QUILL User Guide

Introduction

Welcome, and thank you for giving QUILL a try.

QUILL is a writing studio for Windows and macOS, made for people who use a screen reader. I am blind, I use one every day, and I wanted an editor that was built around the keyboard and the ear from the very first line. QUILL is what came of that. You can write in it, of course. You can also open almost any document, have it read to you, dictate into it, check its spelling, compare two drafts, tidy up a scanned PDF, turn a manuscript into an audiobook, and a good deal more, all without reaching for the mouse.

The name stands for Quality, Usable, Inclusive, Lightweight, Literate. QUILL is free, and it is made by Community Access.

This guide is written for QUILL 1.0.0. QUILL 1.0 is not out yet, so now and then the guide may describe something your copy does not have. QUILL is still in beta, which means you will find rough edges and the odd surprise. If something confuses you or does not work, please tell us. Chapter 15 shows you how, and every report makes QUILL better for the next person.

What you will be able to do

By the time you have read this guide you will be able to open, write and save documents in all the common formats, and move around a long document by heading, paragraph or bookmark. You will know how to search and replace, check your spelling, format text, and have QUILL read your work back to you. You will be able to dictate, transcribe a recording, and, if you want it, ask the AI for help with a piece of writing. You will have QUILL set up to say as much or as little as you like, with your own keys and your own choice of features. And when something puzzles you, you will know where to find help.

None of this needs to happen on day one. Chapter 1 gets you writing in a few minutes. Everything after that is there for when you are curious.

How this guide is laid out

The chapters follow the order you are likely to want things. Read from the beginning if you are new to QUILL, or jump to the chapter for the job in front of you.

1. Chapter 1: Your first session. A short, hand-held start: write something, save it, and learn the handful of keys that do most of the work.
2. Chapter 2: Finding your way around. The window, the status bar, F1 help, the Command Palette, the QUILL key, and a tour of the menus.
3. Chapter 3: Opening, saving and converting files. Every format QUILL reads and writes, converting between them, and files on other computers and on GitHub.
4. Chapter 4: Writing and editing. Selecting, copying, the Copy Tray, inserting dates, symbols and emoji, abbreviations, and links.
5. Chapter 5: Formatting, structure and markup. Headings, lists, tables, Markdown and HTML, maths and citations.
6. Chapter 6: Moving around and finding things. Find and replace, jumping by heading, bookmarks and marks, Quick Nav mode, and Quill Eraser.
7. Chapter 7: Spelling and words. Spell checking, the thesaurus, the dictionary and document statistics.
8. Chapter 8: Reading, reviewing and listening. Read Aloud, Reveal Codes, comparing documents, OCR, audiobooks and keeping your place.
9. Chapter 9: Dictation and transcription. Speaking into a document and turning recordings into text, on your own computer.
10. Chapter 10: AI, when you want it. The free AI, your own keys, the assistant, and exactly what is sent where.
11. Chapter 11: Accessibility, speech and braille. How much QUILL says, low-vision settings, sounds, braille files and GLOW.
12. Chapter 12: Making QUILL yours. Feature profiles, keyboard packs, your own keys, Quillins and languages.
13. Chapter 13: Keeping your work safe. Autosave, recovery, restore points, sessions and safe mode.
14. Chapter 14: Projects, notes and the QuillVille family. Story Studio, the Vault, sticky notes, Git, Mastodon, and the apps that live alongside QUILL.
15. Chapter 15: Help, updates and support. F1, tutorials, updates, release channels and getting help from a person.

After the chapters come the appendices: the Developer Console, writing your own AI skills, the full list of emoji QUILL can insert, notes from earlier versions, and the Developer Console’s design document. Last of all are the Glossary of QUILL Terms and Getting help.

QUILL also has guided tutorials, short lessons you do with QUILL open in front of you, on Help > Tutorials… (Ctrl+Alt+F1). Whenever a lesson covers the same ground as part of this guide, the chapter gives you its name, so you can choose between reading about something and being walked through it. If you would rather learn by listening, QUILL, Step by Step is a slower companion book written to be read aloud, one skill per chapter.

Now and then a short note from QUILLBee, QUILLVille’s guide, is set apart as a quote: a faster key, a word explained, or something worth knowing before it catches you out. QUILLBert, the curious porcupine, wanders in once or twice when he has found something. The guide reads perfectly well if you skip every one of them, and you can meet the pair properly on the Meet QUILLBert and QUILLBee page.

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.

The notes from QUILLBee and QUILLBert are block quotes. In a web browser, Q moves to the next one in JAWS and NVDA, and Shift+Q goes back, so they are as easy to skip as they are to find.

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 writes them in its menus. Ctrl+Shift+P means hold down Ctrl and Shift together and press P. A menu path such as File > Save As… means open the File menu and choose Save As. If you have changed a key in QUILL, your key is the one that works; Help > Open Keyboard Reference always lists the keys you have right now.

When a section walks you through something, the steps are numbered. Follow them with QUILL 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. Press F1 on almost anything in QUILL, a field, a button, a menu item or the editor itself, and QUILL tells you what it does and which keys go with it.

Chapter 1: Your first session

This chapter is your first sit-down with QUILL, and I will stay with you the whole way. You will open QUILL, write a few lines, save them, and meet the handful of keys that do most of the work. If you have never used QUILL before, start here. If you have, skim the key list near the end and move on to Chapter 2.

Getting started

If you only have five minutes, do this.

1. The first time QUILL starts, the Personalise QUILL wizard offers to set up your keyboard layout, your profile and any optional features you want. It takes about two minutes. Finish it, or close it and come back later from Help > Personalise QUILL… whenever you like.
2. Press Ctrl+N to make a new document, or Ctrl+O to open one you already have.
3. Type a few lines.
4. Press Ctrl+Shift+P to open the Command Palette. Type guide, spell, compare or glow, and listen to how quickly QUILL finds what you meant.
5. Press F6 to move out of the editor and on towards the status bar along the bottom of the window. QUILL treats that strip as a place you can work, not just something to read. Shift+F6 brings you back.
6. Try F7 for spell check, Ctrl+F to search, or Ctrl+K to insert a link.
7. Press F1 on any control to hear what it does and which keys work there.

If you ever feel lost, F1 is the first thing to try. For ideas about the document you have open, choose Help > What Can I Do Here? (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F1). Between them, they are like having a friend at your elbow.

QUILLBee’s tip: Forgotten where something lives? Press Ctrl+Shift+P and type a word, like “sort” or “print”. The palette says each command’s key as you arrow past it, so you pick up the keys while you work.

What QUILL is like to use

A few promises shape everything in QUILL.

• The keyboard always comes first.
• Screen readers are part of the plan from the start, never an add-on.
• Every major action can be reached from the menus, from the Command Palette and through the command system.
• Your documents open on your computer and stay there, unless you choose an action that uses the network.
• QUILL tells you what changed, where you are and what you can do next.

In day-to-day use, that means QUILL pays a lot of attention to where your focus goes, gives you status updates that mean something, makes commands easy to discover, and uses the standard Windows controls your screen reader already knows. It also tries hard to take the worry out of things. Opening a recovered draft, comparing two files or checking how well text came out of a scanned document are all made to be safe and easy to undo.

A first proper session

Here is what your first real visit to QUILL is likely to look like.

You start QUILL. There is no splash screen to wait through. The window appears quickly, with a menu bar across the top, the editor in the middle and a status bar along the bottom. If QUILL finds a screen reader running, it adjusts its hints and the way it announces things to suit. If QUILL finds signs of an earlier crash, or work it saved automatically, it offers to recover it for you straight away.

From there, a good first session goes like this.

1. Open a file with Ctrl+O, or make a new one with Ctrl+N. If you would like a smaller file picker that is easier to use with a screen reader, open Preferences (Ctrl+,), go to General and turn on Use simple file open dialog.
2. Read or write in the editor.
3. Press Ctrl+Shift+P and explore commands, without memorising anything.
4. Open the Navigate menu to jump by line, heading, block, region or page.
5. Open the Tools menu for spelling, word count, checking extracted text, comparing files, macros and help with regular expressions.
6. Choose Help > Open Keyboard Reference to see every shortcut that works in your setup right now. QUILL builds this reference on the spot, so it always matches your current feature profile and any keys you have changed.

The habit this teaches is the most useful one in QUILL: you do not need to go hunting. If QUILL can do something, you can reach it from wherever you are.

QUILLBert found something. He pressed Ctrl+Shift+Grave twice in a row to see what would happen, and suddenly every letter he typed moved him around the document instead of writing. H took him to a heading, P to a paragraph. That is Quick Nav, and it stays on until you press Esc, which is how he got his typing back. Chapter 2 explains the QUILL key properly.

The keys that do most of the work

If you want a small set of keys to learn first, start with these.

• Ctrl+N new document, Ctrl+O open, Ctrl+S save, Ctrl+Shift+S save as.
• Ctrl+Shift+P the Command Palette.
• Ctrl+F find, F3 find next, Shift+F3 find previous. Alt+F3 turns Reveal Codes on and off, so you can hear the formatting that is normally hidden.
• Ctrl+G go to a line. Ctrl+Shift+G Document Statistics, the word count and more.
• Ctrl+K insert a link, Ctrl+Enter follow the link at the cursor.
• Ctrl+Shift+Grave, L (press the QUILL key, then L) for the List Manager, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+L for the Structured List Studio, and Ctrl+Shift+F2 for Insert Special Character.
• Ctrl+F9 starts and stops Locked Dictation, and Alt+F9 says what dictation is doing.
• F9 says the last result again, if you missed it.
• F7 spell check, Ctrl+F7 next misspelling, Ctrl+Shift+F7 previous misspelling, Shift+F7 the thesaurus.
• Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab move between open documents.
• F6 and Shift+F6 move between the parts of the window.
• Alt+Z turns soft wrap on and off.

When those feel familiar, open Help > Open Keyboard Reference and let QUILL show you the rest, taken from the keys you actually have.

What you learned, and where to go next

You have opened QUILL, written something, found commands by name with the Command Palette, and met the keys you will use every day. You also know the two ways out of any muddle: F1 on whatever you are on, and Help > What Can I Do Here?.

If you would like to go over this with QUILL keeping you company, open Help > Tutorials… (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and take the track called Your first hour. Its lessons “Write and save your first document”, “Do anything by name” and “Getting unstuck” follow this chapter closely. On the website, Your first hour with QUILL walks the same ground at a gentler pace.

When you are ready, Chapter 2, Finding your way around, takes you on a tour of the window, the menus and the QUILL key.

Chapter 2: Finding your way around

This chapter is a walk around QUILL. You will learn how to get help on whatever you are on, how to run any command by name, how the QUILL key opens up the rest of QUILL, and what lives where in the window and the menus. Read it once from top to bottom, then come back to it whenever you wonder where something is.

Getting around QUILL

QUILL is built so you never have to memorise an action to reach it. Three things carry most of the load: F1 for help on what you are on, the Command Palette for running anything by name, and the QUILL key for the bigger features.

Help on the focused control (F1)

Press F1 on anything that can take focus, whether that is a field in a dialog, a button, a menu item or the editor itself, and a small help window opens. It tells you what the control does and which keys work there. All of the text sits in one read-only field, so your screen reader reads the whole thing as soon as the window opens.

The help keys are:

• F1 help on the focused control.
• Ctrl+Shift+F1 open the full User Guide.
• Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F1 open What Can I Do Here?, ideas for the document you have open.
• Ctrl+F1 the Key Cheatsheet, a list of shortcuts.
• Shift+F1 About QUILL.

Chapter 15, Help, updates and support, covers context-sensitive help in full.

F1 works the same way in every QuillVille app: Radio, Cast, the Media Player, Audio Studio, Inkwell, Weather, the Converter and Beacon. It answers two questions at once. First it says what the window you are in is for, in a sentence or two written for that window. Then it describes the control under your cursor: what it wants, what format it expects, what its default is and what changing it affects. A field that asks for a number of seconds says so, and says which number it starts at.

Some controls already explain themselves by name, such as “Reload the highlighted source from the internet”. For those, F1 gives you the name plus a line on how to work that kind of control (“A list: Up and Down move between rows, Enter acts on the row, and Shift+F10 lists everything else you can do to it”). Nothing answers F1 with silence.

If you would rather read it all in one place, every help sentence in the family is collected in the F1 help reference. The default keyboard shortcuts have a companion document, the keyboard reference. Both are made from the app itself, so they always match what QUILL really does.

The Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P)

Ctrl+Shift+P opens the Command Palette, a list of every command in QUILL that you can search. Type any part of a command’s name to narrow the list, then press Enter to run it. It is the quickest way to any action when you do not know its key or where it lives in the menus. Searching for guide, spell, compare or glow is good practice. You can also open it from Tools > Command Palette….

Your search can be looser than the exact name:

• Words can come in any order. url open and open url both find Open From URL….
• A shortcut works as a search. ctrl+o finds Open.
• Everyday words are understood. settings finds Preferences…, and quit finds Exit.

As you arrow through the results, QUILL says each command’s shortcut along with its name. Before long you will find you reach for the key and not the palette.

Every on/off command in the palette says which way it is set right now, for example Toggle Soft Wrap (currently On) and Toggle Dark Mode (currently Off). The same goes for find wrap, the tab control, persistent undo, spell check as you type, word prediction, overwrite mode, extend-selection mode, tab insert mode, abbreviation expansion and more. A menu can show a check mark, but a list in the palette cannot, so the state goes in the name. You never have to flip a switch just to find out which way it was.

When a command cannot run right now, the palette tells you why. A command switched off by a safety update reads as “(unavailable: Turned off by a safety update: …)”, and trying to run it says the reason again.

The palette learns from you, too. The commands you use most rise towards the top of the list.

Palette search modes

Start your search with one of these characters to change how the palette looks:

• Normal search, or >, searches all commands.
• : searches command IDs.
• ? favours commands that have a key.
• ~ puts recently used commands first.

The QUILL key

The QUILL key is Ctrl+Shift+Grave. The grave key is the back-tick key, just above Tab. Press it, then one more key, and you reach most of QUILL’s bigger features without leaving the keyboard.

Everywhere QUILL shows one of these keys, in menus, in About > Keyboard Reference, in the QUILL Key Help dialog, on the cheat sheet and in the status bar, it writes it as QUILL Key + <key>: QUILL Key + S, QUILL Key + Shift+O and so on. When you type one into the Keymap Editor you write it as Ctrl+Shift+Grave, <key>. Both mean the same thing.

The QUILL key works in two ways.

1. Prefix Mode (One-shot). Press it once and QUILL waits a moment for your next key. That key runs a command, such as G to open a file from a favorite folder or M to paste rich text as Markdown, and then QUILL goes back to normal.
2. Browse Mode (Locked). Press the QUILL key twice in a row and QUILL locks Quick Nav (Browse) mode on. Now single letters move you through the document: H for headings, P for paragraphs, S for sentences and more. It stays on until you press Esc.

Every one of these chords can be changed in the Keymap Editor, which the next topic covers. The full cheat sheet is one key away: QUILL Key + ?.

The QUILL key chords

These are the chords QUILL starts with.

• QUILL Key + N Quick Nav (browse) mode for your next move. If Sticky browse mode (the browse_mode_sticky setting) is on, it stays locked until Esc. Otherwise it ends when the QUILL key times out.
• QUILL Key pressed twice locks Quick Nav on until Esc, whatever that setting says. This is the way most people use it: the first press gets QUILL ready, the second locks browse mode.
• QUILL Key + G opens Open From Favorite Folder…. (Go to Anything is Ctrl+Alt+Shift+A, and the Quick Nav landmark list is Ctrl+Shift+Z.)
• QUILL Key + M pastes the rich HTML on the clipboard as Markdown at the cursor.
• QUILL Key + V opens the browser preview of the current document.
• QUILL Key + A opens selection actions when text is selected. With nothing selected, it expands an abbreviation by hand in the middle of a word.
• QUILL Key + Shift+A opens the abbreviation manager.
• QUILL Key + Shift+1 to Shift+9, then Shift+0, Shift+- and Shift+= copy the selection to slots 1 to 12 of the Copy Tray.
• QUILL Key + ? shows the QUILL key cheat sheet.
• QUILL Key + Esc cancels the QUILL key without running anything.

A few things that once had a QUILL key chord have moved:

• Opening from, saving to and managing remote sites (FTP, SFTP, HTTPS, WebDAV, S3 and GitHub) have no key to start with. Find them under File > Open from Remote, or give them a key of your own. (These were QUILL Key + Shift+O, QUILL Key + W and QUILL Key + Shift+M.)
• Turning abbreviation expansion on or off is Alt+Shift+A.
• The Copy Tray dialog is Ctrl+Alt+V.
• Switching the Tab key between indenting and typing a tab character is Ctrl+Alt+Shift+I.

Hearing the QUILL key

When you press the QUILL key, QUILL plays a short double ping that sounds like nothing else, so you know it is ready before any speech arrives. The sound is in every sound pack that comes with QUILL, and you can switch it off on its own in Tools > Reading and Dictation > Sound Scheme… (this used to be called Sound Events).

Some keyboards and drivers report the grave key in unusual ways. QUILL checks for it three different ways, so it recognises the key on any layout.

On macOS, use the physical Control key for the QUILL key, not Cmd. Cmd+Shift+Grave is macOS’s own shortcut for cycling windows, and QUILL never sees it. If you would rather use Cmd, change that system shortcut first in System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Mission Control.

Moving a QUILL key chord

1. Open the Keymap Editor, from Tools > Customize and Support > Keymap Editor… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Space).
2. Find the command you want to move.
3. Type the new chord in the form Ctrl+Shift+Grave, X, putting the key you want in place of X.

The Keymap Editor stores chords in that Ctrl+Shift+Grave, X form, and menus and the cheat sheet show them as QUILL Key + X. If the chord you pick is already in use, QUILL tells you before anything is overwritten.

The Keyboard Manager

The Keymap Editor, also called the Keyboard Manager, is where you see and change every key in QUILL. Open it from Tools > Customize and Support > Keymap Editor… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Space), or from the Keymap Editor entry in More Preferences (the QUILL key, then O). It is made to be quick and safe to use, however you think about shortcuts.

• Search two ways from one box. Type part of a command’s name to narrow the list. Or type a shortcut, such as ctrl+alt+m, Control + Shift + K, or even a QUILL key chord like quill, s. The editor then tells you which command that key belongs to, or that it is “unassigned and available”. You never have to remember whether a key is free. Just ask.
• Forgiving spelling. Write the modifiers however you like: control, ctrl or ctl, in any order (shift+ctrl+k is the same as ctrl+shift+k) and in any case. QUILL tidies up what you type before saving it. A Mac-style Cmd stays separate from Ctrl and is never mixed up with it.
• Record Keys. Would you rather press the keys than spell them? Choose Record Keys, press the chord, and QUILL fills it in for you.
• Clear warnings when a key is taken. If you choose a key that another command already has, QUILL tells you that command’s name and offers to move the key over, taking it off the other command. Nothing is replaced behind your back.
• Diagnostics and repair. Run Diagnostics checks your whole keymap. It reports duplicate shortcuts, keys for commands that no longer exist, bindings it cannot read, and any key that is “assigned but inert”, meaning the editor cannot actually use it. For the problems it can fix, one press of Heal removes the bad entries and reapplies your keymap, so the menus and the shortcuts agree again.

The Main Window

QUILL’s main window is kept simple: a menu bar across the top, the editor in the middle and a status bar along the bottom. When you have several documents open you can also show a row of tabs, which the Windows and tabs topic, later in this chapter, covers.

The menu bar

The menus run across the top of the window in the order you know from Windows and Office: File, Edit, View, Insert, Format, Navigate, Tools, AI, Window, QuillVille and Help. There used to be a Search menu as well. Its commands now live under Edit > Search Tools.

Every menu and every menu item can be reached from the keyboard. Press Alt with the menu’s underlined letter: Alt+F for File, Alt+E for Edit, Alt+V for View, Alt+T for Tools, Alt+W for Window and Alt+H for Help.

The menus cover everything. If QUILL can do something, there is almost always a menu item for it. The menus topic, later in this chapter, says what each one holds.

The editor

The editor is the heart of QUILL. It is where you write, where text taken from other files lands, and where reports and comparison summaries open, as ordinary documents you can read and edit like any other.

The editor handles:

• plain text writing
• Markdown-aware writing
• HTML-aware writing
• moving by the structure of the document
• selection helpers
• cleaning up text
• spelling and the thesaurus
• inserting and following links
• reviewing changes after a comparison

The status bar

The status bar is something you can work in, not just a strip of text to read.

Press F6 to move into it. Once you are there, you can move between its cells and press Enter on one, and most cells open a related window. Shift+F6 takes you back to the editor. Depending on your layout and what you are doing, the status bar can show:

• the current message
• line and column
• word count
• insert or overwrite mode
• tab mode (whether the Tab key indents the line or types a tab character)
• selection size
• encoding
• line endings
• spell-check state
• background tasks
• notifications
• read-aloud state
• autosave timing
• the current search term
• the file path, or that the file is unsaved

You can reorder the cells or hide some of them in Tools > Customize and Support > Status Bar Layout…. Restore Defaults there puts every cell back the way it started.

Open the context menu on a status cell (right-click, Shift+F10 or the Applications key) to Activate it, Hide this item, or open Status bar settings…. On the Notifications cell (or the Background Tasks cell) the menu also has Clear All Notifications, which empties the notification list in one go without opening the dialog.

The status bar never says the same thing twice. When the title bar is set to show the full path, QUILL hides the file path cell. The current message cell hides itself too, whenever its text is exactly the same as another cell you can see.

To hide or show the whole status bar, use View > Status Bar, described in View and display, later in this chapter.

Moving between regions (F6)

F6 and Shift+F6 move you between the main parts of the window. If you write, check and move around entirely from the keyboard, this soon becomes second nature.

When Show Tab Control is on (in the View menu) and at least one document is open, the row of document tabs joins the F6 cycle as Document Tabs, so you can reach the tabs from the keyboard instead of skipping past them. The order is the editor, then Document Tabs, then the preview (when you have it open beside the editor), then the status bar. On the tab row, Left and Right Arrow move between tabs, and Enter, Space or Tab takes you back to the editor on the document you chose.

The Tab key, indent or tab character

Out of the box, the Tab key indents. It adds one level of indentation at the start of the current line, or of every line you have selected, and Shift+Tab takes one level away. On a Markdown list item, Tab and Shift+Tab move the item in and out a level. QUILL speaks each of these, so you hear that the line moved even though the cursor stays where it was.

When you indent with Tab, or outdent with Shift+Tab, QUILL says how deep the line now sits, for example “4 spaces”, “8 spaces” or “1 tab”. If you would rather just hear “Indented lines”, turn off Announce indentation depth on Tab in Preferences, under Accessibility.

Two settings decide what an indent is made of, both in Preferences:

• Indent size is the number of spaces per indent level, from 1 to 8. The default is 4.
• Indent with tabs makes QUILL insert tab characters instead of spaces.

Whichever you choose, the spoken depth follows it.

If you would rather Tab typed a real tab character at the cursor, the way it does in a plain text editor, switch Tab Mode with Ctrl+Alt+Shift+I, or with Format > Tab Key Inserts Tab Character, which is checked while the mode is on. QUILL says the new mode when you switch, and the Tab Mode cell in the status bar shows Indent or Tab char. Even while Tab types a tab character, Shift+Tab still outdents, so you can take back a stray indent without leaving the mode. Tab Mode lasts until you close QUILL.

The menus

Here is what each menu holds and which chapter tells you more. They are listed in the order they sit on the menu bar.

File

File is where documents begin and end: new, open, save and save as, recent files and favourite folders, opening from a web address or over SSH and remote sites, snapshots, publishing, and importing and exporting other formats. Chapter 3, Opening, saving and converting files, covers all of it.

Edit

Edit holds the everyday editing commands, along with selection tools, the Copy Tray and Edit > Search Tools, which has what used to be the Search menu. Chapter 4, Writing and editing, covers editing and selection, and Chapter 6, Moving around and finding things, covers Search Tools.

View

View changes how your document is shown without changing what is in it: soft wrap, the tab row, the status bar, text size, previews and Reveal Codes. It is covered later in this chapter, under View and display.

Insert

Insert puts things into your document: headings, lists, the date and time, links and special characters. Chapter 4, Writing and editing, covers it.

Format

Format holds font, size, alignment, colour and paragraph settings, along with changing case, working on lines, sorting, whitespace, HTML and Markdown, and the document’s language. Chapter 5, Formatting, structure and markup, covers it.

Navigate

Navigate gathers the ways to move around a document: go to line, go to heading, go to an entry in a notebook, the Heading Organizer, the Outline Navigator, back and forward through places you have been, and next and previous by structure. It also has bookmarks, folding and sticky notes. When you need to get around a long document, start here. Chapter 6, Moving around and finding things, covers it.

Tools

Tools is QUILL’s workshop, for jobs that are more than plain editing. The Command Palette is here, along with spelling and writing tools (Chapter 7, Spelling and words), reading, comparison and inspection tools (Chapter 8, Reading, reviewing and listening), speech and dictation (Chapter 9, Dictation and transcription), and braille and accessibility (Chapter 11, Accessibility, speech and braille). Tools > Customize and Support is where you make QUILL your own (Chapter 12, Making QUILL yours), and Story Studio, the Vault and Git are covered in Chapter 14, Projects, notes and the QuillVille family.

AI

AI holds the optional assistant: proofreading, changing the selected text, translation, reading aloud, transcribing audio and more. Nothing in it runs unless you choose it. Chapter 10, AI, when you want it, covers it.

