Chapter 13, When you need a hand, tells you what to do when you are stuck.

Chapter 13: When you need a hand

Everyone gets stuck sometimes, and this chapter is about what to do then. You will meet the ten guided lessons built into QUILL Lite, then learn what to do if QUILL Lite will not start, how to write to a real person at support, and the one thing worth attaching when you do. And remember that F1 works everywhere, and tells you where you are and what the thing you are on does.

Fifteen lessons, inside the app

QUILL Lite has fifteen short guided lessons built in. They walk you through the things that are hard to work out just by pressing keys. Each one takes a few minutes, and you can stop whenever you like.

To open them, press Ctrl+Alt+F1, or choose Help > Tutorials….

The lessons

The lessons come in two groups, called tracks.

Your first documents

Working in a document

If you are new, start with the first lesson and go in order. All fifteen together take about sixty-nine minutes, but there is no need to do them in one sitting.

How a lesson works

Each lesson is a few steps. Every step tells you three things:

1. What to press. It always shows your key. If you have changed a key in the Keyboard Manager, the lesson knows.
2. Why you would want to, in a sentence.
3. What you should hear when it worked. That way you can tell for yourself that you got it right.

Some steps also have a Worth knowing line, a small tip that will save you trouble later.

Finding your way around the window

The window opens on Contents. This is a tree with the two tracks and the lessons under them. There is a filter box above it: type part of a lesson’s name to find it, or type the word here to see the lessons about the window you just came from.

Under the tree are four buttons: Start, Read it all, The whole book as a document, and Forget my progress.

When you start a lesson, the step appears in a box you can arrow through and copy from with Ctrl+C. Under it are five buttons:

Try it is there for when you have not learned a key yet. The lesson can do the step for you, then tell you about the place you have landed in.

You will also find a Follow me check box. In QUILL Lite it is greyed out. In some other QuillVille apps it moves you on to the next step by itself. Here, every step already ends with QUILL Lite saying something out loud, so you will know when it worked, and you press Next when you are ready.

Coming and going

The lessons window stays open beside your document, so you can go back and forth between them. Press Escape or Alt+F4 to close it. QUILL Lite remembers which lessons you have finished, and where you were in the one you were working on.

Every QuillVille app has lessons in the same kind of window, on the same key. If you would rather read all the lessons straight through, press The whole book as a document. It opens the full set in your web browser.

Getting help

There is always a way to get help. This part starts with what to do if QUILL Lite will not start, then shows you how to write to support.

If QUILL Lite does not start

If QUILL Lite cannot start, it does not just disappear. A plain message opens, and your screen reader reads it by itself. It says “QUILL Lite did not start”, gives the reason in words, tells you where the launch log is, and gives you the support address.

What to do depends on the reason:

• It says the zip was opened from inside. Extract the whole zip first. Press the Applications key on the zip, choose Extract All…, then open QuillLite.exe from the folder you extracted.
• It names a missing file or DLL. Extract the zip again into an empty folder, and check whether your antivirus program has put a file into quarantine.
• It says Windows refused to run its files. Move the folder somewhere that belongs to you, such as Documents or a USB stick.
• It says “Python reported”. Send the launch log to support. For a portable copy it is data\logs\launch.log inside the QUILL Lite folder. For an installed copy it is %APPDATA%\Quill\logs\QuillLite-launch.log. Each start replaces the log, so send it before you try again.
• Nothing happens at all, and there is no message. QUILL Lite is probably already running, and your new start simply handed over to it. Check the taskbar, and Task Manager.

Support by email

Support is run by Community Access. The address is support@community-access.org. A real person reads every message and replies by email.

Every message from QUILL Lite goes to that one address. Nothing is posted on GitHub or on any other public site.

Get Help from Support, step by step

The quickest way to write to support is Help > Get Help from Support… (Ctrl+Alt+F2). Every app in the QUILL family opens the same window with this key.

Filling in the window

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+F2. The Get Help from Support window opens. Its first line says the message goes to support@community-access.org, and that nothing is sent until you send it from your mail program.
2. What kind of message (Alt+W) is a list: Something is broken, A question, An accessibility problem, or An idea or request. Use the Up and Down arrows. This only helps your message reach the right person, so do not worry about picking exactly right.
3. Subject (Alt+U) is a short line saying what the message is about, just like an email subject. For example, “Spelling stops after I paste”. You have to fill this in.
4. What happened (Alt+H) is where you describe the problem, in as much or as little detail as you like. This is what a person reads first. You have to fill this in too. Enter starts a new line here, so press Tab to move on.
5. What you expected (Alt+X) is what you thought would happen instead. You can leave it empty.
6. Steps to reproduce (Alt+R) is how someone else could make it happen, for example “Open a .docx, press F7, press Ctrl+V”. You can leave it empty, but if you can fill it in, it helps more than anything else.
7. Your email address (Alt+E) is where support should reply. You can leave it empty. The message goes from your own mail account, so support can reply there anyway. Only fill this in if you want the answer to go somewhere else.
8. Screen reader (Alt+A) is which one you use, if any. It is already filled in with the screen reader that is running, so usually you can leave it.
9. A line under the fields tells you what else is included, for example “Also included: QUILL Lite 1.2.0, your QUILL AI support ID (…), and your Windows version.”