Window

Window lists your open documents and lets you move between them, open a new tab, close the others, or send QUILL to the system tray. It is covered later in this chapter, under Windows and tabs.

QuillVille

QuillVille opens the other apps in the QUILL family, each on a key of its own:

• Open Quill Radio (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F7)
• Open Quill Weather (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F8)
• Open Quill Cast (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F12), the same key that shows and hides Cast from any program once it is running
• Open Audio Studio (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F9)
• Open Quill Converter (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F10), which changes audio and video files from one format to another
• Open Quill Inkwell (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F11)

If an app is not on your computer yet, QUILL offers to download it for you. Chapter 14, Projects, notes and the QuillVille family, says more.

Help

Help has help on the control you are on, What Can I Do Here?, the tutorials, the User Guide, the keyboard reference, Personalise QUILL…, feature profiles, checking for updates and ways to get support. Chapter 15, Help, updates and support, covers it.

Windows and tabs

QUILL lets you have many documents open at once. Each one gets its own tab, and QUILL opens things it makes for you as tabs too. The welcome guide, the keyboard reference and a comparison summary all open as ordinary tabs, right beside the work that produced them.

Tabs and document switching

• Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab move to the next and previous document.
• Ctrl+W closes the document you are in.
• The context menu on a tab lets you close that tab, close the other tabs, or close the tabs to its right.
• The same menu can show a saved document in File Explorer.

To see the row of tabs, turn on Show Tab Control in the View menu (QUILL Key + Shift+T).

The Window menu

The Window menu is small but handy.

• New Tab (Ctrl+T) opens a new, empty document tab.
• Next Document (Ctrl+Tab, also Ctrl+F6; on macOS Cmd+Shift+]) moves to the next open document.
• Previous Document (Ctrl+Shift+Tab, also Ctrl+Shift+F6; on macOS Cmd+Shift+[) moves to the previous open document. macOS keeps Cmd+Tab for its own App Switcher, so on a Mac QUILL uses the same tab keys as Safari and Xcode.
• Close Other Documents (Ctrl+Shift+F4) closes every document except the one you are in.
• Send to System Tray (QUILL Key + T) tucks QUILL into the notification area without closing it.
• After those come your open documents, numbered, such as 1: notes.txt (Alt+1) (active) and 2: other.md (Alt+2). Press Alt+W to open the Window menu, then the number, to go straight to that document. The one you are in is marked active. The list keeps up as you open and close files, and an untitled document takes its new name the moment you save it.

You can also jump straight to a document by its position without opening the menu. Go to Document 1 to Go to Document 10 are Alt+1 to Alt+9, and Alt+0 for the tenth. If no document is open in that position, QUILL says so and leaves you where you are. You can change these keys in the Keymap Editor, like any other.

QUILLBee’s shortcut: Juggling notes, extracted files and previews? Keep your main document first in the row, and Alt+1 will always bring you home.

View and display

The View menu changes how QUILL shows your document on screen. Nothing on it changes what is in the document.

• Toggle Soft Wrap (Alt+Z) wraps long lines to fit the window without changing the file.
• Show Tab Control shows or hides the row of document tabs.
• Status Bar (Alt+Shift+B) shows or hides the whole status bar. It is the same switch on the same key as in Notepad and QUILL Lite. It is a different thing from choosing which cells the bar carries (right-click the bar, or Tools > Customize and Support > Status Bar Layout…): a bar with every cell hidden still takes up a row of the window. The setting is show_status_bar (Show status bar). It is on to start with, and QUILL remembers your choice. QUILL says which way it went, because your screen reader will not tell you a bar has left the window.
• Increase Text Size (Ctrl+=), Decrease Text Size (Ctrl+-) and Reset Text Size (Ctrl+0) change how big the editor’s text is without leaving the document. They are the same three keys as in Notepad and QUILL Lite. Chapter 11, Accessibility, speech and braille, has more on the size and face of the text.
• Preview… (Alt+Shift+V), Preview Side by Side, Focus Preview (Alt+F6) and Browser Preview… (QUILL Key + V) show your document rendered, the way a reader would see it.
• Auto Side-by-Side Preview opens a live preview beside the editor automatically.
• Announce Headings and Announce Lists choose whether QUILL tells you when you move onto a heading or a list.
• What Is This Document?, What Changed? and Undo and Say What Changed tell you the things a screen reader cannot work out for itself.
• Show Entries Panel and Reveal Codes (Alt+F3) show more of the document’s structure and formatting.

Two switches that used to be on this menu are now in Preferences (Ctrl+,): Wrap Find Searches decides whether Find carries on from the top when it reaches the end, and Start With No Document Open makes QUILL open to an empty workspace instead of a starter document.

Other settings that once lived here are in Preferences too, where they are saved in one place: the theme and dark mode, system tray mode, how the title bar shows the path, how the title marks unsaved changes, persistent undo, spell check as you type, and word prediction as you type. You reach them from Tools > Customize and Support > Preferences….

Live preview while you type

Open the side-by-side preview with Preview Side by Side, or turn on Auto Side-by-Side Preview. Alt+F6 jumps straight into it, and while it is open it joins the F6 cycle too.

As you edit, the preview updates quietly in place. The new content is swapped in without reloading the page, so your braille display and screen reader are not interrupted, nothing is read again from the top, and you keep your place. This is the live preview to use if you read with a screen reader or braille.

The Browser Preview in your web browser can also follow your edits. A real browser has to reload the whole page to do that, so QUILL refreshes it only when you pause typing, not on every key. Each time, it puts you back at the section you are editing, or where you had scrolled to, instead of at the top.

Jump from the preview back to the editor

Reading the side preview, and want to change what you just heard? Go to a block (a heading, paragraph, list item, quote, table or code block) and open its context menu with the Applications key, Shift+F10 or a right-click. Choose Go to this location in the editor. The cursor moves to that block in your document, focus goes with it, and QUILL tells you where you landed.

Pressing Enter on a block does the same, when your screen reader passes the key through. The context menu is the dependable way, though: in browse mode there is no way to ask where the virtual cursor is, but a context menu always belongs to the exact spot you are on. The jump is offered when the preview matches your document word for word. A preview that expands Vault links does not offer it, because the places would no longer line up.

What you learned, and where to go next

You know three ways to reach anything in QUILL: F1 for help on what you are on, the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) for any command by name, and the QUILL key (Ctrl+Shift+Grave) for the bigger features and Quick Nav. You have been round the window with F6, heard what each menu holds, moved between documents and tabs, and seen how View changes what is on screen.

For a guided go at the same ground, open Help > Tutorials… (Ctrl+Alt+F1). In the Your first hour track, “Do anything by name”, “The QUILL key” and “Getting unstuck” match this chapter, and “Make QUILL the size you need”, in Living with it, covers text size. On the website, Own the keyboard goes deeper into keys and the Keymap Editor.

Next, Chapter 3, Opening, saving and converting files, shows you how to bring documents in and send them out in the format you need.

Chapter 3: Opening, saving and converting files

This chapter is about getting your words in and out of QUILL. We start with the everyday things: opening a file, saving it, and what QUILL says when something about a file changes. Then we look at the kinds of documents QUILL understands, how to turn one format into another, and how to work with files that live on a server or on GitHub. Read the first two topics now. Come back to the rest when you have a Word file to send or a folder of documents to convert.

Opening files

Most of the time you open a file with File > Open… (Ctrl+O). The File menu has a few other ways in, and each one is handy at the right moment:

• New creates a blank document.
• Open… opens a document from disk.
• Open Recent takes you back to files you used lately. At the bottom of that list, Clear Recent Files… empties it when you want a fresh start. It asks first, and pinned files stay. Your files stay where they are; only the list goes. Just above Clear, Recent Documents… (Alt+Shift+0) shows the whole list in a window of its own. More on that just below.
• Open from Clipboard (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Enter) opens whatever you copied: a file copied in File Explorer, a file path copied as text, or a web link. More on it just below.
• Open from URL… downloads a document from the web. Before anything is downloaded, QUILL asks you, naming the website and the size of the file.
• New Document from Clipboard opens a new document that already holds whatever text is on the clipboard. It is on the Edit menu too.
• Snapshots saves a group of open documents as one workspace snapshot, so you can reopen them all together later. If you know Visual Studio Code, it is a little like a lightweight workspace there.

Files on a server or on GitHub have their own commands. They are covered later in this chapter, under Remote access and GitHub remote files.

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 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. QUILL looks at what you copied:

• Files copied in File Explorer open, one after another. If you copied several, QUILL tells you how many it opened.
• A file path copied as text opens that file. The quotes File Explorer’s “Copy as path” puts around it are fine. Several paths, one per line, open in turn.
• A web link goes to Open from URL, described next.

If the clipboard holds none of those, QUILL says “The clipboard holds no file, path or link.” and nothing else happens. Ctrl+V still pastes, as always.

Open from URL… (on the File menu). Type or paste a web address. QUILL finds out the file’s name and size, then 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, such as “Nothing was found at that address on example.com.” A link to a file’s page on GitHub opens the file itself rather than the web page around it.

The document opens read-only, with its web address in the tab name. To keep it, save a copy. QUILL works from a temporary copy of the download and deletes it when you close the tab.

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

QUILL Lite has all three, on the same key.

Opening something you worked on recently

QUILL remembers the documents you open, newest first. There are two quick ways back to one.

The first nine. Alt+Shift+1 reopens the document you opened most recently, Alt+Shift+2 the one before that, and so on up to Alt+Shift+9. They are the first nine rows of File > Open Recent, where each row says the file’s name first and then its folder.

The whole list. Press Alt+Shift+0, or choose File > Open Recent > Recent Documents…. Arrow to a document and press Enter to open it. In the same window you can:

• Pin a document you keep coming back to (Alt+P). Pinned documents stay at the top, however many others you open. On a pinned one, the button says Unpin.
• Remove from List (Alt+R, or the Delete key) takes one off the list. The file is not touched.
• Open Containing Folder (Alt+F) shows the file in File Explorer.
• Clear Unpinned… (Alt+L) empties the list. It asks first, and pressing Enter answers No. Pinned documents always stay.
• Remember up to this many documents (Alt+U) sets the length of the list, from 1 to 50. It is the same setting as Recent files to remember in Settings.
• Forget missing files when the app starts (Alt+M) is the same setting as Drop missing recent files automatically, described below.

A file that has moved or been deleted says “not found” in this window, and Remove from List tidies it away. QUILL Lite has the same window on the same key; the two apps keep their own lists.

The Simple File Open dialog

QUILL can open files with either the standard Windows file open dialog or its own Simple File Open dialog. The simple one is a short, keyboard-friendly window: one list of files, a small filter, your recent files and a switch for hidden files. Both are reached the same way, with File > Open… or Ctrl+O. Which one you get is decided by Settings > General > Use simple file open dialog. It is off to begin with. Turn it on if you would like a plain picker that is easy to use with a screen reader.

Here is what is in the Simple File Open dialog:

• A Path field at the top shows the folder you are in. Type a path and press Enter. A folder opens in the list, and a file opens in QUILL. Press Ctrl+L from anywhere in the dialog to jump back to this field. You can paste a path in whatever form you have it: with the quotes File Explorer’s “Copy as path” adds, with %APPDATA%-style environment variables, as a file:// link, or starting with ~. QUILL tidies it up for you.
• A Filter dropdown chooses which file types are shown. The default, Supported files, shows plain text, Markdown, HTML and Rich Text. Choose Plain text, Markdown, HTML or Rich Text to narrow it further, or All files to see everything.
• A Files list shows the folders and files where you are. Folders start with [dir]. To go up to the parent folder, press Backspace in the list or use the Up button.
• A Hidden toggle shows or hides files whose names start with a dot, or that Windows marks as hidden. Press Ctrl+H in the path field or the file list to flip it. On a Mac, use Cmd+Shift+. instead, as the Finder does, because Ctrl+H there is the system’s Hide shortcut.
• A Recent button pops up your recently opened files, so you can reopen one with a single choice.
• A Use Windows Dialog button opens the standard Windows dialog just this once. Your setting does not change, so the next Ctrl+O brings you back to the simple dialog. It is there for the odd case, such as a very long path or a custom file association, where you want the Windows picker.
• An Open button and a Cancel button. Enter opens the selected file and Escape cancels.

Under the list, a status line tells you the folder you are in, how many entries are showing, and any error. If a folder is off limits (“permission denied”) or a path is not a folder, the dialog stays open so you can fix the path and try again.

QUILLBee’s tip: Someone sent you a file path in an e-mail? In the Simple File Open dialog, press Ctrl+L to jump to the Path field, paste it, and press Enter. Quotes and all, QUILL tidies it up.

When a file is not where it was

Files move. A OneDrive or SharePoint file can be a placeholder whose contents were never downloaded to this PC. A file on File > Open Recent may have been renamed or deleted since you last used it. A file on a USB stick or a network share simply is not there when that drive is not connected.

When that happens, QUILL says so in one sentence, in the status bar and out loud:

Bingo3.html is no longer there. It may have been moved, renamed, or deleted, or it may live on a drive that is not connected.

That is all. There is no dialog to close, and QUILL stays exactly where it was, so you can press Ctrl+O and pick something else. If you choose a folder where QUILL expected a file, it tells you that instead.

Your Recent list keeps the entry. A file that is missing today may be on a USB stick you plug back in tomorrow, so QUILL does not quietly forget it because one open failed.

If you would rather lose dead entries, turn on Drop missing recent files automatically in Settings, on the General page (the setting is recent_files_auto_clear_missing, and it is off by default). Even then, it only removes entries whose file has been deleted from one of this PC’s own fixed drives. Files on USB, removable or network drives are never even checked, so unplugging a drive never clears its history. “Not connected” is not the same as “gone”.

Saving files

Saving is three commands on the File menu:

• Save writes the current document.
• Save As… writes it to a new name or place, and converts it to the file type you choose in the dialog.
• Save All writes every open document that has changes.

Save As… really converts. QUILL keeps your text as portable Markdown-style markup, so choosing Rich Text Format (*.rtf) writes real RTF, HTML (*.html) writes a standalone web page, and Text (*.txt) writes your text as a plain file. Choosing Markdown (*.md) keeps the markup just as it is. The file’s extension always decides the format. If you type a name with no extension, the type you selected supplies one. There is more on each format under What happens when you save in another format, later in this chapter.

When Save As changes the format, QUILL can reload the file so the editor matches it. For example, a freshly saved .rtf can reopen in the Rich text editor. Reloading replaces what is in the editor with the saved file, so by default QUILL asks first with a Yes or No question. To stop the question, set Settings > Editing > Reload after Save As to match the format to Reload automatically or Keep current surface.

Filename suggestions. When you save a document that has never been saved, QUILL fills in the name box from the document’s first line. It removes leading # marks, quotes and bullets, and any characters a file name cannot hold. This is only a suggestion: type over it with anything you like. It never renames a document that is already saved. It is on by default, and you can turn it off with Suggest a filename from the first line in Preferences.

Save As Plain Text

Save As Plain Text… saves a clean plain-text copy, with the markup taken out. Plain text has no links, so Settings > Editing > Links in plain-text export decides what happens to a Markdown link. You can keep the link text and its URL (the default, so you never lose where a link pointed), the link text only, the URL only, or the original Markdown link. The same setting applies whenever Save As writes a .txt file. If your document has hidden formatting such as fonts, colours or alignment, QUILL offers to keep it in an Illumination, which comes next.

Keeping formatting in a plain-text file with Illuminations

A plain .txt file has nowhere to store fonts, colours or alignment, so saving formatted text as plain text normally loses the formatting. QUILL gives you a choice. It is named after the painted decoration a scribe adds to a manuscript: an Illumination is a small companion file, yourfile.txt.illumination, that keeps the formatting beside the clean text. Your .txt stays truly plain, so Notepad, e-mail and every other program can read it. When you open it again in QUILL, the Illumination puts back every font, colour and alignment exactly.

What happens is set by Settings > Editing > Saving formatted text as plain text:

• Ask each time (the default). QUILL asks whether to keep your formatting by saving as Markdown, Word or RTF instead, to save the plain .txt plus an Illumination, or to save plain text only and drop the formatting.
• Always save an Illumination sidecar. QUILL writes the clean .txt and the .illumination companion every time, with no question.
• Save plain text and drop the formatting. The classic save that loses formatting. The .txt is clean, and any old Illumination beside it is removed.

Two things to keep in mind. The Illumination is a separate file, so if you copy or e-mail only the .txt, the formatting stays behind. Keep the pair together. And if you edit the .txt in another program, QUILL notices the text no longer matches its Illumination and opens it as plain text, so formatting never lands on the wrong words. If you want one file that keeps everything, save as Markdown, which keeps the formatting inline, or Word/RTF, which turn it into real formatting.

Encoding and line endings (Ctrl+Alt+E)

File > File Format… (Ctrl+Alt+E) is one window for the two things that decide exactly how your file is written to disk. QUILL Lite opens the same window on the same key, under the name Tools > File Encoding and Line Endings….

• Encoding. Choose UTF-8 for anything new. UTF-8 with BOM suits the Windows tools that expect one. There is also UTF-16, and Windows-1252 for older .txt files that use it. A file that arrived in something else, such as UTF-16 big-endian, shows as a keep as is row and stays that way.
• Line endings. CRLF is what Windows programs write, and it is what a new QUILL document starts with, the same as Notepad, WordPad, Word and QUILL Lite. LF is what Unix, macOS and most build tools expect. A file that arrived with old-style Mac CR endings keeps them, in its own keep as is row.

Nothing changes until you save, and the window tells you so. If the encoding you chose cannot hold a character in your document, the save names that character and offers Save As. It never quietly turns it into a question mark.

When a file is not UTF-8. Most files today are UTF-8. When QUILL opens one that is not, such as an older Windows file, it tells you once: “Opened as Windows-1252, not UTF-8.” Nothing about the file has changed. QUILL reads every byte, and a save puts every byte back as it was.

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. In the File Format window, choose Reopen with Encoding…, pick the encoding the file was written in, and QUILL reads the same file again from disk that way. If you have unsaved changes, QUILL asks first, because reopening throws them away. Nothing on disk changes. If the file is not valid in the encoding you picked, QUILL says so and leaves your document as it was.

After a reopen, the file saves back in that same encoding, so the next program that reads it sees what it always saw. To turn it into UTF-8 instead, open File Format again, choose UTF-8, and save.

When another program changes the file you are editing

QUILL keeps an eye on the file you have open. When something else writes to it (Word saving a .docx, a build tool regenerating a .md, a colleague’s sync client), QUILL asks what you want to do. Unless you tell it to, it never reloads on its own.

You have three answers:

• Reload from Disk reads the file again, using the right reader for its format, and keeps your cursor where it was.
• Keep Mine leaves your tab exactly as it is. The version on disk is ignored until you save over it or reload. Escape gives this answer too, because doing nothing to your text is the safe choice.
• Open Disk Version in a New Tab opens what is on disk as a second, read-only tab named <name> (on disk), so you can compare the two and decide. Your own tab is not touched.

The question has a checkbox, such as “Do not ask me again for .docx files.” Check it and QUILL remembers your answer for every file of that format. That way a build that rewrites the file you are reading every few seconds is answered once, not every time. Reload and Keep Mine can be remembered. Opening the disk version in a new tab is a one-off comparison, so it never is. To take every remembered answer back, choose File > Forget Remembered File-Change Answers (Ctrl+Shift+0). A remembered Reload never throws away unsaved edits; QUILL asks instead.

If the file changes while you do have unsaved edits, the same question spells out what is at stake: reloading throws away your edits, and keeping yours overwrites the disk version the next time you save.

Save looks once more. Right before Save writes your file, QUILL checks the file on disk again. If another program changed it since you opened it or last saved it, even a moment ago, QUILL 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.

This matters most when an AI assistant or a sync tool is rewriting a file while you read it. If you already answered Keep Mine for that change, Save does not ask again. QUILL Lite checks the same way, and watches the same way, with the same four settings in its Preferences.

Two related commands are on the File menu:

• Reload from Disk throws away your changes in memory and reads the file again, after asking you to confirm.
• Check for External Changes… asks the same question whenever you want to check.

Four settings on the General page of Settings shape all of this:

• Watch the open file for external changes is on to begin with. Turn it off and QUILL stops noticing when another program changes or deletes your file.
• Reload automatically when you have no unsaved edits is off to begin with. Turn it on and, as long as you have not changed anything yourself, QUILL reloads a changed file without asking, in every format, and keeps your cursor where it was. An answer you asked QUILL to remember still comes first.
• Ask before discarding unsaved edits on a conflict is on to begin with. It is the question above, when you do have unsaved edits, and the question about a file that was deleted. Turn it off and QUILL says nothing in those cases and leaves your text exactly as it is.
• External-change debounce (milliseconds) is how long QUILL waits after it notices a change before it reacts, so a program that writes a file in several steps is dealt with once. The default is 750.

The rest of the File menu

The File menu covers the whole life of a document. Besides opening and saving, you will find these:

• Restore Backup… brings back a saved backup version.
• Page Setup… and Print… handle paper and printing.
• Print Studio… goes a step further. It first tells you what the printout will be, for example “3 pages, Letter, default margins”, which is a print preview you can hear. Then you can choose all, odd, or even pages, print in reverse order, or skip the first page (handy when page 1 is pre-printed letterhead) before it hands you to the same print dialog Print uses.
• Header and Footer… builds a header and footer for the current document. Start from a preset such as Title left, page number right, Filename and date or Roman numerals for front matter, or make your own from a small set of pieces (title, filename, date, page number) placed left, center or right. Turn on Different first page to give page 1 its own header and footer, and choose numeric or Roman page numbers with any starting number. It is saved with the document and printed on every page, from Print or Print Studio.
• Run Current File runs the saved file with the program it belongs to, and Open Target at Cursor opens the path or link under the cursor.
• Rename Current File… and Delete Current File… rename or delete the file on disk without leaving the editor.
• Close Document closes the current tab.
• Exit closes QUILL.

Anything on this menu that could cost you work, such as reloading, restoring a backup or opening a web address, asks before it acts.

Making QUILL your text editor

Installing QUILL tells Windows that QUILL can open your text files, Markdown, rich text, HTML, Word documents, EPUB books and a few more. It doesn’t take anything over. QUILL simply shows up when you choose Open with on a file, and in Windows Settings under Default apps, which is where you decide which app opens what.

Both of the next steps live in one place: open Settings, go to the General page, and find Windows and your files. A line at the top tells you which program opens in place of Notepad right now.

The Make QUILL My Text Editor… button takes you the rest of the way. It tells you what Windows lets an app do and what is up to you, then opens the Default apps page for QUILL. Choose .txt, pick QUILL, and choose Set default. Do the same for any other type you’d like QUILL to open. Anything you leave alone stays with the app that opens it now, and you can change your mind on the same page. This works from a portable copy of QUILL too.

Some programs still start Notepad by name, and so does typing “notepad” in the Run box. If you’d like QUILL to open for those as well, check Open QUILL instead of Notepad and press OK or Apply. It’s off to begin with. Because it changes Notepad for everyone on the computer, QUILL asks first and Windows asks for administrator approval. The checkbox always shows whether it’s on right now, and clearing it puts Notepad back. On Windows 11, QUILL then shows you where to turn off the newer Notepad’s app execution alias, which would otherwise go around the switch. Uninstalling QUILL puts Notepad back for you.

Only one program can open in place of Notepad. If QUILL Lite, or another program, already does, QUILL tells you who before it takes over. QUILL Lite has the same two settings in its Preferences.

Working with Different Document Types

QUILL is at its best with plain text, Markdown, HTML, RTF, EPUB, and text pulled out of other documents. It can also bring in PDFs and scanned pages, with tools to check what came through, and it understands the structure of Office files. Here is what each kind of file gets.

Plain text

Plain text stays plain. QUILL never slips hidden formatting into it.

Markdown

Markdown gets commands that understand its structure: help with lists, headings, links and code blocks.

HTML

HTML gets tag insertion, help with editing its structure, and link handling.

RTF

When an RTF file contains unsafe embedded content, such as OLE objects, QUILL removes it as the file opens and tells you. Remote fields, which would fetch something from the internet, are flagged and wait for your consent instead of being fetched quietly.

Earlier versions had an optional Rich text lens for RTF files, switched on under Settings, Editing (the “Editor surface” choice) and toggled with an editing-lens shortcut. It has been retired. To move a document between Plain text, Markdown, HTML, Rich Text and Word, use Format > Document Format… (Alt+Shift+F).

CSV and TSV

When you open a CSV or TSV file, QUILL asks how: in the CSV grid mode, or in the normal text editor. You can remember your choice as the default and still switch modes inside the tab at any time. Grid mode is built for the keyboard and for screen-reader users who want to edit a table cell by cell without leaving QUILL.

Word (.docx and .doc)

Word documents open the same way, with a choice between the structured Word view and the normal text editor. Again, you can remember a default and switch inside the tab.

The structured Word view puts readable structure first. Tables are read out in a straight line, headers and then rows, which is easier to follow with a screen reader. Normal text mode gives you all of QUILL’s editing for making changes directly.

Saving to Word. You can save any document as Word. In File > Save As…, choose Word Document (*.docx) (or Rich Text Format (*.rtf)) in the file type list, and QUILL converts the current content as it saves. Markdown and HTML structure (headings, lists, emphasis, links, simple tables) becomes real Word styles, so you can move around the result in Word by heading, not just look at it. Saving plain text this way gives you a correct but unformatted document, because plain text has no structure to carry.

EPUB

EPUB books get the navigator and reading chapter by chapter.

PowerPoint (.pptx and .ppt)

QUILL keeps a presentation’s structure when it brings it in. Slide titles become headings, bullets become nested list items, tables become text tables you can Tab through, and speaker notes come along when there are any.

Excel-style spreadsheets (.xlsx and .xls)

Spreadsheets come in as text, with their structure kept. QUILL lays each sheet out as readable table text, so you can look through the content quickly. If optional converters are installed, older and mixed-format files come through better.

PDF and OCR-derived text

PDFs and scanned pages are where QUILL’s tools for checking extracted text matter most. Treat them as a proofreading step, not an extra. The next topics cover opening PDFs, OCR and those checks.

What happens when you save in another format

File > Save As truly converts your document to the format you pick in the “Save as type” list. It never just renames the file. QUILL’s editor holds your text in one clean form, and Save As writes that text out in the format you chose. Here is what each choice does:

• Markdown (.md): your text is written exactly as it is in the editor. Markdown is QUILL’s own format, so nothing is converted or lost.
• Text (.txt): also written exactly as it is, Markdown markup included, so a plain-text file comes back just as it went out. If you want the markup stripped, with headings and emphasis turned into plain words, use File > Save As Plain Text instead. That command also offers to keep your formatting in an Illumination. A third route is Format > Document Format… > Plain text, which asks which of the two you want. Save As leaves your file byte for byte as it was, so a .txt you opened comes back unchanged.
• HTML (.html): converted to a complete web page with your document’s title, ready for a browser.
• Rich Text (.rtf): converted with all its formatting. Fonts, sizes, colors, highlights and alignment all carry over.
• Word (.docx): converted to a real Word document. Headings become Word heading styles, so Word and screen readers can move by them. Each line in the editor becomes one Word paragraph, so your line breaks stay exactly where they were. Hidden-codes formatting (font, size, color, highlight, alignment) becomes real Word formatting.
• An extension QUILL cannot write, for example typing notes.pdf in the name box: QUILL refuses rather than writing a broken file. For PDF, ODT and EPUB it offers to open File > Export, which makes them properly with Pandoc.

You keep editing QUILL text. After a Save As that converts, the file on disk is Word (or HTML, or RTF), but the editor still holds QUILL’s clean text, and every Ctrl+S after that converts it again. QUILL tells you this after the save: “Saved as report.docx, Word format. You are still editing QUILL text; each save converts it to Word.” The window title and tab title change to the new name straight away, and from then on Ctrl+S saves quietly to the same file.

Your originals are protected. If you opened a PDF, EPUB, spreadsheet or presentation, what you are editing is text taken out of it, and the original file cannot hold your changes. Pressing Ctrl+S on one of these never overwrites the original. QUILL explains why and opens Save As, so your edits go into a new file in a format that can hold them.

What carries over between formats

QUILL converts everything through one clean form inside, so what survives a Save As or a conversion depends on the feature, not on the pair of formats. This table is what QUILL’s own tests check. Yes means it carries over as that format’s own structure. Partly means it carries over, but as text or as QUILL’s portable markup rather than a real object in that format. No means it is not kept. The numbers point to the notes after the table.

Notes:

1. In Markdown, underline, strikethrough, superscript and subscript, colour, highlight, font, alignment and page breaks are kept in QUILL’s hidden-codes markup. You don’t see it while you edit, and it turns into real formatting when you export to HTML, Word or RTF. Markdown itself has no standard way to write these, so another Markdown app shows QUILL’s [text]{...} codes instead of the effect.
2. Blockquotes, code blocks and horizontal rules belong to Markdown and show properly in HTML. In Word and RTF they appear as their Markdown markers (>, ```, ---) rather than a Word quote or code style.
3. Tables travel as real tables between Markdown, HTML and Word. A Word table you open in QUILL becomes a clean Markdown (GFM) table that you can edit and move around in. Markdown and HTML tables stay as they are. A table you save to Word becomes a real, editable Word table with a header row that repeats, so a screen reader announces the column headers. The one exception is RTF: a table saved to .rtf is written as readable pipe text, not a real RTF table.
4. Images: an image reference (![alt](path)) survives a trip through Markdown and becomes <img> in HTML. QUILL does not put image files inside Word documents, and images inside a Word document you open are not brought into the text.

Plain text (.txt) never carries formatting. That is what plain text is for. Use Save As Plain Text when you want the markup flattened on purpose, with the option to keep your formatting in an Illumination.

Choosing a conversion engine

More than one converter can handle a Word document, and each gives a slightly different result. QUILL lets you choose, and describes what each choice gives you in plain words. The defaults suit almost everyone. The choices are there for when they don’t.

• Word document reading engine (Settings > Editing) decides how a .docx becomes editable text when you open it. Auto (the default) tries MarkItDown first and falls back to a plain extract. MarkItDown is fast and reliable: headings, lists and tables come through, but images, comments and fonts do not. Pandoc keeps more of the structure, so footnotes and complex tables come through better. It needs Pandoc installed. If Pandoc is missing, this setting quietly acts as Auto, so your file still opens.
• Word document saving engine (Settings > Editing) decides how your text becomes a .docx when you save. Auto (the default) uses the native writer. Native keeps QUILL’s formatting codes (fonts, sizes, colors, highlights, alignment) and makes each line in the editor one Word paragraph. It is the best choice for documents written in QUILL. Pandoc turns structure into Word styles (headings, lists, tables, links and footnotes) but drops font, size and color codes.
• In the Convert File dialog, the Conversion engine choice (Auto, Pandoc or MarkItDown) applies to one conversion at a time. As you arrow through it, a description under the choice changes, so you hear what each engine will do before you convert. MarkItDown only works when the source is Word, PowerPoint, Excel or PDF and the result is Markdown or plain text. If you choose it for anything else, QUILL says so and offers Pandoc. It never swaps in an engine you did not pick.

Import and Export

QUILL can convert between the formats the people around you use, without you leaving the editor. File > Import brings a document from another program into QUILL as a new tab. File > Export saves the current document as a different file type. Both use Pandoc and work in the background, so the editor never freezes. Exports keep your line breaks exactly: one line in the editor is one paragraph in the exported document, in every format.

Import (File > Import) reads Markdown, CommonMark, GitHub-Flavored Markdown, HTML, Word documents (.docx), OpenDocument Text (.odt), Rich Text (.rtf), plain text, CSV and TSV tables, EPUB books, and LaTeX or TeX.

Export (File > Export) writes the same set, plus PDF and a DAISY Talking Book, which are export only.

A few examples cover most of what people do:

• Choose File > Import > Word Document, pick a .docx, and a new Markdown tab opens with the document ready to edit.
• Choose File > Export > EPUB Book, pick a folder, and QUILL writes an EPUB next to your current file.
• Choose File > Export > PDF to publish a finished document.

A web page you can share. File > Export > HTML… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+End) saves a copy of your document as one web page: its styles are inside it, it has no scripts, and it says what language it is in, so you can email it or put it on a website as it is. Task lists show as check boxes and struck-out text is struck out. The document you are editing stays the document you are editing. If notes are written into the file, QUILL 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.

Getting there by keyboard. File > Import and File > Export are ordinary menus: open the menu, arrow down and press Enter. There is no single key for the whole list, because choosing the format is the point of the command. The quickest way is the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P): type import or export and pick the format from the list.

After the conversion. When the new file is one QUILL can edit (Markdown, CommonMark, GFM, HTML, plain text, CSV or TSV), QUILL asks whether to open it in a new window. Press Yes to open it, or No to carry on where you were. PDF, DOCX, EPUB, ODT and RTF don’t ask, because QUILL cannot edit those directly. Instead a message tells you where the file was saved and copies the path to the clipboard, so you can paste it into File Explorer.

Other formats. Both menus end with Other Pandoc Format…. It shows a list of every other format Pandoc can read (on Import) or write (on Export), such as CommonMark and GitHub-Flavored Markdown. Arrow to the one you want and press Enter, and the conversion runs just like the named ones above. On Export, the list opens on your Default export preset (Settings > General; HTML unless you change it), so if you nearly always export the same way, Enter alone does it.

What it does not do. Importing a PDF this way is not supported, because Pandoc cannot do it reliably. Use Import / Convert Document, described below, and for print-to-braille work, the braille and DAISY tools.

DAISY Talking Book export

File > Export > DAISY Talking Book saves the current document as a DAISY 2.02 text-only talking book. DAISY is the accessible book format read by DAISY software and by players such as the Victor Reader Stream, Plextalk and APH units. A DAISY book is a folder, not a single file, so the name you choose becomes a folder holding ncc.html, content.html and book.smil. Your headings become the player’s navigation points, and Markdown styling is flattened into clean, readable text. The book has no audio, so a player reads it with its own text-to-speech. You can also open the folder in APH Book Wizard Producer to record or synthesize a full text-and-audio book. The export reads what is on screen, so you do not have to save first.

Batch Conversion

When you have a whole folder of documents to convert, opening them one at a time is slow going. File > Import > Batch Conversion… (or File > Export > Batch Conversion…, which opens the same wizard) converts a whole folder in the background. The key is the QUILL key, then B (Ctrl+Shift+Grave then B).

Use the single-file Import and Export menus for one document. Use the wizard when you have a folder of documents, when every file needs the same treatment, and when you are happy to let it run while you keep writing.

The wizard, page by page

1. Introduction. A short summary, then a check for Pandoc and its version. If Pandoc is not installed, the page says so, and Start stays unavailable until you install Pandoc 3.x from https://pandoc.org.
2. Folder and options. A folder picker, an Include subfolders checkbox, an Output layout choice (Same folder as source, or Output subfolder per source folder), and an Overwrite choice (Ask each time, Never, Always). These start from your Settings, and the last folder you used is remembered for next time.
3. Format and profile. A Direction choice (Import into QUILL, or Export from QUILL), a list of source formats and a list of target formats from the main Import and Export set, and a picker for the seven built-in conversion profiles.
4. Review and start. A plain-text summary of the whole plan. Press Start to begin the batch and close the wizard.

QUILL keeps each file’s name and changes only the extension: report.docx becomes report.md (or report.html, report.epub, and so on). With Output subfolder per source folder (the default), the results go into a new Output/ folder inside the source folder. With Same folder as source, they go next to the originals.

Profiles

The profile picker offers seven ready-made profiles. Each one comes with a plain description that your screen reader reads before you press Start.

• Clean Word Document: report.md becomes a polished Word document, with no Markdown left showing.
• Accessible HTML Page: a single HTML page with a title block and lang metadata, ready for an accessibility check.
• EPUB Book: an EPUB ready for publishing yourself, with a table of contents and EPUB-3 metadata.
• GitHub README: GitHub-Flavored Markdown with no wrapper, ready to paste into a repository.
• Print PDF: a PDF with standard PDF metadata. Pandoc picks the right engine for your computer.
• Instructor Handout: a print-ready PDF with 1-inch margins and numbered top-level sections.
• Plain Text for Screen Readers: plain text with no HTML wrapper, no smart quotes and a fixed 80-column width. The right choice for feeding a text-to-speech engine.

Overwriting existing files

The three overwrite choices save you from answering a question for every file:

• Ask each time: QUILL lists every result that would replace an existing file and asks once, with a single Yes or No. If you say No, those files are skipped.
• Never: existing files are skipped automatically. The Status Page counts them under skipped, so the totals still add up.
• Always: existing files are replaced without asking. Useful when you run the same batch again.

Following progress

To watch the batch, open the Status Page (Help > Status Page). The Tasks & Downloads tab shows a row for it as it works. The first row is Batch conversion: scanning <folder>, followed by one row per file.

When the batch is done, QUILL says one line, through the announcement backend you have set up, with the converted, skipped and failed counts and how long it took:

“Batch conversion complete. 12 of 14 files converted in 4.2 seconds. 2 skipped.”

That line follows your verbosity settings under Settings > Accessibility and Announcements. The Status Page row updates either way, so sighted and low-vision users see the same result. A short report then lists every file that gave a warning or failed, with the exact error.

Batch settings

Three Settings choose what the wizard starts with:

• Include subfolders in batch conversion: on or off, on by default (True).
• Overwrite behaviour for batch conversion: Ask each time (the default), Never or Always.
• Default output layout for batch conversion: Output subfolder per source folder (the default) or Same folder as source.

You can change any of them in the wizard for one run. To change what it starts with every time, use Preferences.

Import / Convert Document (OCR)

File > Import > Import / Convert Document (OCR)… (also on Tools > Reading and Dictation > OCR and Document Conversion) is QUILL’s rescue tool for documents that are hard to read: locked-down Office files, EPUBs, scanned PDFs and photos of pages. It follows one rule: free first, local first, and nothing is ever uploaded without your say-so.

Here is how a conversion goes:

1. The free local converter runs first. Word, PowerPoint, Excel, HTML, EPUB, and PDFs that already contain text convert straight away on your computer and open as clean, editable text. No account, no key, no upload and no cost.
2. A scanned document is noticed, not dumped on you. If a PDF comes back nearly empty, QUILL says “It looks scanned or image-based” and asks whether to run free OCR on your computer. Yes runs it. No opens the empty result anyway. Cancel imports nothing. QUILL never opens a blank result without telling you, and never runs OCR without asking.
3. OCR on your computer rescues the scan. The local Tesseract engine reads each page on your own computer (it uses only the processor and works offline). It marks where each page begins with a searchable <!-- Page N --> marker and tells you how it is going (“Recognizing page 3 of 12…”). When it is not confident about what it read, QUILL tells you plainly, so you know to check the result.

Other problems get their own clear message instead of the scanned-PDF question. A file that is really corrupt is reported as damaged, with a note that OCR won’t help (repair it or export it again from where it came from). A PDF on a computer with no text extractor points you to Help > Download Optional Components > “PDF and Office text extraction” instead of claiming it is scanned. The installed apps come with a PDF reader, so this only happens with a pip or source install. A password-protected PDF is handled separately, as described next.

Opening a password-protected PDF

When you open a PDF that is locked with a password, QUILL asks for the password and reads the document. You don’t need to remove the password in another program first. Type the password and the PDF opens. If it is wrong, QUILL tells you and lets you try again. Press Cancel to stop opening it.

The password is used only to open that one file for reading. QUILL never stores, logs or remembers it, so if you close the file and open it again, it asks again. PDFs that are technically locked but open with an empty password (they only restrict permissions) open with no question, as before.

A PDF’s bookmarks come across

If a PDF has an outline, the chapters and sections you would see in Adobe Reader’s bookmarks pane, QUILL adds those entries to its own bookmark list (List Named Bookmarks…, Alt+Shift+G) when you open the file, as it does for Word and EPUB structure. Each bookmark takes you exactly where Go To Page for that page would. This happens once, the first time you open the PDF. If you later rename or delete some of those bookmarks, opening the file again will not bring them back or make duplicates. A PDF with no outline opens as usual.

The text from a PDF is repaired before you read it

A PDF does not store sentences. It stores where each letter was printed on the page. So what comes out is a picture of the page rather than the words the author typed, and read aloud that can be rough going. QUILL fixes four things as it opens the file, page by page:

• Words split across lines are joined again. Print layout breaks long words with a hyphen at the end of a line, so “inter-” on one line and “national” on the next would be read as two words, and a search for “international” found nothing. QUILL joins them. A hyphen that belongs to the word stays: Anglo-Saxon and 2018-2019 are left exactly as written.
• Paragraphs are put back together. Every printed line arrives as its own line of text, so speech would stop at the edge of the page instead of the end of the sentence, and moving to the next paragraph moved one printed line. QUILL joins lines that were only broken because the page ran out of room. Blank lines, list items, headings, short deliberate lines and finished sentences keep their breaks, so lists stay lists and paragraphs stay separate.
• Spaced-out headings are closed up. A designer’s letter-spaced title comes through as “C H A P T E R O N E”, which a screen reader spells one letter at a time and a search never matches. It becomes “CHAPTER ONE”. Ordinary text is left alone: a line such as “A B testing” is not a heading and is not touched.
• Missing joined letters are restored. The joined “fi”, “fl” and “ff” shapes a typesetter uses are often stored as characters that mean nothing outside the document’s own font, so a screen reader reads nothing where they were, and “office” is announced as “o ce”. QUILL turns them back into letters, and removes any leftover meaningless character so speech doesn’t stumble over it.

These repairs are careful. When a case could go either way, QUILL leaves the text as it found it, and a PDF whose text is already clean comes through unchanged. They never cross from one page to the next, so Go To Page and the page count stay exact.

Installing the OCR engine

The OCR engine is a free, one-time download of about 48 MB: Tools > Reading and Dictation > OCR and Document Conversion > Install Local OCR Engine (Tesseract)…. QUILL fetches the official installer from its own verified release, checks it byte for byte, and opens it for you to finish. It never installs anything silently. If Tesseract is already on your computer (or installed with Homebrew on a Mac), QUILL finds it and uses it.

The optional Datalab Chandra OCR cloud service

Some documents are too hard even for OCR on your computer: complex tables, forms, handwriting, crowded columns, very poor scans. For those, QUILL supports an optional paid cloud service, Datalab Chandra OCR, using your own key. QUILL only offers it after the OCR on your computer comes back weak (or when you turn down installing the free engine). Every single upload requires your explicit consent in a window that names the service, reminds you to think about private, medical, legal or financial content, and notes that Datalab deletes results from its servers about an hour after processing. A file whose name suggests sensitive content (tax, medical, legal and similar) gets an extra CAUTION line. QUILL decides that from the name only and never looks inside the file to decide. There is no “don’t ask again”.

To set it up, choose Tools > Reading and Dictation > OCR and Document Conversion > OCR Service Settings…. This opens the AI Hub Services tab. Turn the service on, paste your Datalab API key (it is kept in the Windows credential vault, never in a settings file), choose the default mode (Fast, Balanced or Accurate) and output (Markdown is recommended), and press Test Connection. The test checks your key and the address and uploads no document. Other buttons open the provider’s website, key page, pricing, privacy documents, API documents and list of supported file types in your browser, and Copy Service Summary copies a description with no secrets in it, for support requests.

Checking and tidying up after OCR

Review Last OCR Result… opens a checklist for your most recent conversion: which service made it, the page count, how confident the recognition was, and, for OCR on your computer, every line it was unsure of, listed as Page N: [confidence] text. Arrow through the flagged lines, then search the converted document for the page marker (for example <!-- Page 3 -->) to jump to the trouble spot. That way you check by ear exactly where it is needed, instead of proofreading everything again.

Delete OCR Temporary Files clears any leftover job files from QUILL’s data folder and tells you what it removed. The local tools normally clean up after themselves. Converted results live only in the open, unsaved document until you choose to save.

OCR and Conversion Services… explains each service in plain words: the free local converter, the local OCR engine and the optional Datalab cloud service. For each it tells you what it does, what it is best at, whether it runs on your computer or in the cloud, what it costs and how it is set up right now.

Two settings are there for unusual setups: the OCR recognition language (ocr_language, English by default) and a path to the engine if QUILL cannot find it (tesseract_path). The cloud service’s other options, apart from the key, are on the Services tab.

Remote access

QUILL can open files from a server, save to it, and copy to it, much as it works with files on your own computer. You can use FTP, SFTP, HTTPS, WebDAV, and Amazon S3 (or any S3-compatible service). Every remote action is something you choose, QUILL tells you what is happening, and nothing is written to disk before you confirm. The commands are on File > Open from Remote:

• Open from Remote… lists every site you have saved, lets you look around a folder on the server, and downloads the file you choose. QUILL tells you the host and the expected size, saves the download to a temporary file, and opens it in a normal tab whose title ends with (from site:path). The document is read-only until you save it back with Save Copy to Remote… or copy it to your own computer.
• Save to Remote writes the current document to a path you choose on one of your saved sites, and keeps a tilde backup next to the original.
• Save Copy to Remote… writes a copy to the server and leaves your local file as it is.
• Manage Remote Sites… adds, edits and deletes saved sites for all five kinds of server. Each site’s password goes into Windows Credential Manager when it is available, or otherwise into a file protected by Windows (DPAPI). On a Mac, the Keychain is used.

All remote traffic uses a verified TLS context, a checked and encrypted connection. Cloud addresses (S3, HTTPS, and WebDAV over HTTPS) must use HTTPS. FTP is allowed because you chose it, usually for a computer on your own network or an older server. Every remote connection is listed in QUILL’s record of the places it connects to, and file listings from S3 and WebDAV servers are read in a way that a booby-trapped listing cannot take advantage of.

These commands have no keys of their own out of the box. Reach them from the menu or the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P), or give them keys in the Keymap Editor.

Editing a file over SSH

If you look after a Linux server, a Raspberry Pi or a web host, you can edit its files over SSH as though they were on your own computer. The commands are on File > Open over SSH.

1. Choose File > Open over SSH > Quick Connect…. The Connect to SSH Server window opens.
2. Fill in Host or IP address, Port (22 unless your server says otherwise) and Username.
3. Choose how you sign in under Authentication: Password, Private key file or SSH agent. For a password, type it in Password / key passphrase. For a key, type its path, or press Browse… to find it. OpenSSH, PEM and PuTTY (.ppk) keys all work. If your key has a passphrase, type that in the same box.
4. Press Connect. QUILL says “Connecting to” and the server’s name, and then opens the Open Remote File window on your home folder.
5. Arrow through the list. Folders say “dir” in front of their names. Press Enter on a folder to go into it, or on .. (parent directory) to go back up. Press Enter on the file you want, or choose Open.

The file opens in a normal tab, and the status bar says that saving uploads it back. Press Ctrl+S as usual, and QUILL sends your changes to the server, keeps a backup copy of the old version next to it with a tilde on the end of its name, and keeps the line endings the file already had.

If you connect to the same server often, save it once in File > Open over SSH > Site Manager…. The SSH Site Manager window lists your Saved sites, with New, Edit and Delete buttons beside the list. Pick a site and press Connect. A saved site never keeps your password: QUILL asks for it each time you connect.

QUILL is careful about which servers it trusts. It only connects to a server whose identity your computer already knows, from the same list OpenSSH uses, or one you have already told QUILL to trust. A server it has never seen is turned away, so a server pretending to be yours cannot slip in. If you really do want QUILL to accept a new server the first time it sees it, turn on Trust SSH hosts on first connection on the Administration page of Settings. Leave it off unless you have a reason.

GitHub remote files

QUILL can browse GitHub repositories, open files from them and save your changes back, without Git, the GitHub CLI or GitHub Desktop installed.

Getting started with GitHub

The first time you use a GitHub feature, QUILL asks you to confirm that it may connect to GitHub. You are asked once, and QUILL remembers your answer.

You do not need a GitHub account to browse public repositories. For private repositories, and for anything that changes GitHub, you need a Personal Access Token (PAT).

Creating a Personal Access Token

1. Go to github.com and sign in.
2. Open Settings > Developer settings > Personal access tokens > Tokens (classic).
3. Choose Generate new token.
4. Give it a name such as “QUILL” and select the repo scope (or public_repo if you only need public repositories).
5. Copy the token. You will only see it once.

QUILL keeps your token safely in Windows Credential Manager. It is never saved in a text file.

Managing your GitHub account

Use File > Open from Remote > Manage GitHub Accounts… to:

• See which GitHub account you are signed in as.
• Add or replace a token.
• Sign out and clear your stored token.

If the GitHub commands are missing

GitHub access is the feature called GitHub Remote Access (core.github_remote). If you can’t find it, open File > Open from Remote and check whether the GitHub items are there. If PyGithub is not installed, QUILL shows a message explaining how to install it: pip install "quill[github]". The GitHub commands are also unavailable in Safe Mode.

Opening and saving GitHub files

The repository browser

Open File > Open from Remote > GitHub Repository…. The browser has these parts:

• Account shows your GitHub username, or “Anonymous” if no token is stored.
• Repository: type an owner/repo name such as microsoft/vscode and press Enter or choose Load.
• Branch or tag chooses which version of the repository to browse. It starts on the repository’s default branch.
• Current path shows where you are in the folder tree.
• File list lists folders and files, folders first.
• Status shows progress messages and item counts.

To move around:

• Press Enter on a folder to open it.
• Press Enter on a file to open it (the same as choosing Open File).
• Press Backspace to go up one level.
• Press F5 to refresh the current folder.
• Tab through the buttons: Open File, Go Up, Refresh, Copy URL, Cancel.

Opening a file from its address

If you have the web address of a file on GitHub, perhaps from a colleague, use File > Open from Remote > GitHub File URL…. Paste an address like https://github.com/owner/repo/blob/branch/path/to/file and press Enter. QUILL fetches the file directly.

GitHub’s file service only handles files up to 1 MB. A larger file has to be downloaded by hand from github.com.

Saving back to GitHub

When you have opened a file from GitHub and made changes, use File > Open from Remote > Save to GitHub…. QUILL asks for a commit message. Type a short description of your changes and press Enter. QUILL commits your changes to the same repository, branch and file path.

• You need a token with permission to write (repo scope).
• If the file changed on GitHub after you opened it, QUILL tells you to refresh and try again.
• Pressing Save never does this for you. You choose Save to GitHub each time.

The GitHub Items viewer

File > Open from Remote > GitHub Items… opens a viewer for a repository’s issues, pull requests, branches, commits, tags, releases, workflows and workflow runs. It is the same kind of overview the GitHub website gives you, made for the keyboard and a screen reader. It owes a great deal to GHManage, Kelly Ford’s open-source GitHub browser for screen-reader users, which QUILL has followed from the start. QUILL adds its own touches: pull request and branch differences are read through the same engine as Compare Documents instead of as a raw patch, and the Quick filter stays quiet while you type.

You can browse without signing in. Signing in adds the Batch… menu and the Actions… menu, for things like new issues and pull requests, merging, deleting branches, running workflows and replying to comments. Your pins, favorites and column choices are saved on your own computer only.