Sending it

1. Press Enter, or Tab to Send and press Space.
2. If the subject or What happened is empty, or the email address does not look right, you hear the first problem and the whole list is shown. Press Enter to close it, fix the field, and send again.
3. Otherwise your own mail program opens with the whole message already written, addressed to support@community-access.org, with a subject such as “[QUILL Lite 1.2.0] Spelling stops after I paste”. You hear “Your mail program is opening with the message ready. Nothing is sent until you send it there.” The Get Help window closes.
4. Press Send in your mail program. Nothing leaves your computer until you do, so you can read it over, add anything, or change your mind.

If you have no mail program

If you only use webmail, there is no mail program to open. QUILL Lite says “No mail program answered. Write to support@community-access.org.” Your message is not lost. The whole message, with the address and subject at the top, is on your clipboard. Start a new email to support@community-access.org in your webmail and paste it with Ctrl+V. The Get Help window stays open with everything you typed.

If your message is very long, the email holds a shortened copy with a line saying so, and the complete text goes on your clipboard. QUILL Lite tells you when this happens. Paste the full text over the shortened one with Ctrl+V.

What is included, and what is not

• Included: what you typed, the kind of message, QUILL Lite’s name and version, your Windows version, and the screen reader you chose. If this computer is connected to QUILL’s free AI, its support ID is included too. That lets support look up your AI allowance without needing a name or password.
• Not included: your documents, your file names, your settings, or anything you did not type. If support needs more, they will ask you.
• It is an ordinary email from your own account to Community Access. Nothing is posted in public, and QUILL Lite itself does not send anything.

What happens next

A person at Community Access reads your message and replies by email, usually to the address you sent it from. If you open the window and change your mind, press Escape or choose Cancel to close it without sending anything.

You never have to use the window. Writing to support@community-access.org yourself, from any email account, works just as well. Just say which app you were using and what happened.

The one thing worth attaching

Sometimes QUILL Lite starts but behaves oddly. Maybe there is no formatting, every word is called a misspelling, or nothing is spoken. When that happens, run it once with --check:

QuillLite.exe --check

No window opens. Instead it writes about a dozen lines to check.log in your data folder (Help > About QUILL Lite tells you where that is), and prints the same lines. They say which version you have, whether it is a frozen build, whether rich text started properly, which text mode it is in, which screen reader it can reach, whether the spelling dictionary loaded, and where your data is kept.

Paste those lines into your email to support. They answer the first questions support would ask, so you get help faster.

Other ways to start QUILL Lite

There are three more options for the same command line. --rich and --plain start with a new document of that kind, whatever your setting says. --new-instance starts a second, separate QUILL Lite instead of handing the file to the one that is already open.

What you learned, and where to go next

Ctrl+Alt+F1 opens nine guided lessons in two tracks. Each step tells you what to press and what you should hear, Try it can do a step for you, and your place is remembered. If QUILL Lite will not start, the message tells you why and what to try. To reach a person, press Ctrl+Alt+F2, fill in the form, and send it from your own mail program, or just write to support@community-access.org. If QUILL Lite starts but seems wrong, --check gives support the facts they need.

A good first lesson is Open a file, and give it back unchanged. For help inside the app any time, What to press when you are lost teaches the three keys that explain where you are: F1, F6 and Ctrl+F1.

After this chapter comes the Keyboard reference: every key QUILL Lite has, menu by menu.

Keyboard reference

This is every key QUILL Lite has, grouped by menu, the same way the menus are laid out. You do not need to learn them all. Skim for the ones you use most, and come back when you wonder whether there is a key for something.

Ctrl+F1 shows this same list inside the app, and you can type part of a name to narrow it. If a key does not suit you, Changing what a key does, in Chapter 11, shows you how to pick another.

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

Matches (in Edit)

Lines (in Edit)

Selection (in Edit)

Clipboard (in Edit)

View

Insert

Format

Line Spacing (in Format)

Headings (in Format)

Structure (in Format)

Navigate

Bookmarks (in Navigate)

Tools

Spelling (in Tools)

AI (in Tools)

Dictionary (in Tools)

Inline Notes (in Tools)

Dictation (in Tools)

Change Case (in Tools)

Indenting (in Tools)

Window

Help

Built per window

Second keys

A few commands answer to two keys. The first is the one the menu shows; the second is here because it is the key a hand trained on Word or on a home-row editor already reaches for. Both work, always, and rebinding the first in the Keyboard Manager leaves the second alone.

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.