Loading a repository

Type a repository as owner/repo, paste a github.com address, or paste a git@github.com: remote, and press Load. QUILL turns any of those into owner/repo for you. If the document you are editing came from GitHub, or lives in a git folder whose origin remote points at GitHub, the repository is already filled in.

• Pinned… opens a menu of your pinned repositories. Choose one to load it straight away, or pin or unpin the repository you have loaded. It is your own short list for the few repositories you really work in. It is separate from anything GitHub keeps and never synced anywhere.
• Favorites. Press Ctrl+D on any row (an issue, a pull request, a branch, a release) to bookmark it. The Favorites… button lists every bookmark across every repository. Choose one to open it in your browser. Favorites are kept between sessions.
• View Upstream. When the repository you load is a fork, the View Upstream button becomes available. Press it to load the repository it was forked from, just as if you had typed its name. The button stays unavailable for a repository that is not a fork, or, rarely, for a fork whose parent GitHub cannot find.

Views and the list

Pick a View: Issues & PRs (issues and pull requests together), Branches, Commits, Tags, Releases, Workflows or Workflow Runs. The list shows one row per item, and the Details box below shows the full text of the selected row. In Issues & PRs you can also filter by Show (Both, Issues, PRs) and State (Open, Closed, All), and Sort by number, title, last updated or number of comments.

• List mode. There are two ways to read the list. Quick shows short cells as they appear in the columns. Full says each cell as field: value (for example number: 208, type: ISSUE, state: OPEN, title: Fix the thing), so your screen reader reads a line that explains itself instead of bare values. Switch with the List mode choice, or press M in the list.
• Columns… lists every field for the current view as a checkbox. Uncheck the ones you don’t need (at least one always stays). Your choice is remembered for each view.
• View More loads the next page of results.

Searching and filtering

• Search with GitHub’s own syntax. Press Ctrl+F (or Tab to the Search box), type any GitHub search, such as label:bug is:open crash, author:alice is:pr or created:>2026-01-01 no:assignee, and press Enter. The results replace the Issues & PRs list, limited to the loaded repository. Clear the box and press Enter to get the normal list back. Loading another repository also clears the search.
• Quick filter. Ctrl+Shift+F moves to the Quick filter box, next to Search. Instead of asking GitHub, it narrows the list you already have, as you type. Nothing goes over the network, so it is instant even on a slow connection. It never moves your focus while you type, and it doesn’t announce a count after every letter, which would talk over your screen reader’s own typing echo. QUILL only says the count when a real fetch finishes. Press Escape in the box to clear it. Switching views or loading another repository clears it too.

Reading issues, pull requests and comments

When you select an issue or pull request, the details show its text and then load the comments. Press Alt+N for the next comment and Alt+P for the previous one. QUILL selects and scrolls to each and says “Comment N of M” (and “first” or “last” at either end).

AI thread summaries. Select an issue or pull request and press Summarize. QUILL’s AI boils the whole discussion, text and comments, down to a short summary in plain prose: what it is about, where it stands, open questions and the next step. It goes at the top of the details and is read out. It uses the same AI connection and consent questions as every other AI feature in QUILL. If AI is not set up, Summarize offers to set it up instead of failing quietly.

Pull request diffs and branch comparisons

• Pull request diffs. Select a pull request and press Diff…. A list of its changed files opens, each row reading status: filename +added -removed. Select a file to hear its changes through the same engine as Compare Documents, for example “Difference 2 of 5. Text changed at line 41”, with both sides labeled (main: and this PR:) and the changed words described. A new file reads as its content, a deleted file says so plainly, and a binary or very large file falls back to its change counts and GitHub’s patch text.
• Compare two branches. In the Branches view, select a branch and press Compare… or Ctrl+Shift+B. QUILL asks for the base branch, then the branch to compare with it (the row you selected fills in the second question). It tells you how far ahead and behind the two branches are and lists every commit between them. The Changed Files tab walks each file’s differences the same way Diff… does. Comparing only reads, so it works without signing in.

Workflows

Switch to the Workflows view to see the repository’s workflow definitions, the .yml files themselves. The Workflow Runs view below them shows run history. Select a workflow and press Enter, or use Actions… > Run “name” on Branch…, to run it: QUILL asks for a branch, confirms, and tells you whether GitHub accepted the run. You need to be signed in. If the workflow does not accept manual runs, QUILL shows GitHub’s own explanation.

Batch operations

The list lets you select several rows: hold Shift or Ctrl to select issues or pull requests, then press Batch… and choose Close, Reopen or Add label. You must be signed in, because browsing without an account only ever reads. A confirmation names the exact action and the exact item numbers, and nothing changes on GitHub until you confirm. If some items fail, QUILL tells you which, and the rest still go through.

Keys in the Items viewer

• Enter on a row opens it in your browser. On a Branch row, Enter shows that branch’s commits. On a Workflow row, Enter runs it on a branch you choose.
• Backspace in the Commits view (reached with Enter on a branch) goes back to the branch list.
• Ctrl+R refreshes the current view. Ctrl+O opens the selected item in your browser. Ctrl+G goes to an issue or pull request by number (in the Issues & PRs view).
• Ctrl+F moves to the GitHub search box, and Ctrl+Shift+F to the Quick filter box. Ctrl+Shift+B compares two branches (Branches view). Ctrl+D adds the selected row to your favorites.

The Items viewer follows the same rules as the other GitHub commands: it is off in Safe Mode, asks for your consent the first time, and works without an account for public repositories (GitHub allows fewer requests then) or with your stored token for private ones.

Doing more from the Items viewer

When you are signed in, the Actions… button opens a menu that changes with what you are looking at:

• In Issues & PRs: New Issue… and New Pull Request… ask for a title (and, for a pull request, the head and base branches) and an optional description. If exactly one unmerged pull request is selected, Merge Pull Request #N… appears too. Merging changes the target branch for everyone, so you confirm it by typing the pull request number again, not just by pressing Yes.
• With comments loaded: Reply to Thread… posts a new comment. (GitHub’s comments are not threaded, so a reply is simply another comment in the same conversation.) Once you have used Alt+N or Alt+P to land on a comment, Edit This Comment… and Delete This Comment… appear as well. GitHub only lets you edit or delete your own comments, so trying it on someone else’s brings back GitHub’s permission error. To delete, you type “delete” to confirm.
• In Branches: select one branch and Delete Branch ‘name’… appears. Type the branch name again to confirm. It cannot be undone from QUILL. Compare… is here too, and needs no sign-in.
• In Workflows: select one workflow and Run “name” on Branch… appears, the same as pressing Enter.
• In Workflow Runs: select one run and Re-run Workflow and View Artifacts… both appear.

All of these need you to be signed in. Without an account, the viewer only reads.

Downloading workflow run artifacts

Select a workflow run and choose Actions… > View Artifacts… to see that run’s build artifacts, each with its size and whether GitHub has already let it expire (an expired artifact can’t be downloaded). From there:

• Download Selected… downloads the highlighted artifact, and Download All… downloads every artifact in the run. Both ask you to choose a folder first.
• If a file with that name is already in the folder, QUILL asks before replacing it.
• A progress window with a Cancel button follows the download. Cancelling stops after the artifact that is downloading at the moment.
• Refresh fetches the list again, which helps while a run is still producing artifacts, and Open Run in Browser takes you to the run’s page on GitHub.

A note on your token: GitHub hands the actual download to a different, short-lived address (usually on Azure Blob Storage). QUILL makes that second request without your token, so your token is only ever sent to github.com.

Managing repositories

These commands are on Tools > Git and GitHub > GitHub. They let you do things you would otherwise open a browser for. All of them need you to be signed in. If you are not, QUILL offers to sign you in right there.

Repository administration

• Create Repository… asks for a name, a description, private or public, and an optional organization. Right after creating it, QUILL offers to set up a local folder synced to the new repository in one step, using the same folder sync as Sync Folder with GitHub (QUILL Sync). Starting a new project never means leaving QUILL.
• Fork Repository… forks into your account or an organization you choose, and offers to sync it locally afterwards in the same way.
• Rename Repository… renames it. GitHub sends the old address on to the new one, but anything elsewhere that has the old name written into it will need updating. You confirm by typing the repository’s current owner/repo name again.
• Change Visibility… switches a repository between private and public. QUILL tells you which it is now before asking. Making a repository public adds a warning line, because its whole history becomes visible. You confirm by typing the repository name again.
• Change Default Branch… loads the branches and lets you pick the new default from a simple list.
• Configure Branch Protection… is a short wizard. Pick a branch, then set the required approving reviews, required status checks, and whether the rules apply to administrators too. Or check “Remove all protection from this branch instead” to clear the rules.
• Delete Branch… lists the branches (never the default branch, so you cannot delete the one everything depends on by accident), then asks you to type the branch name again to confirm. It can’t be undone from inside QUILL.
• Commit Multiple Files… lets you pick one or more files on your computer, choose the branch and write a commit message. QUILL commits them all to GitHub together in one commit. This is different from Save to GitHub, which only commits the document you have open. Only plain text (UTF-8) files are supported.

The four riskiest actions, renaming, changing visibility, deleting a branch and (in the Items viewer) merging a pull request, all ask you to type the exact name or number instead of answering Yes or No. A stray press of Enter on one of these is much harder to put right than most things in QUILL.

All eight are in the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P). They have no keys out of the box. You can give any of them one in the Keymap Editor (Tools > Customize and Support > Keymap Editor…).

Organizations, releases, notifications and security alerts

Five more commands on Tools > Git and GitHub > GitHub:

• Browse Organization Repositories… lists the organizations your account belongs to, then that organization’s repositories. Choose one to open it in the GitHub Items viewer. This is for browsing only. QUILL does not manage organization teams or their permissions.
• Create Release… asks for a tag and an optional title, then either your own release notes or GitHub’s automatic notes (a summary of pull requests merged since the last release), and whether to save it as a draft or publish it straight away.
• Dispatch Workflow… runs a GitHub Actions workflow on a branch or tag you choose, the same as “Run workflow” on github.com. It is useful for workflows set up to be started by hand.
• Notifications… is a real inbox: every notification for your account, across every repository, not just the one you have loaded. Each tells you whether it is read or unread, which repository it is from and why you got it. Choosing one opens your GitHub notifications page and marks it read.
• Security Alerts… lists a repository’s open Dependabot alerts (severity, the package affected and a summary), so you can see what needs attention without opening a browser.

Codespaces and Copilot CLI

Four more commands on Tools > Git and GitHub > GitHub use the gh command-line tool installed on your own computer, instead of QUILL’s usual GitHub connection. If you don’t have gh yet, see Downloading git and the GitHub CLI elsewhere in this guide.

• Codespaces… lists your active Codespaces (name, repository and state). Select one for a menu to Stop or Delete it.
• Create Codespace… asks for a repository and an optional branch, then creates a Codespace. Codespaces use GitHub compute and storage minutes and may cost money. This is the one GitHub command in QUILL that says so, and it asks you to confirm, naming the cost, before it does anything.
• Ask Copilot for a Command… lets you describe in plain words what you want to do (for example, “undo my last commit”) and shows the command GitHub Copilot suggests.
• Explain a Command… asks for a git or gh command you don’t recognize and shows Copilot’s plain explanation of what it does.

These four are new. They have been tested with a stand-in for gh, but not yet with a real Codespaces repository or real Copilot CLI access. If something looks wrong, please tell us through Help > Get Help from Support.

Command-line launching

You can start QUILL from a command line, a script or a shortcut, and tell it which file to open and where to put the cursor. Most people never need this. It is handy when another tool, such as a search or a list of errors, hands you a file name and line number.

The command is quill.exe, the launcher that comes with both the installed and the portable copy. During setup, the installer offers an “Add Quill to PATH” option. Turn it on and quill works from any Command Prompt or PowerShell window without the full path. If you skipped that option, use the full path instead (usually "%LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Quill for All\quill.exe" for an install just for you). From a source checkout, the command is python -m quill.

These are the options:

• --help: show the command help and exit.
• --version: print QUILL’s version and exit without opening the window.
• --safe-mode: start with optional features switched off.
• --reset-profile: reset the feature profile store before starting.
• --diagnostics: start with diagnostics tracing on.
• --dump-stacks: write a thread-stack dump and exit.
• --line N: the line (counting from 1) for the first file you open.
• --column M: the column (counting from 1) for the first file you open.
• --goto FILE[:LINE[:COL]]: open a file at a line and column in one argument (both optional, counting from 1). It is the short form of --line and --column, handy when a linter, a search result or a build error gives you a file:line:column string. Example: --goto main.kt:27:5.
• --diff LEFT RIGHT: open two files straight into compare mode, on the first difference, without opening each one by hand.
• --new-window: start a new copy of QUILL instead of handing the file to the one already running.
• --wait: when handing the file to a QUILL that is already running, wait until that QUILL closes.

Some examples:

• quill --version
• quill notes.md --line 40 --column 5
• quill --goto main.kt:27:5
• quill --diff old-draft.md new-draft.md
• quill --new-window notes.md

What you learned, and where to go next

You can now open files, including ones that have moved, and save them in the format you need. You know what each kind of document gets in QUILL, what carries over when you convert, and how to convert one file or a whole folder. You can rescue a scanned PDF, work with files on a server or on GitHub, and start QUILL from a command line.

To practise with QUILL open, choose Help > Tutorials… (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and try “Write and save your first document” and “Open anything, save as anything”. On the website, Rescue a scanned PDF, From document to published audiobook and GitHub inside QUILL walk through the longer jobs.

Next, Chapter 4, Writing and editing, is where you start shaping the words themselves.

Chapter 4: Writing and editing

This chapter is about the work you do most: typing, fixing, moving text around and putting things in. It starts with the keys you already know from other Windows programs, then shows the extras QUILL adds, such as a tray of twelve clipboards, abbreviations that type for you, and an emoji picker that describes every emoji in words. Read the first few topics now. The rest will keep until you want them.

Writing and editing

Start with the commands you already know. They work in QUILL exactly as they do everywhere else:

• Ctrl+Z to undo
• Ctrl+Y to redo
• Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to cut, copy and paste
• Ctrl+A to select everything

Once those feel at home, QUILL has more to offer. You can put text away in a numbered slot and paste it back with one chord, get back something you deleted and drop it somewhere else, and run any command twenty times in a row. Each has its own topic below.

Ending a line without a new paragraph (Shift+Enter)

Line Break (Shift+Enter) ends the line without starting a new paragraph, the same key Word uses. In Markdown a blank line between two lines makes two paragraphs, while a line break makes two lines of one paragraph. Use it for an address block, a verse, or a run of short lines that should sit close together.

QUILL writes the break in the style set in Settings > Editing > Markdown line break style (markdown_hard_break_style), and says which one it used. The default is a backslash at the end of the line. The other style, two spaces at the end of the line, cannot be seen on screen, is not spoken by a screen reader, and is often removed by other programs when they save. QUILL reads both styles, so a document written elsewhere with two spaces still shows its breaks correctly here.

QUILL Lite has the same command on Edit > Insert > Line Break, on the same key.

The Edit menu

The Edit menu holds the commands you use while writing. The standard clipboard commands come first:

• Undo
• Redo
• Cut
• Copy
• Paste
• Paste Text Only (Ctrl+Shift+V), which pastes the words on the clipboard and leaves behind any fonts, colours or links that came with them. If something is selected, the pasted text replaces it.
• Copy With Attribution (Alt+Shift+C)
• Select All

Magic Paste (press the QUILL key, then Shift+V) looks at what is on the clipboard before it pastes, and tells you what it found: plain text, a web address, Markdown, HTML or an image. Then it offers the ways that kind of thing can go in. A web address can go in as a Markdown link, Markdown can keep its formatting, HTML can come in as clean text or exactly as it is, and an image can go in as a picture reference. Plain text is always one of the choices. Arrow to the one you want and press Paste.

After those come the commands that know about selection and position:

• Find…, Replace…, Find Next, Find Previous and Find All Matches. The Replace dialog has a Replace All button, so bulk replacement happens in the same place.
• Word Prediction… opens inline word and tag suggestions (Ctrl+.).
• Extend Selection Mode turns selection growth into a mode of its own.
• The Selection submenu: Select Word, Select Line, Select Paragraph, Select Block, Select to Start or End of Line, Select to Start or End of Document, and the mark commands: Set Temporary Mark, Jump to Previous Mark, Swap Cursor and Mark and List Recent Marks. Selecting text, later in this chapter, has the keys.
• Search Tools, with Count Occurrences, Multi Replace and the regular expression tools (Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 cover them).
• Paste HTML as Markdown turns rich HTML from the clipboard into Markdown as it pastes.
• Paste Markdown as HTML does the opposite. It turns Markdown on the clipboard into a clean piece of HTML, using the same renderer as the live preview and HTML export, and inserts it at the cursor. It has no key at first; give it one in the Keymap Editor.
• Follow Link (Ctrl+Enter), on the Navigate menu, opens the link under the caret. Adding a link is on the Insert menu.
• The delete group, on Format > Line: Delete to Line Start, Delete to Line End, Delete to Document Start, Delete to Document End and Delete Paragraph remove text measured from the cursor. Edit > Restore Deleted Text, below, brings the last three back.

Preferences… and Customize Menus… are with the rest of QUILL’s settings, under Tools > Customize and Support.

Find and Replace

By default Ctrl+F and Ctrl+H open the standard Windows Find and Replace dialog. Turn on Settings > Navigation and QUILL Key > Use QUILL’s own Find dialog and they open QUILL’s own accessible Find dialog instead. It does everything the Windows one does, and adds these:

• Extended mode (special characters). Choose Extended in the Mode list to search for characters you cannot type: \n for a line break, \t for a tab, \xNN or \uNNNN by code, or \N{EM DASH} by name. The Insert Special Character… button offers forty named characters, such as the non-breaking space, curly quotes, the zero-width space and the soft hyphen. Those invisible characters can quietly spoil a document, and now you can find them by name. Replacements understand the same codes, so “replace every non-breaking space with a plain space” takes two fields.
• A spoken match count as you type. Pause for a moment and QUILL says “17 matches”, so you know the search is right before you go.
• Peek navigation. Ctrl+Down and Ctrl+Up step through the matches while you stay in the search field. Each step speaks the match in its sentence and selects it in the editor, and you can keep typing at any moment. Look around first, then press Enter when the search is right.
• Spoken match context. Each match is read as the sentence around it (“line 40: …the quick brown fox…”), not just a position. QUILL always tells you when the search wraps past the end of the document.
• A Direction group with a name. The Up and Down choice is a labelled group, so your screen reader says “Direction” when you reach it.
• One dialog, always. Ctrl+F while it is open takes you back to the search field. Ctrl+H switches it to Replace without opening another window. Ctrl+L jumps back to the search field from anywhere in the dialog. Escape closes it and returns you to your text. Count tells you how many matches there are without moving anywhere.

The setting is off when QUILL is installed, while the dialog is tested with every screen reader. The Windows dialog is unchanged, and you can switch back at any time. For now this dialog searches the current document only. Searching folders or the Vault from it will come later.

Chapter 6, Moving around and finding things, has much more on searching.

Selecting text

You can select the usual way, holding Shift while you move. QUILL also gives you ways to select a whole unit at once, to mark where a selection starts and finish it later, and to leave yourself marks to jump back to.

Anchor selection with F8

With anchor selection you drop an invisible anchor, move anywhere you like, and then select everything between the anchor and the cursor.

Selecting by structure

The ordinary selection keys are on the Edit > Selection menu too, so you can find them there if you forget: Select to Start of Line (Shift+Home), Select to End of Line (Shift+End), Select to Start of Document (Ctrl+Shift+Home) and Select to End of Document (Ctrl+Shift+End).

Once something is selected, Duplicate Selection (Ctrl+Alt+Q) puts a copy of it straight after itself, which saves a copy and a paste when you are building a list of similar lines. With nothing selected, it duplicates the line you are on.

You can also run any of these from the Command Palette, and change their keys in the Keymap Editor.

Extend Selection Mode

In Extend Selection Mode, the keys that normally move the cursor grow the selection instead. Turn it on and off from the Selection menu, or with Alt+Shift+F9. You can change the key in the Keymap Editor. While it is on, EXT shows in the status bar.

The mark ring

The mark ring is a short stack of temporary places to jump back to while you work.

Named marks and the review buffer

Named marks last for the whole session. Find them on Edit > Selection:

• Set Named Mark gives the cursor position a name and remembers it, and tells you the line and column.
• Jump to Named Mark shows a list of your marks with their positions. Choose one and you are there.
• Review Buffer opens the current selection in a read-only window, so you can read through it with your screen reader without any risk of changing it. You need a selection first. Its key is Alt+Shift+U.

Set Named Mark and Jump to Named Mark have no keys at first. Give them keys in the Keymap Editor, or use the Selection menu.

Getting text back, and doing it again

Restore Deleted Text

Undo (Ctrl+Z) puts your last edit back exactly where it was. Sometimes you want something else: you deleted a sentence, and now you want to put it somewhere else. Edit > Restore Deleted Text… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Z) remembers the last three pieces of text you removed with QUILL’s delete commands (delete to start or end of line, delete to start or end of document, and delete paragraph). Pick one from the list and it goes in at the cursor.

• The list is newest first, with a short preview and the length of each, so you can tell them apart by ear.
• If only one deletion is remembered, it comes straight back with no list.
• To change its key, search for “Restore Deleted Text” in the Keymap Editor.

Fans of the classic WordPerfect Editor will know this as its “Cancel” buffer, except that here you choose where the text lands.

Repeat Next Command

When you need to do the same thing many times, such as moving down twenty lines, deleting ten words, typing forty dashes or replaying a macro, you do not have to press the key over and over. Choose Edit > Repeat Next Command…, type how many times, and the next command you run happens that many times. Then the count clears itself and editing carries on as normal.

• It works with nearly any command, including moving, deleting, inserting and a recorded macro.
• The most it will repeat is 1000 times, so a slip of the finger cannot run away with you.
• It has no key at first. If you use it often, give it one in the Keymap Editor (Tools > Customize and Support > Keymap Editor…; search for “Repeat Next Command”).

This is the “Repeat” command from the classic WordPerfect Editor.

Copy Tray

The Copy Tray is twelve clipboards of your own, each with a number. You put text in a slot on purpose, and it stays there until you replace it or clear it, even after you close and reopen QUILL. The Windows clipboard is shared by every program and changes every time you copy. Copy Tray slots belong to QUILL alone.

Pasting and copying with a slot

To paste from a slot, hold Ctrl+Alt+Shift and press a number key.

To copy into a slot, press the QUILL key and then the same key with Shift:

A paste chord does more if you press it quickly more than once:

• Press once to paste the slot at the cursor.
• Press twice to peek. QUILL reads the slot to you without pasting it, so you can check what is there first.
• Press three times to open the Copy Tray dialog on that slot.

QUILLBee’s tip: Can’t remember what is in slot 3? Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+3 twice, quickly. QUILL reads it to you and pastes nothing.

Copy to Next Empty Slot, Copy to Tray Slot and Search Tray Slots

Edit > Copy Tray > Copy to Next Empty Slot (Ctrl+Alt+Y) copies the selection to the first slot, from 1 to 12, that is empty and not pinned, and tells you which: “Copied to slot 4 (first empty).” If all twelve slots are full, QUILL tells you so and overwrites nothing.

Edit > Copy Tray > Copy to Tray Slot… (Alt+Shift+Y) lets you choose the slot yourself, from a list. Each row says what is in that slot now, its label if it has one, and whether it is pinned, so you know what you would be replacing before you replace it. Arrow to the slot and press Enter. QUILL says “Copied to tray slot 3”, or “Replaced tray slot 3” if something was there already.

Edit > Copy Tray > Search Tray Slots… opens a small search box. Type a word or phrase and QUILL searches the text and labels of every slot and reads you the matches. Press the slot’s number to paste it, or Escape to cancel.

Pinned slots

In the Copy Tray dialog you can pin any slot. A pinned slot:

• Is never filled by Copy to Next Empty Slot.
• Is read with “pinned” in front: “Slot 1 (pinned, signature)”.
• Stays pinned after a restart (the pin is saved in copy_tray.json).

To pin or unpin a slot, open the Copy Tray dialog (Ctrl+Alt+V), choose the slot, and press the Pin/Unpin button.

The Copy Tray dialog

Open it with Ctrl+Alt+V, or Edit > Copy Tray > Open Copy Tray…. It lists all twelve slots. Each row has the slot number, a label if you gave it one, and a preview of the text. Move with the arrow keys. The buttons are:

• Paste puts the chosen slot’s text at the cursor. Enter or a double-click on a row does the same.
• Paste from Clipboard stores what is on the Windows clipboard in the chosen slot.
• Pin / Unpin pins or unpins the chosen slot.
• Save Changes keeps edits you typed straight into the content area.
• Clear Slot empties the chosen slot.
• Close closes without pasting.

To empty every slot at once, choose Edit > Copy Tray > Clear All Tray Slots (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Y). QUILL asks first and tells you how many slots have something in them, with No already chosen, because this cannot be undone. If the tray is already empty, it just says so.

Other ways to reach the tray

• The Paste from Tray submenu. Edit > Copy Tray > Paste from Tray lists every slot that has something in it, with its label and a preview: “1 signature, Hi, I wanted to follow…”. Your screen reader reads both as you move through the submenu.
• The status bar. The Slots: X/12 cell shows how many of the twelve slots are in use. Click it to open the Copy Tray dialog. If you cannot find it, add it in Tools > Customize and Support > Status Bar Layout….
• The system tray. QUILL’s icon in the system tray has a Copy Tray submenu listing every slot in use. Choose one to paste it into the active editor, without bringing QUILL to the front first.

Copy Tray tips

• Put a signature, a disclaimer or a heading you use all the time in slot 1 and pin it. One chord pastes it anywhere, and Copy to Next Empty Slot will never overwrite it.
• Label your slots for a research session: slot 1 “intro quote”, slot 2 “methodology note”, slot 3 “source URL”. Copy one piece into each as you read, then paste them in order as you write.
• Slots survive restarts, so you can keep a small set of pieces you reach for every day.
• You can change every Copy Tray key in the Keymap Editor (Tools > Customize and Support > Keymap Editor…).

Clip Library

The twelve Copy Tray slots are for things you chose to keep. The Clip Library, on the Edit menu, is a second, bigger store: a searchable history of up to 200 clips.

• Edit > Keep Selection in Clip Library (Ctrl+Alt+M) remembers the current selection. Keeping the same text again from the same place does nothing, because it is already there.
• Edit > Open Clip Library… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+M) opens the library. Search as you type, Favorite a clip so it is never pushed out as the history fills up, Remove one you no longer need, Copy to Clipboard, or Promote to Copy Tray… to give a clip a labelled slot of its own.
• Rename… gives a clip a short name, which is much easier to find later than its first few words. Leave the name empty to go back to a preview of the text.
• Combine Marked… joins several clips into one piece of text. Mark them with Ctrl or Shift (plain arrow keys still choose just one), choose what goes between them (space, comma, full stop, vertical bar, new line or blank line), and the joined text goes on the clipboard in the order the clips are listed.
• Save as Abbreviation… turns a clip into an abbreviation. QUILL and Quill Inkwell share one abbreviation library, so a clip saved this way can be typed in every program, not just here.

Automatic capture. Turn on Settings > Editing > “Automatically keep everything you copy in the Clip Library” (off at first) and every copy you make inside QUILL is kept for you, whether you used the menu, its key or a right-click Copy. It only sees copies made in QUILL, never the system clipboard in general, and never anything you copied before you turned it on.

Format. What Copy to Clipboard puts on the clipboard, and what Send as Email and Copy as Email Body send, both follow one setting: Settings > Editing > “Kept and sent content format” (plain text, Markdown or HTML). Change it once and both follow.

What the Clip Library is not. It remembers what you keep or copy inside QUILL. It does not watch the system clipboard, and it keeps no history of what you copy in other programs. For a clipboard history across everything you do, use a clipboard manager alongside QUILL. The two do different jobs.

Copy With Source

Alt+Shift+C copies the selection and adds a note of where it came from in the document. With nothing selected, QUILL copies the current line. This is handy for notes, reviews and gathering evidence.

In a Markdown document you can choose what goes on the clipboard, under Settings > Editing > Markdown clipboard format. Plain text only (the default) copies the Markdown just as you wrote it. HTML or Rich text adds a formatted copy as well, so when you paste into Word or an email the headings, bold and links arrive formatted. Notepad and other plain-text programs still get the plain text.

Links

Ctrl+K adds a link written the right way for the document’s format. Ctrl+Enter follows the link under the caret. In Markdown and HTML this makes citations and cross-references much less work.

The Insert menu

The Insert menu puts structured content at the cursor. QUILL treats Markdown and HTML as everyday writing formats, so the tag pickers sit here next to the other inserts.

• Insert Link… adds a link in the right form for the document’s format.
• The Heading submenu: Heading 1 through 6, Decrease Level and Increase Level, and Style Headings… (font, size and alignment) for the current level or all levels.
• Body Text (Ctrl+Alt+0).
• The List submenu: Bullet, Numbered, Task, List Manager… and Structured List Studio… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+L).
• Insert Code Block, Insert Footnote, Insert Table…, Insert Block Quote, Insert Horizontal Rule, Insert HTML Tag… and Insert Markdown Tag….
• Date and Time (F5) and the Date and Time submenu.
• Insert Snippet… and Manage Snippets… for reusable text with blanks to fill in.
• Special Character… (Ctrl+Shift+F2).
• Line Break (Shift+Enter), described under Writing and editing at the start of this chapter.
• Insert Emoji… (Alt+.).
• File Content… inserts the contents of another file at the cursor.
• Insert Equation… (Ctrl+Alt+=).

The topics below explain the ones that need more than a line.

Headings and lists

Heading N sets the level, it does not add one. Ctrl+Alt+2 on a line that reads ### Notes gives you ## Notes, not ## ### Notes. It works from anywhere on the line, not just the start. With several lines selected, it makes all of them headings in one change, so a single Ctrl+Z puts them all back. Your screen reader says “Heading 2” either way, so it is good to know QUILL gets this right.

Body Text (Ctrl+Alt+0) is the bottom rung of the Ctrl+Alt+1 to 6 heading ladder. It takes the heading marker off and leaves the words.

Next Heading is Ctrl+Alt+H and Previous Heading is Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H. Ctrl+Alt+L opens the Outline Navigator, the same key QUILL Lite uses for List Headings, so either habit works, and Ctrl+Shift+O opens it too. AI Thesaurus no longer has a key of its own; reach it from the AI menu or the Command Palette. The plain Thesaurus keeps Word’s Shift+F7.

Bullet lists are on Ctrl+Shift+L and numbered lists on Ctrl+Shift+Grave, Shift+L.

Format-aware inserts

Block quote, horizontal rule, table and image write Markdown in a Markdown document and HTML in an HTML document. If the document’s format is not set yet (a new or plain document), QUILL asks “Markdown or HTML?” the first time, then remembers your answer for that document and stops asking.

Some have keys of their own:

• Insert Table is Ctrl+Alt+T.
• Insert Block Quote is the same command as Quote Lines (Ctrl+Shift+Q), because both wrote the same > in Markdown. Unquote Lines (Alt+Shift+., that is Alt, Shift and the period) takes the > off again.
• Insert Horizontal Rule is Ctrl+Alt+-.

You can change all of them in the Keymap Editor.

Insert Markdown Tag appears only in Markdown documents. In a plain or rich text document it is not on the menu at all, and if you press its key there, QUILL just says “Markdown tags are for Markdown documents.” Insert HTML Tag is the same idea for HTML, except that it stays on the menu, dimmed, in any document that is not HTML. Navigate > Set Document Language… changes what kind of document you are in.

Special Character (Ctrl+Shift+F2)

Special Character… opens a picker for the 357 characters a keyboard has no key for. Search by name (dash, euro, acute, arrow) or by a word people use even if Unicode does not (gbp, copyright, eszett). Or clear the box and browse one of fifteen groups: whitespace, dashes, quotes, invisibles, typography, legal and reference marks, currency, maths and units, fractions, superscripts and ordinals, arrows, accented letters (small and capital), Greek, and punctuation from other languages.

Each row shows the character, its name and its code point, and a description pane changes as you arrow. The search box is also the code-point box: 2014, U+2014 and d8212 all find the em dash, and a code point that is in no group still works, so the picker reaches every character Unicode has. When you insert one, QUILL tells you what it was, in Describe Character’s words, because most of these characters cannot be seen on the page.

QUILL Lite has the same picker on Edit > Insert > Special Character…. Both keys can be changed in the Keymap Editor.

Insert Equation (Ctrl+Alt+=)

Insert Equation… (Ctrl+Alt+=) asks for a LaTeX or MathML equation in up to two steps.

1. Type the formula in LaTeX, for example E=mc^2 or \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a}, or paste a MathML fragment.
2. For LaTeX, choose whether it sits inline in the text (\(...\)) or as a block of its own ($$...$$).

If a LaTeX equation is already selected when you open Insert Equation, QUILL takes off its delimiters and puts the bare formula in the box for you. MathML (anything starting with <math) goes in exactly as typed, with no second step. Browser Preview and HTML export show equations using MathJax 3. Math Equations, later in this guide, has the formula gallery, symbol abbreviations, exploring an equation part by part, and Word export.

Word prediction and snippets

Word prediction and snippets are kept apart, so each has its own key.

1. Press Ctrl+. to open Word Prediction (also Edit > Word Prediction…).
2. Type, and matching words from your document, HTML tags and Markdown tags appear.
3. Arrow to the one you want and press Enter to insert it.

To set up and look after snippets:

• Press Ctrl+Shift+Grave, S for Insert Snippet.
• Press Ctrl+Shift+Grave, Shift+S for Manage Snippets (create, edit, delete, import, export, and starter packs).
• Open More Preferences > Install Starter Snippet Packs for sample sets for everyday writing, developer work, and support and accessibility notes.
• In General Preferences, turn Word prediction and tag IntelliSense or Expand snippet triggers while typing on or off as you like.

Snippets can have blanks such as ${input:name}, ${choice:a|b}, ${date}, ${time} and ${cursor}.

Date and time

Date and Time (F5) types the time and date at the caret and reads it back to you. It uses Notepad’s key and Notepad’s layout (14:07 16/09/2026), and QUILL Lite’s too. It is built into QUILL, so it works in Safe Mode as well.

Insert > Date and Time is also a submenu. The bundled Insert Tools Quillin (com.quill.bundled.insert-tools) adds three items to it:

• Insert Date puts today’s date at the cursor, in the format ${date} uses.
• Insert Time puts the current time at the cursor, using ${time}.
• Insert Date and Time puts both, with one space between them.

Those three are part of the Insert Tools Quillin, so they switch off with the rest of it, and in Safe Mode. If you turn the Quillin off, the submenu stays but its three items go. Turn it on or off in Preferences > Quillins, for example if you would rather use date and time snippets of your own.

Insert Emoji (Alt+.)

Insert > Insert Emoji… (Alt+.) opens the Accessible Emoji Picker. It is for the opposite case from Special Character…: you do not know the code, and you want help finding the right one. You can browse or search all 3,781 standard emoji by name, keyword, symbol or a typed smiley like :), and each has a real spoken description of what it looks like. There is no grid of pictures anywhere in it. It is a category list and a list of named results, like QUILL’s other browse-and-search windows.

There are two ways to find an emoji.

• Search (the box at the top) looks, in this order, for: the emoji itself if you paste or type one in; an old typed smiley like :), :D or <3; part of the official Unicode name or a keyword (for example “grin”, “dog” or “heart”); and last, part of the emoji’s description. So a half-remembered word like “melting” or “puddle” can still find the right one even when it is not a keyword.

• Category (the list on the left) follows Unicode’s own groups, largest first:

  Category	Emoji
  People & Body	2,261
  Flags	270
  Objects	264
  Symbols	224
  Travel & Places	218
  Smileys & Emotion	169
  Animals & Nature	159
  Food & Drink	131
  Activities	85

  Clearing the search box takes you back to the category you chose last.

As you arrow through the results, the Description pane shows the emoji’s category and subgroup, its official name, its keywords, any old typed smiley, and one or two sentences about what it actually looks like: colours, shapes, expression and pose, not just its name again. Press Insert, or Enter on a result, to type the emoji at your cursor and close the picker. Cancel or Escape closes it without inserting anything.

Favorites and Recent sit above the nine Unicode categories:

• Favorites lists the emoji you have starred. Choose any emoji, from a category, a search or Recent, and press Add to Favorites. Once it is a favourite the button reads Remove from Favorites.
• Recent fills itself with the last 30 emoji you inserted, newest first.

Taking an emoji out of Favorites, or letting it drop off Recent, only changes those two lists. The emoji is still in the picker, under its category and in search, as before.

All 3,781 emoji, with their categories, keywords, typed smileys and descriptions, come in one file installed with QUILL. The picker never goes online, in Safe Mode or otherwise. The PRD’s Accessible Emoji Picker section explains how the catalogue is kept up to date.

The full list, with every description, is in Appendix C, Every emoji QUILL can insert.

Abbreviation Expansion

Abbreviation Expansion types longer text for you, like TextExpander. You type a short trigger word followed by a space, full stop, comma or other punctuation, and QUILL quietly replaces the trigger with the full text. For example, type btw (with the space at the end) and QUILL changes it to by the way .

It is off by default, so your text never changes as you type unless you asked for it. Turn it on when you want it; QUILL remembers your choice.

Turning it on and off

Any of these turns it on, and the same again turns it off:

• Press Alt+Shift+A, or choose Insert > Toggle Abbreviation Expansion.
• Click the ABR: On / ABR: Off cell in the status bar, if it is showing (add it in the status bar settings).
• Change Abbreviation expansion in Settings > Editing.

The built-in abbreviations

QUILL comes with fifteen abbreviations for common shorthand. You can edit or switch off any of them, and add your own.

Managing your abbreviations

Open Insert > Manage Abbreviations… (Ctrl+Shift+Grave, Shift+A) to add, edit and organise your abbreviations. Each one has:

• Abbreviation: the short trigger word, such as btw.
• Expansion: the full text that replaces it, such as by the way.
• Description: an optional note for yourself.
• Case sensitive: when checked, only the exact capitals match. Otherwise any capitalisation of the trigger works.
• Enabled: switch one off without deleting it.
• Category: any word you like (Work, Personal, Email) to group the list. There is a category filter beside the search box, and abbreviations with no category are listed under Uncategorised.
• Expand after: which keys set it off. A space or punctuation (the default), a space only, punctuation only, or never. Never means it only expands from Quick Insert, which suits a long expansion you would not want to appear by accident.
• Speak: what your screen reader says when it expands: nothing, the abbreviation, or the expanded text. You set this for each one, because a short one usually needs no announcement and a long template sometimes does.
• Sound: follow the main sound setting, always play, or never play.
• Add a trailing space after punctuation: adds a space after the punctuation that set it off, so co. gives Company, and not Company ,. It makes no difference after a space, which already leaves one.

The Search box at the top of the manager filters the list as you type any part of a trigger or its expansion. Switched-off abbreviations show “(disabled)” after their name.

Import and Export read and write your library as a JSON file. Export saves the whole library. Import adds a file’s abbreviations to yours, skips any it already has, and tells you how many it added.

Other ways to use an abbreviation

• Expand now. Press Ctrl+Shift+Grave, A (or Insert > Expand Abbreviation) to expand the word just before the cursor without typing a space or punctuation. Useful in the middle of a word or at the very end of a document.
• Quick Insert. Insert > Quick Insert… opens a list of every switched-on abbreviation, with the ones you use most at the top and a preview of each expansion. Type a few letters, arrow down, press Enter, and the expansion goes in at the cursor. It is how you use an abbreviation you have not memorised, and the only way to reach one set to expand after Never. It has no key at first, but you can give it one in the keyboard settings, and it is in the Command Palette.
• New Abbreviation from Clipboard. Insert > New Abbreviation from Clipboard… opens a new abbreviation with the clipboard text already in the expansion, so all you add is the trigger. It is the quickest way to turn a signature, an address or a block of standard wording into an abbreviation.

Abbreviations in every program, with Quill Inkwell

Your abbreviations also work in other programs through Quill Inkwell, a small free companion app that sits in the system tray. It uses the very same library file as QUILL. Add an abbreviation here and it works in your browser; add one there and it works here. Open it from the QuillVille menu, and see Quill Inkwell’s own user guide for where it will and will not type.

Abbreviations for certain programs only. You can limit an abbreviation to named programs, such as a signature to your mail program or a code snippet to your code editor, by listing them in its Applications field. Leave the field empty, as it is at first, and it works everywhere. This only matters in Quill Inkwell, which types into whatever program you are in. Inside QUILL there is only one program, so the field has no effect there. If Inkwell cannot tell which program is in front, a limited abbreviation does not fire, so it never types into the wrong place.

Variables in expansions

An expansion can include these:

Fields that ask you something

A signature is the same every time. A letter or a bug report is the same except for a name, a date or a reference number. Put a field in the expansion and QUILL asks for it before inserting:

• ${field:Label} asks for a value with that label.
• ${field:Label=something} offers a starting value you can keep or change.
• The same label used twice is asked once and filled in everywhere, so a name in the greeting also appears in the sign-off.
• ${choice:Label|first reminder|second reminder|final notice} gives you a list to choose from instead of a box to type in. Use it whenever the answer is one of a few known ones: choosing is one arrow key, and you never have to spell “Second reminder” exactly right. The first option is the default.

A small form opens with one labelled control for each field, a box to type in or a list to choose from, in the order they appear in the text. Tab moves between them, Enter moves to the next one, Enter on the last one accepts, and Escape cancels and leaves your text exactly as it was. ${cursor} still works alongside fields: the cursor lands where the template puts it once your answers are in. Quill Inkwell shows the same form, so a template works the same wherever you use it.

Timing and sound

• Multi-press window. How quickly you must press a key twice or three times to count as a double or triple press is set in Settings > Editing as Multi-press time window (ms). The default is 400 ms, and it can be anything from 100 to 1000 ms. Make it longer if you press keys slowly, or shorter if double presses happen by accident when you type fast.
• Sound. To hear a sound when an abbreviation expands, turn on Play sound on abbreviation expansion in Settings > Editing. You can point Abbreviation expansion sound file at a .wav file, or leave it empty for the standard system beep.

Abbreviations from Quillins

Installed Quillins can add abbreviations of their own. You can switch each one on or off on that Quillin’s own preferences page: open Preferences (Ctrl+Comma) and go to the Quillin by name. For the bundled Smart Insert Quillin, they are on its Abbreviations tab. These are kept apart from your own library and never saved into it, so removing a Quillin removes its abbreviations too. Your own abbreviations always win over a Quillin’s. If two Quillins use the same trigger, the one loaded first wins. They work in other programs too, through Quill Inkwell, so a Quillin full of medical abbreviations or company wording is useful everywhere you type.

The bundled Smart Insert Quillin adds four abbreviations that expand as you type:

Only abbreviations with fixed text expand as you type. Ones that build their text when used, such as Smart Insert’s qbrf, do not fire from typing the word. Use the matching smart trigger (=brftest()) or the Insert menu command instead.

Abbreviation tips

• Use ${cursor} to put the cursor inside a template. For example, sig expanding to Best regards,${cursor}Jeff leaves the cursor just after the comma.
• Use case-sensitive abbreviations sparingly. Most triggers are lower case, and you rarely need it.
• Abbreviations expand before snippets. If a word is both, the abbreviation wins.
• Export your library now and then, as a backup and to copy it to another computer.

Insert Automation

Insert Automation ties abbreviations, smart text triggers, .LOG files and append anchors together, all from the keyboard. Everything it does is announced and can be undone, and it only acts on an exact match. Nothing runs in the background, and nothing reads through your file unless you asked.

Smart Text Triggers

A smart text trigger is a short command that starts with =, sits on a line by itself, and expands when you press Enter. Because it starts with =, it cannot go off by accident in the middle of a sentence.

The bundled Smart Insert Quillin comes with these:

How to use one. Type the trigger on a line by itself and press Enter. If it matches, QUILL replaces the whole line with the new text and tells you what it inserted. If it does not match, nothing happens and Enter works as usual.

Large inserts. If a trigger would produce more than a set amount of text (50 paragraphs at first), QUILL asks before inserting anything. Change the amount in More Preferences > Smart Insert > General tab.

Switching triggers on and off. Every trigger can be switched on or off in More Preferences > Smart Insert > Smart Triggers tab. A switched-off trigger’s =name() text is simply left on the line as you typed it.

Log files that stamp themselves

If the first line of a text file is .LOG, QUILL treats it as a log with a time stamp for each entry, just as Notepad has for decades.

When you open a .LOG file, QUILL:

1. Finds .LOG at the top of the file (within the first 4096 bytes).
2. Finds where the new entry belongs: a QUILL-LOG-APPEND-HERE anchor near the bottom of the file, or the end of the document if there is none.
3. Puts in a fresh time stamp.
4. Leaves the cursor just after it, so you can start typing.
5. Says “Log timestamp inserted. Type your entry.”

QUILL never changes a read-only file. .LOG further down a file does nothing on its own. A UTF-8 BOM before .LOG is fine.

Time stamp format. Choose it in More Preferences > Smart Insert > Log Mode tab:

• Long date and time (the default): Sunday, June 14, 2026 9:42 PM
• Short: 06/14/2026 09:42 PM
• ISO 8601: 2026-06-14T21:42:00
• Date only, Time only, or a custom strftime pattern

For example, set Timestamp format to Custom and enter %Y-%m-%d %H:%M to get 2026-06-14 21:42.

Append Anchors

Any file can have a QUILL-APPEND-HERE line near the bottom. When QUILL adds something that belongs at the end of the file, such as a log time stamp, a template or a braille test block, it puts the new text just above the anchor and leaves the anchor where it is for next time.

That gives you a fixed spot that keeps working. Footer notes, details or closing instructions stay below the anchor, and new text always lands above them.

A .LOG file can use the more specific QUILL-LOG-APPEND-HERE anchor to keep log entries apart from other added text.

To add an anchor, type QUILL-APPEND-HERE on a line by itself near the bottom of your file. That is all. QUILL finds it the next time it adds something to that file.

Look Up, Thesaurus and the Dictionary

Press the Applications key (or Shift+F10, or right-click) on any word and the menu has two submenus named after that word.

• Thesaurus for “running” has the best replacements one key away, each further meaning as a submenu of its own, Opposites, Say Word Summary (what the thesaurus knows, spoken) and More in Thesaurus….
• Dictionary for “running” starts with Look Up “running”… and, when AI is on, goes on with the thirteen AI dictionary items described under the AI menu.

If you have selected a single word, the menus use that word instead of the one at the cursor.

Thesaurus (Shift+F7)

Thesaurus… (Shift+F7, Tools > Writing and Language) opens a two-part window for the word you are on, or asks you for one. It finds your word even when it is not in its plain form. The thesaurus knows “run”, not “running”, and “happy”, not “happier”, so QUILL works back to the plain word and tells you: in the title (“running (as run)”) and on each meaning (“verb, from run: sprinting, dashing, …”). It then gives each replacement back in the form your sentence needs, with the same capitals: “sprinting” for “running”, “More glad” for “Happier”, “sought” for “sought”.

You start in the Senses list, with the part of speech first, so type n for the nouns or v for the verbs. Tab moves to the words for the chosen meaning: replacements, then broader: and opposite: words, each labelled. Enter or Replace puts the chosen word in and drops the selection.

Say Word Summary (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+[) reads you the plain word, its meanings for each part of speech, the first few replacements and the opposites, without opening anything. QUILL Lite has the same thesaurus.

Look Up Word (Alt+F10)

Look Up Word… (Alt+F10, Tools > Writing and Language) is the dictionary without AI, in a window QUILL Lite shares. You start in the Result, a read-only box you arrow through: the word, then a labelled section for each kind of answer. Below it, Words you can use lists every synonym, opposite, related word and rhyme, each saying which it is.

• Enter or Replace Word puts the chosen word in place of yours.
• Copy copies the chosen word, or the whole result.
• Add to Dictionary adds the word to your personal dictionary.

Offline, Look Up uses the thesaurus and nothing leaves this computer. The Use online sources checkbox is off until you check it. When it is on, the word, and only the word, never your sentence or document, goes to three free services that need no account:

• the Free Dictionary, for definitions with examples
• Datamuse, for more synonyms, opposites, rhymes and related words
• Wikipedia, for a short summary with a link to the article (a word with no real article, or a page that only lists other meanings, shows no encyclopedia section)

The offline answer appears straight away and QUILL says “Looking up online”. When the online answer arrives it replaces the box, and QUILL tells you. Your choice is remembered as dictionary_online_lookups in the settings file. Uncheck the box and the next lookup is offline again.

Chapter 7, Spelling and words, has more on spelling and the dictionary.

Sending your writing somewhere else

Send as Email and Copy as Email Body

File > Send as Email opens your usual mail program with the selection, or the whole document if nothing is selected, as the message. File > Copy as Email Body prepares the same text and puts it on the clipboard instead. Use that when your mail program cuts off or refuses a very long message. Both follow the same format setting as the Clip Library. Copy as Email Body is also on the QUILL key: press the QUILL key and then C (Copy Selection For Email).

Using QUILL as an external editor

Some programs, such as Thunderbird, can hand a draft to another editor and take it back when you are done. QUILL opens one window per file and closes when you close it, which is exactly what those programs expect, so QUILL needs no special setup. For Thunderbird:

1. Install the External Editor Revived add-on in Thunderbird (Tools > Add-ons and Themes, then search for it). It also needs a small companion program, and its own setup page walks you through that.
2. In the add-on’s settings, set the editor to QUILL’s full path. On Windows this is usually C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Local\Programs\QUILL for All\quill.exe. Copy the exact path from the Target field of your QUILL shortcut.
3. Write a message and press the add-on’s edit-externally key (Ctrl+E in Thunderbird, unless you changed it). Your draft opens in QUILL with everything QUILL offers: spell check, read aloud, AI tools and braille. Save (Ctrl+S) and close QUILL, and the text goes back into Thunderbird’s message window.

The same steps work with any program that opens an editor on a file and reads it back when the editor closes.

AutoOutline numbered headings

Format > Update Outline Numbering numbers every heading in your document by its level, typed as real text at the start of the heading:

• Numeric (the default): 1, 1.1, 1.2, 2, 2.1…
• Legal: I, I.A, I.B, II…

Choose the style in Settings > Editing > “AutoOutline numbering style.” Because the numbers are real text, they are read aloud, survive copy and paste, and export with nothing to set up. Add, remove or move headings, then run Format > Update Outline Numbering again. It replaces the old numbers instead of adding new ones in front. Format > Remove Outline Numbering takes them out again.

Work Personas

A Work Persona is a named set of things you use together: a feature profile, a working folder, some favourite files and, if you like, a keymap profile. Make one for each part of your work, such as school, a freelance client or a novel, and switch to it in one step.

Open Tools > Work Personas… to manage them.

1. Choose New Persona.
2. Type a name, pick a feature profile, browse to a working folder, add your favourite files and, if you want, choose a keymap profile.
3. Choose Save.

Then:

• Apply Now switches your feature profile, changes your working folder, reopens your favourite files and applies the keymap, all in the current session. Keymap changes take effect the next time you start QUILL.
• Generate Shortcut… makes a launcher you can double-click to open QUILL straight into that persona, even when QUILL is not running. On Windows it is a real shortcut where possible, or a .bat file otherwise. On macOS it is a .command file you open from Finder, which starts QUILL in Terminal.
• From a command prompt or another shortcut, quill --persona "Persona Name" does the same.

A persona is for one person’s different kinds of work. It is not a separate user account, and it does not replace Story Studio, Notebooks or the Copy Tray, though a persona can point to any of them.

Typing stays ahead of you

QUILL is built so that your next keystroke never has to wait. Between one character and the next, it does only three things: updates your text, refreshes the modified marker, and quietly sets the status line.

Everything else, such as the side preview, the spelling hint, word prediction, getting browse mode ready, language detection, turning menu items on and off, and autosave, waits until after your screen reader has been told about the character. QUILL waits for a fifth of a second of quiet first, and if you type faster than that it skips the work until you pause. So the faster you type, the less QUILL does between keystrokes.

The status bar’s word count, line and column, and progress cells also update in those pauses, using the text QUILL already holds. And the abbreviation feature only touches the Windows clipboard, which every program and your screen reader share, at the moment an abbreviation that uses ${clipboard} expands.

This matters most with a screen reader. NVDA and JAWS speak the character you typed when they get a signal from the same part of QUILL that does this work. Anything done between keystrokes is heard as a delay before the character, and if enough builds up, as keystrokes running together. A missing space between words is usually the first sign. If you ever notice that in a very large document, please report it rather than changing your screen reader settings: it means something is slowing down typing that should not be.

The Editing page in Settings

Most of the Editing page in Settings (Ctrl+,) is described where the feature itself is. These are the rest:

• Enable soft wrap wraps long lines to the width of the window. It is on to begin with, and Alt+Z turns it on and off as you work.
• Auto-fill numbered list markers writes 1., 2., 3. in front of every item when you insert a Markdown numbered list, instead of only the first. It is off to begin with, but QUILL does it anyway while you are in a Markdown document, and for five minutes after you turn a numbered list on.
• Backspace after expansion decides what Backspace does straight after an abbreviation expands: Delete the expanded text (the default) or Revert to the typed abbreviation.
• Enable persistent undo keeps a saved file’s undo history from one session to the next. It is off to begin with; Chapter 13 has more.
• How to open CSV files is Ask each time (the default), Plain text or Grid.
• How to open Word files is Ask each time (the default), Plain text or Structured.
• Autosave interval (seconds) is how often QUILL autosaves the open document, from 5 to 600 seconds. The default is 30.
• Autoformat straight quotes to curly turns straight quotes into curly ones as you type. Off to begin with.
• Autoformat double hyphen to dash turns two hyphens into a dash as you type. Off to begin with.
• Multi-press time window (ms) is how long QUILL waits for a second or third press of the same key before it treats the first as a single press. It matters for the Copy Tray and Command Palette keys that do something different when pressed twice. The default is 400. Fast typists may like 300, and 500 gives you more time.

What you learned, and where to go next

You now know the everyday editing keys, how to select by anchor, by structure and with marks, and how to get deleted text back or repeat a command. You met the Copy Tray and the Clip Library, the Insert menu with its special characters, equations, snippets, dates and emoji, and abbreviations, smart triggers and log files that do some of the typing for you.

To practise, open Help > Tutorials… (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and try “Select, mark, and move text” and “Spelling, words, and the thesaurus” from the Writing and editing track.

Next, Chapter 5, Formatting, structure and markup, shows how to give your writing shape: headings, lists, tables and formatting.

Chapter 5: Formatting, structure and markup

This chapter is about the shape of your writing: headings, lists, bold and italic, fonts and colours, tables, equations and citations. QUILL keeps your text plain and easy to read while you work, and still gives you a properly formatted document when you save it as Word, RTF or HTML. If you write in Markdown or HTML, or you want a document that other people can navigate by heading, this is the chapter for you. Near the end you will also find the tools for tidying pasted text and fixing character encoding problems, and how QUILL tells you what it has done.

Format menu

The Format menu is where you change how existing text looks and how it is laid out. Most of it works on the selection, or on the current line when nothing is selected.

Case, comments and indentation

The Change Case submenu has five commands:

• Upper Case
• Lower Case
• Title Case
• Sentence Case
• Toggle Case

For code and structured text there are comment and indentation tools:

• Toggle Line Comment (Ctrl+/)
• Toggle Block Comment (Ctrl+Shift+/)
• Indent (Ctrl+])
• Outdent (Ctrl+[)
• Tab Key Inserts Tab Character (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+I), which Chapter 2 explains under the Tab key.
• Describe Indent Depth (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+V), which tells you how deeply the line you are on is indented, such as “4 spaces” or “1 tab”, without moving anything.

Working with whole lines

These commands are on Format > Line, and act on the line your cursor is on:

• Move Line Up (Ctrl+Shift+Up)
• Move Line Down (Ctrl+Shift+Down)
• Duplicate Line (Ctrl+D)
• Delete Line (Ctrl+Shift+Delete)
• Join Lines
• Delete to Line Start (Ctrl+Shift+Backspace) and Delete to Line End (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Delete)
• Delete to Document Start and Delete to Document End, which remove everything from the cursor to the top or the bottom of the document. They have no keys at first, because they remove a lot at once. Ctrl+Z puts it back, and so does Edit > Restore Deleted Text….
• Delete Paragraph (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Backspace)
• Quote Lines (Ctrl+Shift+Q) and Unquote Lines (Alt+Shift+.), which add or take away the > that marks a quoted line in an email or in Markdown.

Five line tools have their own keys, so you do not have to walk the menu each time:

• Hard-Wrap Lines (Alt+Shift+W)
• Delete Lines Containing (Alt+Shift+X)
• Convert Indentation to Spaces (Alt+F11)
• Convert Indentation to Tabs (Alt+F12)
• Line Statistics (Ctrl+Alt+W)

The first four use the same keys as QUILL Lite, so your hands work the same way in both. Line Statistics is on Tools > Advanced, and Document Statistics is on Ctrl+Shift+G.

Sort and Filter, Whitespace, and numbering lines

Three more submenus of the Format menu work on many lines at once. Each one works on the selected lines, or on the whole document when nothing is selected.

Format > Sort and Filter puts lines in order and weeds them out:

• Sort Lines A to Z (Ctrl+Alt+S) and Sort Lines Z to A
• Shuffle Lines, which puts them in a random order, handy for a quiz or a draw
• Sort Lines Numerically, Sort Lines by Date and Sort Lines by Length, described below
• Delete Lines Containing… (Alt+Shift+X) and Delete Lines Not Containing…. Type a word or phrase, and every line with it (or every line without it) goes.
• Reverse Lines (Alt+Shift+Z)
• Remove Duplicate Lines (Ctrl+Alt+D)

Format > Whitespace tidies spaces and blank lines:

• Trim Trailing Whitespace (Ctrl+Alt+R)
• Trim Blank Lines at the Ends (Ctrl+Shift+Enter) and Remove Every Blank Line (Ctrl+Alt+K), described next
• Normalize Whitespace
• Convert Indentation to Spaces (Alt+F11) and Convert Indentation to Tabs (Alt+F12)

Format > Line has the numbering tools, Number Lines… (Alt+Shift+N) and Number Lines (Advanced)…, along with Hard-Wrap Lines… (Alt+Shift+W). Number Lines (Advanced)… is for the times the simple version is not enough. You can set a starting number, an increment, digits or Roman numerals, a zero-padding width, a custom suffix, and left or right alignment.

Two ways to remove blank lines

The Format menu has two blank-line commands, and their names tell you which is which.

• Trim Blank Lines at the Ends removes only the blank lines before the first line of text and after the last one. Use it before you paste a fragment into something else.
• Remove Every Blank Line removes all of them, including the ones between your paragraphs. Use it on text copied from a web page that arrived double-spaced.

A line with nothing but spaces on it counts as blank to both commands. They used to be called Trim Blank Lines and Remove Blank Lines.

Sorting lines by number, length or date

Besides the plain A to Z sorts, Format > Sort and Filter has three more for structured lists. Each works on the selected lines, or the whole document if nothing is selected.

• Sort Lines Numerically sorts by the first number on each line.
• Sort Lines by Length puts the shortest lines first.
• Sort Lines by Date sorts by the date on each line.

Sort Lines by Date understands the common ways of writing a date:

• ISO dates, such as 2020-03-05.
• Slash and dot forms, such as 03/04/2020 and 5.1.2020.
• English month names, such as Jan 5, 2020, 5 January 2020 and March 3rd, 1999.

When a numeric date could be read two ways, QUILL follows your region. In US English it reads the month first, so 03/04 is March 4th. Everywhere else it reads the day first, so 03/04 is 4 March. A date that can only mean one thing, like 25/12, is always read correctly. Lines with no date it recognizes stay together at the bottom, in their original order, so nothing is lost.

All three sorts have no key by default. You can give them one in the Keymap Editor.

Bold, italic and rich formatting

Bold and Italic are on the Format menu, as you would expect. Beyond those two, the menu applies real document formatting:

• Underline, Strikethrough, Superscript and Subscript
• Font (the font family) and Size (the point size)
• Text Colour and Highlight
• paragraph Alignment (Left / Centre / Right / Justify)
• line spacing, indent and named styles

QUILL uses what it calls hidden codes for this. The formatting is stored out of sight, so what you read and edit stays clean plain text with no clutter in it. When you save or export, the hidden codes become real formatting, and the document comes out as a properly formatted Word, RTF or HTML file.

Everything else in QUILL works on that same clean text: undo, search, the outline, word counts, read-aloud and the AI tools all see your prose, not the markup.

Applying formatting

Use the Font, Size, Align, Colour and Highlight items on the Format menu. If text is selected, the formatting applies to the selection. If nothing is selected, it applies to what you type next.

Here is what each one offers:

• Format > Font has six everyday typefaces: Arial, Calibri, Times New Roman, Courier New, Verdana and Georgia.
• Format > Font Size has Grow Font (Ctrl+Shift+.) and Shrink Font (Ctrl+Shift+,), which step the size up or down, and a list of sizes from 8 to 72 point.
• Format > Align has Left (Ctrl+L), Center (Ctrl+E), Right (Ctrl+R) and Justify (Ctrl+J), the same keys as Word.
• Format > Text Color has Black, Red, Green, Blue, Orange and Purple.
• Format > Highlight has Yellow, Green, Turquoise, Pink and Gray.
• Format > Line Spacing has Single (Ctrl+1), One and a Half (Ctrl+5) and Double (Ctrl+2), Word’s keys again.
• Format > Paragraph Spacing adds 6 or 12 points of space before or after the paragraph.
• Format > Paragraph Indent indents the paragraph’s left edge by 18, 36 or 54 points, or indents just its first line by 18 or 36 points.
• Format > Paragraph Style makes the paragraph a Quote, a Title, a Subtitle or a Caption.
• Format > Insert Page Break puts a page break on its own line in a Markdown document. You do not see a new page while you write; the break takes effect when you save or export to a format that has pages, such as Word or PDF.
• Format > Clear Formatting (Ctrl+Shift+N) is Word’s “back to normal text”. In a rich text document it turns bold, italic, underline and strikethrough off, puts the size, colour, highlight, alignment and spacing back to normal, and takes the text out of any list, all as one step you can undo. In a Markdown document it takes the emphasis codes off the selected text, or off the paragraph when nothing is selected. When you are not sure what is still applied to some text, this is the way to be certain.

The Markdown Format Codes… dialog gathers font family, point size, colour and highlight in one place. It writes hidden Markdown codes, so it works only in a Markdown document. It used to be called “More Font Options…”.

The two items above it are the ones most people mean by “font”:

• Font… changes the editor’s own typeface and size.
• Font for Selection… changes the font of text in a rich text document.

Hearing what is there

Because the codes are hidden, you cannot read them in the text. Describe Formatting at Cursor speaks exactly what is in effect at the cursor, for example “Arial, 14 point, centred, bold”. Its key is Ctrl+Shift+D. To hear formatting changes as you arrow through a document, check Format > Announce Formatting on Cursor Move. It stays on until you uncheck it, even after a restart.

Saving with your formatting

When you use Save As (or Export) to Word (.docx), Rich Text (.rtf) or HTML, the hidden codes become real formatting: font, size, colour, highlight, alignment and the rest. Word export uses a built-in writer when the optional python-docx component is installed, and Pandoc otherwise.

If the format you are saving to cannot carry something, QUILL tells you before you commit, instead of quietly dropping it. Saving to plain text drops the formatting, and you get the same warning.

Markdown and HTML awareness

Plenty of people write in plain text and still care a great deal about the structure of what they export. QUILL helps with that by noticing whether the document in front of you looks like Markdown, HTML or plain text. It uses that to guide the insertion helpers and to switch on the commands that make sense for that kind of document. The heading and list keys below, for example, work in Markdown and HTML documents. In a plain-text document QUILL says the command is unavailable and leaves your text alone.

Headings

Headings are what let you, and anyone you share a document with, jump through it by section. QUILL’s heading tools help you keep that structure tidy, not just add decoration.

Setting a heading level (Ctrl+Alt+1 to 6)

Put your cursor on a line and press Ctrl+Alt+1 through Ctrl+Alt+6 to make it a heading of that level. Press the same key again on a heading that is already that level to turn it back into an ordinary line. This works in Markdown and HTML documents.

Alt+Shift+Left and Alt+Shift+Right raise and lower the level of the heading you are on.

If you use NVDA: these keys take the place of NVDA’s own keys for switching to synthesizer 1 through 6. If you rely on those, rebind QUILL’s heading keys in the Keymap Editor.

Moving a section

In Markdown and HTML, a section is a heading and everything under it. You can move whole sections without cutting and pasting.

• Alt+Shift+Up and Alt+Shift+Down move the section you are in one step, swapping it with the section before or after it. This is right for tidying two neighbouring sections.
• Alt+Shift+F5 is Select Section. It selects the section and everything under it, so ordinary Ctrl+X and Ctrl+V can put it anywhere: elsewhere in this document, in another document, or in another program. QUILL tells you how much it selected, for example “Selected Bread and 1 section under it, 7 lines”, because your screen reader only says the selection changed.
• Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F5 is Move Section To…, which moves a section to a place you choose instead of one step at a time. It is described just below.

Your cursor must be on the heading for Alt+Shift+Up and Alt+Shift+Down. In a plain-text document QUILL says the key is unavailable and nothing moves. A line such as # fake inside a ``` code fence is never mistaken for a heading.

When there is no section of the same level in the direction you are moving, the section trades places with whatever is next to it, the way Word’s outline Move Up and Move Down work on the same keys. A first child section rises above its parent’s heading. A section that runs to the end of the file cannot move down, and QUILL tells you so and names the key that would promote it to make it a sibling.

The moved section keeps its level. Moving never renumbers your headings. To change a level, use Alt+Shift+Left and Alt+Shift+Right; you can combine the two.

Alt+Shift+Up and Alt+Shift+Down used to expand and shrink the selection. Those commands are now on Ctrl+Shift+X and Ctrl+Alt+Shift+X, and keymaps you saved in older versions are moved over automatically.

Move Section To (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F5)

Moving a section forty places with Alt+Shift+Up means forty announcements to count. Move Section To… asks where you want it to go instead.

1. Put your cursor in the section you want to move and press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F5.
2. Choose the heading to move it next to. The list holds every heading in the document, and each row reads like “3 of 7, level 2 - Bread”, so two sections with the same name are still two different rows.
3. Choose Before, After or Inside that heading.

The whole move is a single edit, so one Ctrl+Z undoes it.

Only Inside changes a level. It makes your section the last one under the heading you chose, moves everything in it one level deeper, and tells you the new level.

A few things make the two lists easy to use by ear:

• Focus starts in the search box. Pressing Enter there takes you into the results; it does not accept whatever happens to be highlighted.
• The list never reorders itself as you type. It is your outline in document order, so you can find things by position.
• A heading inside the section you are moving is still listed, and marked as such. If you choose it, QUILL explains, for example: “Sourdough is inside Bread, so Bread cannot move into it. Promote Sourdough first if you want them side by side.”

QUILL also refuses to push a heading past level 6, and tells you why.

Press Escape at either question to cancel. Nothing changes and nothing is announced.

Style Headings and the Heading Organizer

To change how headings look, open Insert > Heading > Style Headings…. You can style all heading levels or just the level you are on, and set the font family, point size and alignment. In a Markdown document, styled headings are written as HTML heading tags so the formatting is kept.

For bigger reorganising, open Navigate > Heading Organizer… (Alt+Shift+O). It lists each heading as its level and title. In it you can:

• promote and demote headings with Tab and Shift+Tab
• move sections up and down
• rename headings
• check the heading order before you apply your changes. It catches a wrong starting level, skipped levels and empty headings.

QUILLBee’s tip: Lost track of where you are in a long document? Press Alt+Shift+O to open the Heading Organizer and hear every heading as a list.

The Section cell on the status bar

The status bar can show a Section cell, which reads Section: Heading N (ordinal of total) whenever your cursor is on a heading in a Markdown or HTML document. It is hidden by default; turn it on in Tools > Customize and Support > Status Bar Layout…. In a plain-text document, or on a line that is not a heading, it stays empty.

Lists

Bullet and numbered lists (Ctrl+Shift+L)

Press Ctrl+Shift+L to start a bullet list, or Ctrl+Shift+Grave, Shift+L for a numbered list. QUILL looks at the line you are on:

• If it is not in a list, a new list starts at the cursor.
• If it is already in a list, the same key turns that list off. Only the list you are in changes; every other list in the document is left alone.

When it turns a list off, QUILL tells you how many items it changed, for example “Bullet list removed, 4 items”, since that is the part you cannot see. Ctrl+Z puts the markers back.

Numbered lists follow the list_auto_fill_numbers setting, Settings > Editing > Auto-fill numbered list markers. When it is on, every item gets its number, 1. , 2. , 3. and so on. When it is off, only the first item does.

These keys always work in Markdown and HTML documents. In a plain-text document QUILL says the command is unavailable.

Typing in a list

Markdown lists behave the way they do in other editors:

• Enter continues the current bullet, numbered or task item.
• Enter on an empty list marker ends the list.
• On a list item, Tab nests it one level deeper and Shift+Tab brings it back out.

For bigger changes, open Insert > List > List Manager… (Ctrl+Shift+Grave, L). It shows your list as a tree, where you can move, promote, demote, add, edit and delete items.

Structured List Studio (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+L)

The Structured List Studio lets you build a list by its parts (each item’s text, a checked box, a term and its definition) and writes the correct Markdown or HTML for you. You never have to type -, 1., [ ], <ul> or <dl> yourself.

Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+L, or choose Insert > List > Structured List Studio….

• With text selected, the studio turns your selection into a list. It makes one item per line, or one per paragraph when blank lines separate them, and removes any bullets, numbers or task markers already there. With nothing selected, it starts a new list.
• Choose the type: Bulleted, Numbered, Checklist, or Definition (or description) list. Then choose the output format, Markdown or HTML.
• As you work, a read-only Generated source field shows exactly what will be inserted. The items outline tells you each item’s text, its number or checked state, and its position.
• Inserting the finished list is a single edit, so one Ctrl+Z undoes it.

Definition lists

For a definition list, fill in the Term and Definition fields. For HTML, QUILL writes valid <dl>/<dt>/<dd> markup. For Markdown, it uses a Pandoc-compatible syntax. A term can have several synonyms (one per line, each becoming its own <dt>), and a definition can have several paragraphs (separated by a blank line, each becoming its own <dd>).

If you make a Markdown definition list and the document has no profile set, QUILL asks how you want it written instead of guessing:

• embedded HTML, the recommended choice because it works almost everywhere
• a specific Markdown profile: Pandoc, Markdown Extra or MultiMarkdown
• a plain “Term: Definition” list

Nesting, reordering and editing a list later

• Indent, Outdent and Add child build nested lists.
• Move up and Move down carry an item together with all its children.
• To edit a list you already have, put your cursor inside it with nothing selected and open the studio. It loads that list, and when you are done it rewrites just that block.

Converting and importing

• Switching a list to another type carries the content across, and warns you before any structure would be lost.
• Import from clipboard and Import from file… bring text in, with the live preview showing how QUILL understood it.
• When you choose OK, the studio checks the generated source. If something is wrong, your document is left unchanged and you are told what the problem was.

List Studio Settings

Open Insert > List > List Studio Settings… to set your defaults. You can pick a ready-made preset, adjust the main options (verbosity, markers, definition profile and loose lists), and export or import your settings as a JSON file. Save them for all documents, which is what the studio starts from next time, or for this document only, which overrides just the options you changed. The document’s format still chooses the Markdown syntax for definition lists automatically.

The studio used to open with F2, and Insert Special Character used to be on Shift+F2. Today F2 and Shift+F2 move between bookmarks, and Insert Special Character is on Ctrl+Shift+F2. You can change any of these keys in the Keymap Editor.

Checking off tasks

A task list is a list whose items start with a box: - [ ] for something still to do and - [x] for something done. Insert > List > Task makes one, and plans written by AI assistants are usually full of them.

To check a task, put the cursor on its line and press Ctrl+Alt+Enter (**Insert

List > Toggle Task Done**). Press it again to uncheck it. QUILL tells you what changed and how many tasks in that list are done, for example “Checked: Write the tests. 3 of 7 tasks complete.” Select several lines first to check them all at once. Ctrl+Z takes it back like any other edit. On a line that is not a task, QUILL says so and changes nothing.

In the preview and in File > Export > HTML, a task shows as a real check box, checked or not, with the task’s text as its label.

Markdown profiles and table of contents

Markdown means different things to different writers. A poet wants every line break kept, a documentation author wants a table of contents, and someone contributing on GitHub wants task lists and strikethrough. Format > Markdown lets you say which kind of writing you are doing without learning the names of Markdown extensions.

• Insert > Table of Contents builds a table of contents from your document’s headings. It uses no AI and makes no network call, and the links always match your headings exactly, because they are built from the headings themselves. If your document has a [TOC] marker on a line of its own, the table of contents goes there. Otherwise it goes right after your first heading.
• Select Markdown Profile… lets you pick a named profile: Standard Markdown, GitHub-Style Markdown, Documentation, Poetry and Lyrics, Accessible Publishing, Technical Writing, PRD and Release Notes, or Custom. QUILL tells you in plain words what the profile turns on, for example “Markdown profile: Documentation. 5 extensions enabled.”
• Preserve Single Line Breaks keeps every line break as a line break, instead of letting Markdown join the lines into one paragraph. Turn it on for poetry, lyrics, speeches and scripts, where the line is part of the meaning.
• Read Markdown Processing Status tells you your current profile and what it turns on, without opening a dialog.
• Select Citation Style… chooses how the Author or Student profile writes citations: as Markdown footnotes (light, nothing extra to install), or as full Academic bibliography entries through the Insert > Insert Citation… MLA / Chicago / APA form.

If you would like an outline written in the AI’s own words instead, use AI > Generate Table of Contents. The two commands are separate, and the AI one appears only when AI Assistance is turned on.

Equations and mathematics

Most editors make maths hard for a screen-reader user. The notation is visual, and the usual tools give you a mouse and a palette of symbols. QUILL lets you type an equation as text instead. That works from the keyboard, you can review it character by character, and screen readers that speak maths already understand it.

The bundled Math Equations Quillin adds a formula gallery, symbol abbreviations, a way to step through a formula, and export to Word. All of it is covered below, and also taught from start to finish in Tutorial 7: Write math without learning a new language.

Insert Equation (Ctrl+Alt+=)

Choose Insert > Insert Equation… or press Ctrl+Alt+=. (Older versions of this guide gave Ctrl+Shift+E, which now selects the current line.) The dialog has two fields:

• Equation: type LaTeX, such as E = mc^2 or \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}, or paste MathML (<math>...</math>).
• Display mode: Inline puts the equation inside your sentence. Block puts it on its own line.

QUILL adds the delimiters for you: \(...\) for inline, or $$...$$ on a line of its own for a block equation. Those are the marks Browser Preview and Word export both understand, so the equation shows as maths in the preview and becomes a real Word equation when you save as .docx. MathML goes in exactly as you typed it, because it already carries its own markup.

To change an equation you already wrote, select it, including its delimiters, and open Insert Equation again. An equation from an older version of QUILL, written with single $ signs, opens the same way, and inserting it again gives it the new delimiters. The field holds just the maths, with the delimiters taken off, and the display mode you used is already chosen. Change it, choose Insert, and the old equation is replaced.

An equation is ordinary text in your file, so nothing in your document becomes hidden or unreadable. You can always arrow through the raw LaTeX to check it.

Insert Equation was contributed by @salorajan.

The Math Equations Quillin’s own prompt

The Math Equations Quillin has its own Insert Equation… command, a short prompt instead of a form. It writes exactly the same delimiters as QUILL’s own command, so it does not matter which one you use.

• LaTeX is the most common format for typeset maths. Type the formula in standard LaTeX and choose a display mode.

  • Inline (\(...\)) keeps the equation within the surrounding text. E=mc^2 becomes \(E=mc^2\).
  • Block ($$...$$) gives the equation its own line, with a blank line above and below. \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a} becomes $$\frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a}$$ on a single line.

  Both are delimiters MathJax recognizes without any setup, and \(...\) cannot be confused with a dollar amount in your prose the way a bare $...$ could.

• MathML is an XML format used in web publishing and accessible documents. If what you type starts with <math, QUILL inserts it as it is and skips the display mode question. Screen readers can read MathML directly.

• If you select a LaTeX equation before you run it, QUILL removes the delimiters, fills in the bare formula, and puts the display mode it detected first in the list, so one keypress confirms it.

Seeing equations rendered

Browser Preview (Ctrl+Shift+Grave, V) and HTML export add MathJax 3, so equations appear typeset in any browser. QUILL adds it only for documents that contain maths. The document itself always keeps the raw LaTeX or MathML, which is what your screen reader reads.

MathJax is loaded from a public CDN by your browser, so the visual rendering needs an internet connection. The LaTeX or MathML, and everything your screen reader says, is always there offline. If you are offline, equations show as their source instead of typeset maths. Nothing is lost.

Common Formulas gallery

You do not have to type a common formula at all. Insert > Snippet Gallery… lists ten ready-made formulas from the Math Equations Quillin:

• the Quadratic Formula
• the Pythagorean Theorem
• Slope-Intercept Form
• Point-Slope Form
• the Slope Formula
• the Distance Formula
• the Midpoint Formula
• Difference of Squares
• the Area and Circumference of a Circle

Choose one and it goes in as a correctly formatted $$...$$ block. To change it afterwards, select it and open Insert Equation, as with any other equation.

Maths symbol abbreviations

Like Word’s Math AutoCorrect, you can type a backslash code followed by a space or punctuation, and QUILL turns it into the symbol. This works anywhere in ordinary text, but not inside the equation prompt.

• \alpha becomes α
• \sqrt becomes √
• \ne becomes ≠

Case matters where it matters in maths: \delta gives lowercase δ and \Delta gives uppercase Δ.

There are 88 codes, covering operators, relations, set and logic notation, number sets, Greek letters, calculus and geometry. They come from the Word Math AutoCorrect list published by DAISY (daisy.org/MSMathCodes). You will find them under Preferences > Editing > Insert Automation, where you can turn off any one of them, or the whole set, like any other abbreviation.

Explore Equation Structure

Hearing a long formula in one breath is hard to follow. Explore Equation Structure… lets you step through it one piece at a time.

1. Select an equation, or select nothing if you want to type a new one.
2. Choose Insert > Explore Equation Structure…, or press Ctrl+Shift+Grave, Z.
3. If nothing was selected, a text prompt asks for the LaTeX or MathML. Enter accepts it; Escape cancels.
4. QUILL says where you are (“Whole equation” at the top, or the piece’s name, such as “Fraction”, once you have gone deeper) and opens a list.

The list holds the parts of the current piece, such as a fraction’s Numerator and Denominator or a power’s Base and Exponent, followed by Read this part aloud, Back up one level (once you are below the top) and Done exploring.

Use the Up and Down arrows to move, or type a letter to jump to the next item starting with it. Press Enter, or choose OK, to act on the highlighted item:

• A part takes you into it and lists its own parts.
• Read this part aloud reads just the current piece, then reopens the same list at the same place so you can carry on.
• Back up one level goes to the piece that contains this one.
• Done exploring ends and puts you back in the editor.

Escape, or Cancel, ends the whole session at once, from any list at any depth, just like Done exploring. It does not go back one level; Back up one level is the choice for that.

Richer maths speech with MathCAT

Stepping through the parts needs nothing extra. It works the moment QUILL is installed, with no download. Read this part aloud can get better: install the free MathCAT math speech engine from Help > Download Optional Components… > MathCAT math speech engine (about 3 MB, MIT-licensed, from the daisy/MathCATForC project). That command then uses the same natural-language maths speech that NVDA ships, instead of QUILL’s simpler built-in reading. If you skip the download, or MathCAT cannot handle a particular formula, the command still works with the built-in reading.

Nemeth and UEB maths braille are not available yet. If you use JAWS, its Math Viewer works once an equation is a native Word equation (see the next section), and it remains the fuller option, with braille support.

Word export and round trip

File > Export > Word Document… turns every \(...\) and $$...$$ equation in your document into a genuine Word equation, the same kind Word’s own equation editor makes. It does this through Pandoc, one equation at a time. In Word, the equation tools work on it, and JAWS reads it as maths, not as a picture or as literal text. If Pandoc is not available, the equation is kept as its delimited text, never dropped.

Open that Word file again later with File > Open… and the equation comes back as the same plain, editable \(...\) or $$...$$ text. This works whichever reader you have chosen in Settings > Editing > Word document reading engine.

Ask about an equation

The AI Hub’s Math Tutor agent explains a selected equation in plain language: what it means, what each symbol is, and its common name if it is a well-known formula. It does not solve anything or change your document.

Ten worked examples, including the quadratic formula, the binomial theorem, integration by parts and Euler’s identity, are in docs/math/latex_testing.md.

Citations and bibliographies

For research writing, Insert > Insert Citation… builds a correctly formatted citation from the details you type, so you do not have to remember the punctuation and indentation rules.

1. Choose the source type: Book, Journal article, or Website.
2. Choose the style: MLA 9, Chicago 17 (author-date), or APA 7.
3. Choose what to insert: the in-text citation, the full bibliography entry (Works Cited or References), or both.
4. Fill in the details: author or authors, title, year, and the fields for that source type. Separate several authors with a semicolon, for example Jane Smith; John Doe.
5. Choose Insert. The citation goes in at your cursor.

QUILL applies each style’s rules for you, including author order and “et al.”, initials, italics, and where every comma and full stop goes. You supply the facts and QUILL handles the formatting.

Tables, code blocks and tags

QUILL can guide you through inserting tables, code blocks, HTML tags and Markdown snippets. That helps when you want the structure but do not want to type every opening and closing marker correctly by hand each time.

Cleanup and normalization

The cleanup commands under Tools > Convert are made for pasted material, transcripts, exports and text moved from another program. Use them to turn messy text into something steady and readable.

Character encoding tools

Text for the web often runs into encoding trouble: one tool wants UTF-8 and the next insists on plain ASCII. Format > HTML and Encoding has the tools to sort that out.

Finding characters that are not plain ASCII

Show Non-ASCII Characters opens a read-only report of every character beyond plain ASCII. For each one it gives the line and column, the code point, the Unicode name, and whether it converts cleanly to Latin-1 and to Windows-1252 (MS-ANSI). It does the job people used to do at the command line by running a file through iconv with a sentinel string and hunting for what failed.

You can go back and forth between the report and your document:

1. In the report, put your cursor on a character’s row. Each row starts with line:column followed by a tab.
2. Choose Format > HTML and Encoding > Jump to Source Line. QUILL switches to your document and puts you on that line.
3. When you have looked at the character, choose Jump Back to Non-ASCII Report to return to the report.

You can give Jump to Source Line a key in the Keymap Editor to go faster.

HTML tags and entities

• Strip HTML Tags takes every tag out of the selection, or the whole document, and leaves just the words. It is the quick way to get readable text out of a piece of web page source.
• Convert Non-ASCII to HTML Entities rewrites every non-ASCII character as an HTML entity: a named one such as é where it exists, or a numeric one such as é. Ordinary ASCII, including & and <, is left alone. This is the reliable way to feed text to a tool, like Pandoc, that refuses accented characters.
• Encode HTML Entities is the older command. It escapes only the five markup characters (<, >, &, ", '), not accents and symbols.
• Decode HTML Entities goes the other way. It turns entities such as é, &, é and é back into é, &, é and é, using the standard HTML entity table. An entity it does not know, such as &madeupword;, is left as it is.

Saving in a different encoding

• Re-encode As… saves a copy in the encoding you choose: UTF-8, UTF-8 with a byte-order mark, Latin-1, Windows-1252 or ASCII. A character that does not fit a narrower encoding is written as a numeric HTML entity, never a question mark, so nothing is lost and you can always convert it back.
• Analyze Encoding Requirements tells you the smallest encoding your document fits in, without changing anything. Its short report gives your current encoding, whether the document still fits it, and if not, the simplest encoding that holds every character, checking in this order: ASCII, Latin-1 / ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 / MS-ANSI, UTF-8.
• Save Using Minimum Required Encoding… saves a copy in exactly that encoding, so a document that only needs Latin-1 is not forced into UTF-8. You can still choose UTF-8 yourself whenever you want; QUILL never switches you to it without asking.

Stripping and repairing characters

• Remove Email Quote Markers removes the > quote markers at the start of lines in forwarded email, including Name> style prefixes.
• Strip Low ASCII Characters removes control characters.
• Strip High ASCII Characters removes non-ASCII characters.
• Convert to Hex Dump opens a read-only view of the selection, or the whole document, as offset, hex and ASCII columns, so you can check exactly which bytes are there.
• Convert OEM (DOS) to ANSI and Convert ANSI to OEM (DOS) fix text from the DOS era that shows up as garbage in Windows, or the other way round, by converting between code page 437 (CP437) and Windows-1252.
• Convert Line-Drawing Characters to ASCII and Strip Line-Drawing Characters deal with box-drawing characters (─, │, ┌ and the rest of the U+2500 to U+257F block) left over from old DOS art or terminal output. The first turns them into plain -, | and +. The second removes them.

More search and analysis tools

• Multi Replace…, on Edit > Search Tools, makes up to four find and replace swaps in one pass, with an option to ignore case. You do not have to run Find & Replace four times.
• Count Occurrences… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F3), also on Edit > Search Tools, tells you how many times some text appears in the selection or the whole document.
• Count Regular Expression Matches… and Extract Regular Expression Matches…, on the same submenu, ask for a regular expression. The first tells you how many matches there are. The second opens every match in a new document, one to a line, so you can pull all the email addresses or dates out of a long file. If regular expressions are new to you, Tools > Advanced > Regular Expression Helper… builds one for you.
• Lines in First Block Only and Lines Common to Both Blocks, on the same submenu, compare two lists in one document. Paste one list, then the other below it, and put your cursor on the first line of the second list. QUILL treats everything above the cursor as the first block and everything from the cursor down as the second, and gives you the lines only the first block has, or the lines both blocks have.
• Line Statistics, on Tools > Advanced (Ctrl+Alt+W), looks for lines that hold exactly one number and opens a short report: count, total, average, median, mode and standard deviation. Lines that are not plain numbers are skipped, so they cause no error.

The Calculator

Tools > Calculator… is a calculator you can use without leaving your writing, and it can work on numbers that are already in your document.

1. If the numbers you care about are in the document, select them first: a few figures, a column, some comma-separated lines or a whole table. QUILL puts them in the calculator for you.
2. Choose Tools > Calculator…. Your cursor is in the box labelled Enter a calculation, or paste numbers, a column, or a table.
3. To work something out, type it, for example sqrt(264), 10 percent of 500 or 2^10 + 5!, and press Calculate expression.
4. To sum up a set of numbers, choose a Data operation: Sum, Average, Minimum, Maximum, Count, Product, Median, Range or Standard Deviation. Then choose what it is applied to: All numbers, Down each column, Across each row, or a Full summary. Press Apply.
5. The answer is in the Result box. Copy Result puts it on the clipboard, and Insert Result at Cursor types it into your document.
6. Press Escape, or Close, when you are done.

The four announcement channels

Everything QUILL tells you travels on four channels, and you choose which ones you want:

• Speech: through your screen reader, or QUILL’s own voice when no screen reader is running.
• Braille: the same message on a connected display. See the next section.
• Sound: short sounds for things that happen often, so you can stop listening to confirmations you already expect.
• Status: the status bar, which always shows the message.

QUILL, Quill Radio and Quill Weather all send announcements the same way, so they behave alike wherever you are.

Three commands worth knowing

All three are in the command palette. Give them keys in the Keymap Editor if you use them often.

• Repeat Last Announcement says the last message again. Speech is gone the moment it ends, so this helps when you were reading something else as a message went by.
• Announcement Self-Test… sends a test phrase on every channel, then shows a report you can copy, saying which channels delivered it and which screen reader or display handled each one. If something is not reaching you, this is the quickest way to tell whether the trouble is QUILL, your screen reader, or a display that is not connected.
• Report Editor Surface tells you, in one keystroke, which editor is active, its window class, whether the braille fix (system-edit emulation) is on, whether the editor border is hidden, and whether braille output is working and through which route. Nothing from your document is included. If you report a braille or speech problem, run this first and include what it says, so the problem can be looked at straight away.

Announcement settings

These are in Settings > Accessibility and Announcements, and you can search for them:

• Show announcements in braille: on by default.
• Braille announcement style: the same wording as speech, or a short form with the position first (p7/87 l14 c3).
• Hold errors on the braille display: keeps an error under your fingers instead of letting the next message replace it.
• Sound cues in the companion apps: sounds in Quill Radio and Quill Weather.
• Confirm with a sound in Quiet Mode: hear that something worked without QUILL speaking.
• Keep an announcement history: on by default. QUILL keeps a short list of what it has said, for the Spoken Echo and Repeat Last Announcement. Turn it off and nothing is kept, and the list is cleared straight away; Repeat Last Announcement can then only repeat the message still on the status bar.
• Interrupt speech for: which messages cut across whatever your screen reader is saying. Warnings and errors is the default: problems, and the answer to something you just asked for, cut in. Errors only lets everything except a failure wait its turn. Never interrupt lets every message wait. The change takes effect as soon as you press OK.

Quiet Mode and Meeting Mode silence braille along with speech: nothing is said and nothing is flashed to the display. The status bar keeps updating, so you can still read the latest message there.

Announcements on a braille display

Everything QUILL announces, such as “Saved”, “Now playing: …”, “Weather updated”, or a recording starting and stopping, goes to a connected braille display as well as to speech, in QUILL and Quill Radio alike. It works through whichever screen reader you use: JAWS and NVDA both accept a flash message, and Narrator brailles the notifications QUILL already sends.

Four things are worth knowing:

• Braille never costs you speech. If the display is unplugged partway through, or the screen reader refuses the message, you still hear it.
• Nothing is cut short. A long message is sent whole so you can pan across it. Cutting it to the width of the display would lose the end of a track title, which is usually the part you wanted.
• The same message is not flashed twice in a row. A flash replaces what is under your fingers, so an identical message within a couple of seconds (a stream repeating the same title, for instance) is skipped.
• A burst of messages settles instead of flickering. When several different messages arrive quickly, the first is shown at once and the rest are replaced a moment later by the newest one, so the display is never a blur. Errors are the exception: an error is always shown straight away.

To keep the display on your document, turn off Show announcements in braille in Settings > Accessibility and Announcements. Quiet Mode and Meeting Mode silence braille along with speech.

What you learned, and where to go next

You can now change case and tidy lines, apply rich formatting that stays out of your way until you save, and build headings, sections and lists by keyboard. You know how to write equations and citations, fix encoding problems, and choose how QUILL’s announcements reach you.

To practise, open Help > Tutorials… (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and try “Structure and formatting” and “Tables, by ear” in the Writing and editing track. For maths, work through Write math without learning a new language on the website.

Next, Chapter 6, Moving around and finding things, shows you how to get around all that structure quickly.

Chapter 6: Moving around and finding things

Long documents are where a screen reader user loses the most time, so QUILL gives you a lot of ways to get from here to there without listening to everything in between. This chapter starts with the everyday things: finding a word, jumping to a line or a heading, and getting back to where you were. Then it moves on to bookmarks, Quick Nav, folding, inline notes and the tools for code and tidy text. If you work with transcripts, legal text, long Markdown notes, HTML source or text pulled out of a PDF, this is the chapter to spend time with.

Search and replace

Finding text (Ctrl+F)

These are the keys you will use every day:

• Ctrl+F opens Find.
• F3 finds the next match, and Shift+F3 finds the previous one.
• Ctrl+Shift+F3 opens Find All Matches, a summary of every match in one list. (It used to be on Alt+F3, which now belongs to Reveal Codes.)
• Ctrl+H opens Replace.
• Ctrl+Shift+Grave then X replaces all.

Find Next, Find Previous and Find All Matches live on the Edit menu, beside Find and Replace.

Search modes

You can search for plain text, whole words, wildcards or a regular expression. If regular expressions are new to you, the Regular Expression Helper (Tools > Advanced > Regular Expression Helper…) explains the syntax when you need it. QUILL also keeps your search history, so a search you run often is there waiting for you next time.

Search Tools on the Edit menu

QUILL no longer has a top-level Search menu. The commands that used to live there are now under Edit > Search Tools. This is where you go to search many files at once, or to work with regular expressions and lines:

• Search in Files… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F) and Replace Across Files… (Ctrl+Shift+R) search and replace across a folder of documents.
• Count Regex Matches… and Extract Regex Matches… tell you how many times a regular expression matches, or pull every match out for you.
• Lines in First Block Only and Lines Common to Both Blocks compare two marked blocks of lines and keep the lines that are only in the first, or the lines both share.

Search in Files and Replace Across Files appear only when your feature profile includes regular-expression search. In the simpler profiles you still have Find and Replace on the Edit menu.

Navigation

The Navigate menu is built for moving through large, dense material without looking at it. Here are the commands in the order you are likely to want them.

Go To (Ctrl+G)

Go To… (Ctrl+G) is one window for four kinds of place: a line number, a page, a bookmark or a heading.

1. Press Ctrl+G.
2. Choose the kind of place from the radio buttons at the top.
3. Type a number, or pick from the list, and press Enter.

The number field and the list follow your choice. The one that does not apply is dimmed but stays where it is, so the window never changes shape under you. Pages are exact in a PDF and marked ~4 (estimated) everywhere else.

QUILL Lite opens the same window on the same key, without the Page row. The old Go To Line and Go To Page commands both land here now, so a key you gave them still works.

Go to Percent… moves you a part of the way through the document, for example halfway.

Going back after a jump

Every jump leaves a trail. Back Location takes you back to where you were before, and Forward Location takes you forward again.

• Back Location: Alt+Left on Windows, Cmd+[ on macOS.
• Forward Location: Alt+Right on Windows, Cmd+] on macOS.

Moving by heading and structure

Headings are the table of contents of a document, and moving by them is the fastest way around a long one.

• Next Heading (Ctrl+Alt+H) and Previous Heading (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H) move between headings only: the #, ## and ### lines in Markdown, and real headings elsewhere.
• Next Structure (Alt+Down) and Previous Structure (Alt+Up) move between every structural element: headings, and also list items, code blocks, tables and block quotes. This steps you through the full outline.
• Next Region (F6) and Previous Region (Shift+F6) cycle the larger parts of the window.

So a heading is one kind of structure. Next Structure is the wide sweep, and Next Heading is the headings-only part of it.

A few more commands on the same menu:

• Outline Navigator… (Ctrl+Shift+O) lists the document’s outline so you can jump to any part of it.
• Heading Organizer… (Alt+Shift+O) is for changing heading levels, moving whole sections, and checking that your headings are in a sensible order.
• Next Block and Previous Block move by block.
• Match Bracket (Ctrl+Shift+\) jumps to the bracket that pairs with the one at the cursor.
• First Non-Blank and Last Non-Blank move to the first or last character on the line that is not a space.
• Go to Anything (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+A) is a quick search box for jumping to anything by name.

Asking where you are

Three commands on the Navigate menu answer “where am I?” without moving you. Each one starts with the QUILL key (Ctrl+Shift+Grave):

• Speak Window Title (QUILL key, then F) reads QUILL’s title bar, which names the document and says whether it has unsaved changes.
• Speak Full Path (QUILL key, then P) reads where the document is saved, folder and all. A document that has never been saved says so.
• Speak Status Summary (QUILL key, then Q) gives the lot in one breath: the document’s name, where it is, whether it is saved or modified, and its encoding.

What they say also goes on the status bar, so you can read it again in braille.

Search, Replace, and Deep Navigation

QUILL knows what headings, lists and tables are, and it tells you about them as you move. That is the deeper layer of navigation: line and page jumps, block and heading movement, bracket matching, structural next and previous, back and forward history, the outline and bookmarks, all working together. Combined with marks and compare sessions, it makes a long review much less fragile.

Hearing that a paragraph is a heading

Apply Heading 2 to a paragraph, arrow away and arrow back, and your screen reader reads the line but does not say it is a heading. That is not your reader’s fault. No Windows edit control has paragraph styles. The control can tell JAWS or NVDA the font name, the point size and the weight, but it has no way to say that a paragraph is a heading. Word can do it only because it ships its own accessibility support for that.

So QUILL says it for you. Move onto a heading and you hear “Heading 2, Installing”: the level first, then the heading’s own words, as one sentence.

• The level comes first. On a big jump, such as Ctrl+Home, a search hit or a bookmark, NVDA and JAWS drop anything that was waiting to be spoken. A level said first, as part of the sentence, is never lost that way. It is also the order a web browser uses.
• Once, when you arrive. Moving around inside a heading says nothing more. You hear it again when you leave and come back.
• Every kind of heading. Rich text, Markdown, HTML and a real Heading 2 style in a Word document all sound the same.

If you would rather hear the words first, open Settings > Accessibility and Announcements and change “Say a heading’s level” (the heading_announce_position setting) to after. Your reader then reads the line and QUILL adds “Heading 2” behind it. It is a little quieter when you read line by line, but on a big jump you may miss the level.

Applying a heading already tells you what happened, so you never hear it twice. A document that opens on its own title does not greet you with “Heading 1” over your reader’s first reading of the line.

Sometimes you want to read a document simply as text, and one extra phrase per heading is one too many. View > Announce Headings (Ctrl+Alt+F3) turns the cue off and on without leaving the document, and it controls the table cue too. QUILL tells you which way it went, “Headings announced on arrival” or “Headings will not be announced”, so an accidental press is never a mystery. Your choice is remembered (the announce_headings setting), but think of it as something you press per document.

Headings are only found where they really exist. A # at the start of a line is a heading in Markdown and HTML, but in a shell script or a Python file it is a comment, and QUILL says nothing.

Hearing that you are in a list

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

On a web page your screen reader tells you about lists itself. In an editor a list is only characters, so a nested outline would otherwise sound like a run of lines beginning with a dash, and you would have to count spaces to tell level two from level three.

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 the two, so you can tell if you have written one inside out.

Items are counted at your own level, inside your own list. A three-item list whose second item has four sub-items is “3 items” at level one and “4 items” at level two, never “7”. Two sub-lists under two different bullets are two lists.

QUILL stays quiet:

• As you move down a list. Your reader is already speaking each item.
• On - - - or ***. Those are horizontal rules.
• Inside a fenced code block. A - in a code sample is part of the sample.
• In a plain document. A letter is full of hyphens.
• In rich text. There the bullets belong to the control, and a - you type is a hyphen.

To turn the list cue off, use View > Announce Lists (Ctrl+Alt+F5). It is a separate switch from the heading one, because when you are reorganising an outline you want the levels, and when you are proofreading the same file you may not. QUILL tells you which way it went, “Lists will not be announced” or “Lists announced as you enter them”, and remembers your choice as the announce_lists setting.

The key is Ctrl+Alt+F5 rather than Ctrl+Alt+F4 on purpose: miss the Control key on that one and you have pressed Alt+F4, which closes the window.

Moving through a table cell by cell

Arrowing along a table line tells you the characters but not the shape. QUILL gives tables their own keys, and every move tells you where you are before it tells you what is there.

• Ctrl+Alt+Right and Ctrl+Alt+Left move one cell along the row.
• Ctrl+Alt+Down and Ctrl+Alt+Up move one cell down or up the column.
• Alt+Home and Alt+End jump to the first or last cell of the row.
• Ctrl+Alt+Home and Ctrl+Alt+End jump to the first or last cell of the whole table.

Each move speaks the position and the contents together: “Row 2 of 6, column 3 of 5: Portland”. An empty cell is called “blank”. When there is nowhere to go, QUILL says so and stays put: “No more cells” at the end of a row, “No more rows” at the end of a column, and “No more cells, end of table” (or “No more rows, end of table”) on the very last cell. That way you know whether the row stopped or the whole table did.

When you arrow into a table in the ordinary way, you hear its shape, “Table, 6 rows, 5 columns”, and leaving it says “Out of table”. Outside a table these keys do no harm; QUILL just says “Not in a table”.

This works on Markdown tables you type yourself and on tables QUILL brings in from Word. A .docx table arrives as a real table laid out as Markdown rows, so the same keys and announcements apply. A cell whose text contains a | character stays one cell and does not throw the column count off.

QUILL Quick Nav Mode

Quick Nav is like browse mode on a web page. Single letters move you around a long document, and nothing you press changes the text. It only moves the cursor.

Turning Quick Nav on

There are two ways in:

• Locked Quick Nav, the usual way. Press Ctrl+Shift+Grave twice in a row. The first press starts the QUILL key; the second locks Quick Nav on until you press Esc. QUILL says “QUILL browse mode locked. It stays active until you press Escape.”
• For one move. Press Ctrl+Shift+Grave then N. Quick Nav is on for the next move. If the browse_mode_sticky setting is on, it stays locked until Esc; otherwise it ends when the QUILL key times out.

Quick Nav keys

Once Quick Nav is on, the keys are the same either way:

• H moves to the next heading, and Shift+H to the previous one.
• 1 through 6 move to the next heading at that level, and Shift+1 through Shift+6 to the previous one.
• A and Shift+A move by link.
• L and Shift+L move by list.
• I and Shift+I move by list item.
• T and Shift+T move by table.
• Q and Shift+Q move by block quote.
• B and Shift+B move by bookmark.
• ' and Shift+' move by code block.
• N and Shift+N move by inline note.
• P and Shift+P move by paragraph.
• S and Shift+S move by sentence.
• Tab and Shift+Tab move by block.
• C opens the table of contents (the Outline Navigator).
• . (period) repeats your last move.
• ] jumps to the line after the current list or table, and [ to the line above it.
• Esc leaves Quick Nav.

The key table at the top of this guide and the QUILL key cheat sheet are the up-to-date reference.

A few things to know:

• If there is nothing of that kind to move to, QUILL tells you.
• Find and replace commands take you back to normal editing on their own.
• After each move QUILL tells you where you landed. QUILL browse move detail, in Settings > Navigation and QUILL Key, sets how much it says: Line and column (the default), Line only or Say nothing.
• Preload QUILL browse cache in background, on the same page, is on by default. If you turn it off, QUILL builds the cache the first time you use Quick Nav.

How Quick Nav finds things

QUILL builds a list of the places in the document once, and reuses it until the text or the kind of document changes. That keeps Quick Nav quick on long Markdown and HTML files.

• Headings come from Markdown and HTML headings.
• List items come from Markdown list markers and HTML <li> tags.
• Paragraphs come from blank lines in text and Markdown, and from block tags in HTML.
• Sentences come from sentence-ending punctuation.
• Tables come from Markdown tables and HTML <table> tags.
• Block quotes come from Markdown > lines and HTML <blockquote> tags.
• Code blocks come from Markdown fences and HTML <pre> or <code> tags.
• Bookmarks come from your bookmarks.
• The list is rebuilt after you edit, replace the whole document, or switch tabs.

QUILL key prefix actions

Press the QUILL key (Ctrl+Shift+Grave) once and it waits briefly for a second key:

• N turns on Quick Nav, as described above. Pressing the QUILL key a second time instead locks it on whatever the setting says.
• M pastes web content as Markdown. QUILL reads the rich HTML on the clipboard (the HTML Format copied from web pages and word processors), turns headings, lists, links, bold and italic, code and block quotes into Markdown, and inserts it at the cursor. If there is no rich HTML, the plain text on the clipboard is treated as HTML. A read-only document is never changed.
• A opens selection actions when text is selected.
• F speaks the window title, P speaks the full path of the current file, and Q speaks a short status summary. These are handy when several documents are open and you want to check where you are.
• ? shows the QUILL key cheat sheet, and Esc cancels.

Quick Nav (Landmarks) has a key of its own, Ctrl+Shift+Z, rather than a QUILL key letter. It lists everything in the document you can move to (headings, links, lists, tables, block quotes, bookmarks, code blocks) with a filter that shows how many of each there are. It also lists the document’s misspellings and, while a search is active, the search hits, so you can jump to a misspelled word or a match from the same place.

Quick Nav and QUILL key settings

The Navigation and QUILL Key page in Settings holds the rest of the choices for Quick Nav and the QUILL key:

• Wrap QUILL browse navigation carries on from the other end of the document when there is nothing more in the direction you are moving. On to begin with.
• QUILL browse feedback is how each move is signalled: Speech only (the default), Sound only, Speech and sound or Silent.
• Sticky browse mode keeps Quick Nav on after a move instead of going back to editing.
• QUILL key prefix timeout (seconds) is how long the QUILL key waits for its second key. The default is 2.5 seconds, and 0 means it waits until you press something.
• Browse mode follow-on timeout is how long Quick Nav stays on between moves after you start it with N: Instant, Fast (one and a half seconds), Normal (four seconds), Slow (eight seconds), Custom… or Unlimited, which is the default. With Custom, type your own time in milliseconds in the box that follows it.
• Custom sound for browse mode entry (WAV file), Custom sound for browse mode exit (WAV file), Custom sound for browse navigation (WAV file) and Custom sound for browse not-found (WAV file) replace the four Quick Nav beeps with sounds of your own. Each has a Choose WAV file… button and a Preview button. Leave one blank to keep the beep.
• Include headings in Quick Nav, Include links in Quick Nav and Include lists in Quick Nav decide what the Quick Nav list (Ctrl+Shift+Z) offers. All three are on to begin with.
• Quick Nav debounce (milliseconds) is how long that list waits after you stop typing in its filter before it searches. The default is 250.
• Quick Nav minimum characters is how many letters you type before the filter starts matching, from 1 to 5. The default is 1.

QUILLBee’s tip: Lost in a long document? Press Ctrl+Shift+Grave twice, then H to hop from heading to heading. Esc puts you back to typing.

Bookmarks and marks

Bookmarks

A bookmark is a place you want to come back to, even days later. The commands live together on Navigate > Bookmarks:

• Set Bookmark (Ctrl+Shift+B) drops a bookmark in the next free numbered slot.
• Next Bookmark (F2) and Previous Bookmark (Shift+F2)
• Clear All Bookmarks (Ctrl+Alt+B)
• Set Bookmark 1 to Set Bookmark 9 (Ctrl+Shift+1 to Ctrl+Shift+9), described under Numbered bookmarks below
• Set Named Bookmark…, which asks for a name
• Go To Named Bookmark…
• List Named Bookmarks… (Alt+Shift+G)
• Set Temporary Bookmark (Ctrl+Alt+J)
• Go to Temporary Bookmark (Ctrl+Shift+J)

Bookmarks belong to each document and are kept between sessions. When you reopen a file, its bookmarks are still there. QUILL also remembers your last cursor position in each saved document and puts you back there when you reopen it. A new document that has never been saved keeps its bookmarks only until you close it; save it, and they are kept.

Bookmarks also stay on the right words as you edit. Each one remembers the text around it, so it follows that text even after you add or delete paragraphs above it. If the bookmarked text itself is deleted, the bookmark goes back to the position it remembered. This works for named and numbered bookmarks alike, and you do not have to do anything.

Temporary bookmark

Sometimes you just want to say “right here” and come straight back, with no name and no dialog. That is the temporary bookmark. Both commands are on Navigate > Bookmarks, just under List Named Bookmarks…, and in the command palette:

• Set Temporary Bookmark (Ctrl+Alt+J) sets it at the cursor.
• Go to Temporary Bookmark (Ctrl+Shift+J) jumps back to it.

Set it, move away, jump back. Setting a new one quietly replaces the old one. It is not kept between sessions: it is scratch paper for the work in front of you. Use a named bookmark for anything you want to find next week.

If you used the 0.9.0 betas, the temporary bookmark was on Ctrl+Shift+K and Alt+Shift+K. Those keys now belong to Lower Case and Previous Inline Note.

Numbered bookmarks

Numbered bookmarks give you fixed slots you set with one keystroke, no menu and nothing to type:

• Ctrl+Shift+1 through Ctrl+Shift+9 set the bookmark for that slot at the cursor.
• Ctrl+Shift+B drops a bookmark in the next free slot.
• Ctrl+Alt+B clears them all.

To get back to one, use F2 and Shift+F2, the bookmark list (Alt+Shift+G), or Go To… (Ctrl+G) with Bookmark chosen. They are stored like named bookmarks, under names such as “Quick 3”, so they are kept with the document. Going to a slot you have not set tells you so plainly.

Marks, bookmarks and selecting a block

These three all “mark a spot”, so they are easy to mix up. Here is what each one does.

Bookmarks are named places that are saved. They travel with the file, as described above. Use Set Named Bookmark…, Go To Named Bookmark… and List Named Bookmarks… when you want to name a place and come back to it days later.

The mark ring is a short stack of temporary jump points. It lasts only for the current session and is never saved.

• Set Temporary Mark (Ctrl+Shift+M) drops a point at the cursor. The status bar says “Mark ring point set at line …, column … (temporary jump)”.
• Jump to Previous Mark (Ctrl+M) jumps back to the most recent mark and removes it from the ring.
• Swap Cursor and Mark (Ctrl+Alt+X) moves the cursor to the mark.
• List Recent Marks (Alt+M) shows the marks in the ring.

These commands only move the cursor. They do not select text and they do not copy anything. In some other editors you drop a mark, move away, and cut or copy everything in between. QUILL’s mark is not that. It is a breadcrumb you can jump back to.

To copy or cut from one point to another, select the text. Put the cursor at the start, then either hold Shift while you move to the end (arrows, Ctrl with the arrows, the Page keys, Home and End) or use one of the selection commands below. Then press Ctrl+C to copy or Ctrl+X to cut. There is no separate “copy from the mark to the cursor” command; the selection is what gets copied.

Selecting a block, a line or a paragraph. A block here means the indented block at the cursor: a run of lines at the same indent, like the inside of a list item or a code block. The selection commands are on Edit > Selection:

• Select Line (Ctrl+Shift+E) selects the current line.
• Select Paragraph (Ctrl+Shift+H) selects the paragraph around the cursor.
• Select Block (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+B) selects the indented block at the cursor.
• Select to Start/End of Line and Select to Start/End of Document.
• Expand Selection (Ctrl+Shift+X) grows the selection one step at a time: word, line, paragraph, block, document, telling you the new size each time.

Each one tells you what it selected and how many words, so you know exactly what you have before you copy or delete it.

Favorite folders

Favorite folders are a short list of folders you want to reach quickly. They are different from the recent folders Windows keeps. Recent folders track what you opened lately; favorites track what you actually want to hand. A folder you use all the time but have not touched in months still belongs here.

• Add Current Folder to Favorites (Ctrl+Shift+Grave then Shift+F) adds the current document’s folder. Save the document first if it is new.
• Remove Favorite Folder… (Ctrl+Shift+Grave then Shift+X) lets you choose a favorite to take off the list.
• Open From Favorite Folder… (Ctrl+Shift+Grave then G) opens Quick Open, described next.

All three are on File > Favorite Folders.

Open From Favorite Folder

Open From Favorite Folder… opens a small window with a text box already focused, much like Quick Open in Visual Studio Code.

1. Start typing part of a file name. The list below narrows as you type, across every favorite folder at once, and capital letters do not matter.
2. Arrow to the file you want. Each entry tells you which favorite folder it came from.
3. Press Enter, or choose OK, to open it.

By default QUILL looks only at the files directly inside each favorite folder, not in folders inside them, which keeps the list instant. Check Include subfolders to search every subfolder too. That search stops at a few thousand files, so even a very large folder cannot hang the window.

Folding and inline notes

Code folding

Folding lets you tuck away a heading section or a fenced code block (```…```) so it is out of your way, without ever hiding it from you.

• Toggle Fold (Ctrl+Shift+[) folds or unfolds the smallest region around the cursor and tells you what happened: “Folded: 14 lines under ‘Chapter Two’” or “Unfolded: ‘Chapter Two’.”
• Next Fold (Alt+Shift+]) and Previous Fold (Alt+Shift+[) jump between regions you can fold, folded or not, and tell you the region’s name, whether it is folded, and how many lines it has.
• List Folds (Ctrl+Shift+]) opens a list of every region you can fold, with its state and line count. Pick one to jump to it, or fold and unfold it from there.

In most editors, folding hides lines and the arrow keys skip right over them, so a screen reader user cannot tell whether text was folded or deleted. QUILL never does that. Folding never changes the text, and arrowing by character, word or line works exactly as before. Arrow through a folded region and you will read every word of it. Folding only changes where the jump commands take you.

Inline notes

Inline notes are comments you attach to a line or a selection: a question, a reminder, a note to yourself while you draft, or your thoughts on a plan somebody sent you. They are on Tools > Writing and Language, and you can change any of their keys in the Keymap Editor.

• Add Inline Note… (Alt+Shift+I) attaches a note to the selected text, or to the current line 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. Type the note and choose Save.
• Next Inline Note (Alt+Shift+J) and Previous Inline Note (Alt+Shift+K) move to the next or previous noted text, and QUILL reads the note.
• Speak Inline Note (Alt+Shift+H) reads the note at the cursor. Press it twice quickly to open the note so you can read, change or delete it.
• Delete Inline Note… (Alt+Shift+Delete) deletes the note at the cursor. QUILL reads you the note and asks first, and No is the default.
• List Inline Notes… (Alt+Shift+Enter) shows every note in the document in one list: the note, the line it is on, the text it is about, and whether it is private or in the file. Press Enter to go to a note, Delete to delete one and F2 to edit one. The buttons also let you Remove All notes (QUILL asks first), Copy All of them as plain text, or Export them to a Markdown or JSON file.
• In Quick Nav, N and Shift+N move to the next and previous note too.

Each note remembers the exact text it was placed on, plus a little around it, so it follows that text as you edit. If that text is deleted, the note is kept, not lost: the list shows it last, marked “the text it was on is gone”, so you can read it and remove it. A new document keeps its notes until you close it; save it and they are kept.

Private notes and notes in the file

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

In a Markdown or HTML document you can also write a note into the file. Check Write this note into the file in the Add Inline Note window, and 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 perfectly good Markdown or HTML file. Web pages, GitHub and other programs hide the comment, but anyone who opens the file in a text editor, and any AI assistant you hand the file to, can read your note. That makes it the way to review a plan an AI assistant wrote: read it, leave your notes in the file, and give the file back. Because a note in the file is part of the text, Ctrl+Z takes back adding, changing or deleting one.

The check box remembers your last choice for each document. To start every new note in the file, turn on Write new inline notes into the file (the inline_notes_in_file setting) on the Editing page in Settings. It is off unless you change it.

Notes on the command line

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

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

The exit code tells a script what happened: 0 means done (or, for check, no notes left), 3 means check found notes still in the file, 1 means the file could not be read or written, and 2 means the command was mistyped. Private notes are never shown here; they stay yours.

Working in code

Code-aware editing

When you open a source file, QUILL loads a language profile based on the file extension. It knows HTML, Markdown, CSS, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, C, C++, C#, PHP, Go, Rust, Kotlin, Shell, YAML, JSON, TOML and SQL, and treats anything else as plain text. The profile tells QUILL how the language is put together, so moving and announcements make sense for code.

• Next Token and Previous Token, on the Navigate menu, move by code token instead of by word. You land on the next name, keyword, operator or value, which is much easier to follow by ear than moving by character or word.
• Token movement goes well with the optional indentation tones described under Sound notifications and earcons, so you hear the structure as pitch while you move.

Setting the document language

QUILL normally goes by the file extension, but you can set the language yourself for the current document. That helps with an unsaved document, an unusual extension, or code you pasted into a plain .txt file. You get the whole of that language’s editing support:

• Bold and Italic insert the right markup (<strong>/<em> for HTML, **...**/*...* for Markdown).
• The heading, table, list, and tag menu items become available for HTML and Markdown.
• Toggle Line/Block Comment uses the language’s comment style (#, //, <!-- -->, -- ).
• Heading and structure navigation, the outline, link insertion and live preview all follow the language you chose.

There are three ways to set it, and they all do the same thing:

• Key: Ctrl+Alt+F6 opens the language picker. Type to find a language; the current one is already selected.
• Menus: Navigate > Set Document Language… opens the same picker. Format > Document Language is a checkable list where you can switch with one key press and hear which language is active.
• Status bar: the Language part shows the current language, with (set) after it when you chose it yourself. Press Enter on it to open the picker.

Choose Auto-detect from file to go back to following the file name. Setting a language never renames the file. If you set HTML on a .txt file, QUILL reminds you to use Save As to save it as .html. The choice applies to the current tab and is forgotten when you close the file.

Automatic language detection

QUILL can guess the language when you paste or type code into a plain .txt or new document. This is off by default. Turn it on in Settings > Editing > Auto-detect document language, which has four choices:

• Off: never guess. This is the default.
• Hint in the status bar only: the status bar quietly shows something like “Looks like HTML”. Nothing changes and nothing is spoken.
• Suggest and announce, you confirm: QUILL tells you which language it thinks this is (“This looks like HTML”) and you decide whether to set it.
• Switch automatically: QUILL sets the language and tells you.

QUILL waits a moment after you stop typing or pasting, then looks at the first several thousand characters. It is careful: it only acts when it is confident, never guesses on ordinary prose, and never overrides a real file extension or a language you set yourself. It also learns a little from the languages you use during a session. In every mode you either stay in control or hear what changed. Braille files and pasted braille are not affected, because braille has its own Braille Mode.

Abbreviation expansion

If you write HTML or CSS, three commands on the Edit menu turn short Emmet-style abbreviations into full markup. You can type ul>li.item$*3>a[href]{Item $} instead of a whole three-item list.

• Expand Abbreviation expands the selection, or, with nothing selected, the word just before the cursor. It is one undo step, so one Undo puts it all back.
• Preview Abbreviation… asks for an abbreviation (filled in from your selection, if you have one) and shows the result in a new tab without touching your document. It is a safe way to try something.
• Explain Abbreviation… gives you a plain, indented breakdown of what an abbreviation means (tag, id, classes, attributes and how many times it repeats) before you expand it. It is the quickest way to learn the grammar by ear.

The usual Emmet operators work: child (>), sibling (+), climb-up (^), grouping ((...)), multiplication (*N) and numbering ($, with $$ for zero-padded numbers). So do ids (#id), classes (.a.b), attributes ([attr="value" bool-attr]) and text ({...}). Common tags get sensible attributes if you leave them out: a gets an empty href, and img gets src and alt. Elements like br and img never get a closing tag.

Some ready-made snippets expand as they are:

• ! gives a full HTML5 page.
• !a11y gives an HTML5 page with a skip link and header/main/footer landmarks in place.
• skiplink gives just the skip link.
• form:a11y gives a labeled form field inside a fieldset.
• table:a11y gives a table with a caption and properly scoped header cells.

When the document is a .css file, all three commands work with CSS shorthand instead, such as d:f for display: flex;, pos:a for position: absolute;, m10-20 for margin: 10px 20px; and mt-10 for margin-top: -10px;.

If QUILL cannot make sense of an abbreviation, the status bar tells you what it expected and where.

Quill Eraser

Quill Eraser (Tools > Writing & Language > Quill Eraser…) tidies the small mechanical slips in your text: extra spaces, spaces at the ends of lines, a missing space after punctuation, too many blank lines, and sentences that start with a small letter. It offers a fix for each one. It follows fixed rules, so there is no AI and nothing goes over the network.

To check only part of the document, select it and use Quill Eraser on Selection…. If nothing is selected, it offers to check the whole document.

What Quill Eraser checks

Each finding comes with a confidence level (High, Medium or Low) so you can decide what to fix first.

Quill Eraser leaves web addresses, email addresses, file paths, code, decimal numbers and times alone. In a Markdown file it also skips fenced code blocks, inline code, front matter and link addresses.

Code files

If you run Quill Eraser on a code file (.py, .js, .ts, .html and so on), it asks first. You can check only for spaces at the ends of lines, which is safe in code, or skip the check. The prose rules are never used on code files.

The review dialog

When Quill Eraser finds something, it opens a review window that stays open while you keep working in the editor.

• The findings list shows each issue in order: confidence, type and line number.
• Select a finding and the pane below tells you what was found, what the fix is, and what it means in plain English.
• Apply Fix makes the fix and moves on to the next issue.
• Ignore hides the finding for this session without changing anything.
• Go to Issue takes you to the exact place in the editor with the text selected, so you can decide for yourself.
• Previous / Next move through the list.
• Rescan checks again after you have made changes by hand.
• Close closes the window.

QUILL tells you the result of every action.

Quill Eraser settings

Four settings at the end of the Spelling page in Settings (Ctrl+,) control Quill Eraser. Each one’s name starts with “Quill Eraser”, so typing eraser in Find a setting lists all four:

The rule IDs you can put in the disabled list are prose.multiple_spaces, prose.trailing_spaces, prose.space_before_punctuation, prose.excessive_blank_lines, prose.missing_space_after_sentence_punct, prose.missing_space_after_comma and prose.lowercase_sentence_start.

What you learned, and where to go next

You can now find text in one document or many, jump by line, page, heading or bookmark with Ctrl+G, and get back with Alt+Left. You know what QUILL says about headings, lists and tables, how Quick Nav moves you with single letters, and the difference between bookmarks, marks and a selection. Favorite folders, folding, inline notes, the code tools and Quill Eraser are there when you want them.

To practise with QUILL guiding you, open Help > Tutorials… (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and try “Get around a long document”, “Find, replace, and search across files”, “Select, mark, and move text”, “Tables, by ear” and “Quick Nav: single-letter movement”. On the website, Own the keyboard covers much of the same ground.

Next, Chapter 7, Spelling and words, shows you how to check spelling and find the right word.

Chapter 7: Spelling and words

This chapter is about getting the words right. You will check spelling a whole document at a time or one word at a time, hear exactly how a misspelled word is spelled, find a better word in the thesaurus, look up what a word means, and count what you have written. Near the end you will also find how to quieten QUILL’s sounds, or choose new ones. Everything here works on your own computer, with no AI and no internet connection, unless you choose otherwise. AI spelling and grammar help is in Chapter 10, AI, when you want it.

Spelling

QUILL checks spelling on your own computer. Nothing you write is uploaded, and no AI provider is involved. The everyday commands are on the Tools menu:

• Spell Check… (F7) opens the Spelling Review, which walks you through every misspelling.
• Spell Check Word (Alt+Shift+F7) checks only the word you are on.
• Next Misspelling (Ctrl+F7) moves straight to the next one in the document, and Ctrl+Shift+F7 goes back to the previous one.

Spelling Review (F7)

Press F7 to start a guided spelling review.

• What it checks. If you have text selected, QUILL checks only the selection. With nothing selected, it reviews the whole document, starting at your caret.
• Where you land. The Spelling Review dialog opens with focus in a read-only Context field. The misspelled word is selected inside its sentence, so you hear it in context. You can arrow through it letter by letter or copy the text, just as you would in a read-only document.

The controls, in Tab order, are: Context, Change to, Suggestions, the Review most-frequent words first checkbox, then the buttons Change, Change All, Ignore Once, Ignore All, Read Sentence, Add to Dictionary, Undo Last and Close.

• Suggestions lists the corrections QUILL has for the word. Arrow through them; choosing one fills Change to for you.
• Change replaces this occurrence and moves to the next problem. Pressing Enter in the Change to field does the same.
• Change All replaces every remaining occurrence in the part you are checking, and keeps the capitals as they were (teh becomes the, Teh becomes The, TEH becomes THE).
• Ignore Once skips this occurrence. Ignore All skips every occurrence, for this session only.
• Add to Dictionary adds the word to your personal dictionary for good.
• Undo Last takes back your last spelling action without closing the dialog. It is unavailable until you have done something.
• Read Sentence (Ctrl+R) reads aloud the whole sentence around the misspelling, so you can hear the word in context without leaving the dialog. The Read Sentence button does the same thing.
• Alt+W takes you back to Context and selects the current word again, at any point. It is handy after you have been arrowing around the context.

When every problem has been dealt with, QUILL tells you how many words were changed, ignored and added to the dictionary, and puts you back in the document.

Review most-frequent words first

Normally the review goes from top to bottom. Check Review most-frequent words first in the dialog and it walks the misspellings by how often each word turns up instead, with the most common first. It is the same dialog and the same buttons (Change, Change All, Ignore Once, Ignore All, Add to Dictionary, Undo Last); only the order changes.

This is for really messy documents: a rough scan that came through OCR, or a document with one mistake repeated many times. Press Change All on the top word and the order is worked out again straight away, so whatever is now most common among what is left comes to the front. You clear the worst offenders first, without hunting for them in reading order. QUILL remembers the checkbox for next time.

How much the review says

Spelling review announcement verbosity, on the Spelling page of Settings, chooses how much the review tells you:

• Concise: progress numbers and the result of each action, and nothing else.
• Balanced (the default): the kind of problem, the current word, your progress and the results.
• Detailed: all of that, plus hints about the controls and reminders of what you are checking.

Four more settings on the same page belong to the review:

• Spelling review context display mode: the Context box usually shows the sentence with the misspelling plus the sentences either side. Choose Full paragraph to see the whole paragraph instead; Read Sentence then reads the paragraph.

• Spell out the misspelled word letter by letter: after telling you the misspelling, QUILL reads it letter by letter. On to begin with.

• Pause before spelling the word (milliseconds) is how long it waits before spelling starts, from 100 to 3000. The default is 800.

• Wrap spelling review to the beginning: when the review reaches the end of the document, it offers to carry on from the top back to where you started. On to begin with.

Spell Check Word (Alt+Shift+F7)

If you are used to checking just the word under the cursor in another word processor, Spell Check Word (Alt+Shift+F7) is that. It checks only the word at your cursor and leaves the rest of the document alone.

• If the word is spelled correctly, QUILL says so and that is all. No dialog opens.
• If it is misspelled, a small list opens with the same choices as the right-click spelling menu: suggested corrections, Add to Dictionary and Ignore. Pick one and you are back to typing.

Use F7 when you want to work through a whole document or selection. Use Alt+Shift+F7 when you only want to check the one word in front of you.

Moving between misspellings

Sometimes you would rather stay in the document and hop from one problem to the next. Ctrl+F7 moves to the next misspelling and Ctrl+Shift+F7 to the previous one. When you land on one, QUILL says the word and then spells it (see How a misspelling is said, later in this chapter).

QUILLBee’s shortcut: Coming from Word? Alt+F7 also jumps to the next misspelling, just as it does there.

To hear them all in one place, open the Misspelling List (Alt+Shift+L). It lists every misspelling in document order. Arrow through it and press Enter to jump to any one.

Ranked spelling

Tools > Misspelling List (Ranked by Frequency)… (Alt+Shift+R) shows the same list in a different order. The word that turns up most often comes first, and each entry carries its count, for example “teh (Ln 12, Col 4, 8 occurrences).”

A repeated typo or a single OCR misreading is usually the quickest thing to fix first. Deal with one entry, by correcting it or with Add to Dictionary, and you have dealt with every occurrence of that word at once. Arrow through the list and press Enter to jump to any occurrence, exactly as in the regular list. The document-order list on Alt+Shift+L stays as it was, and it is still the default.

Spell check as you type

With spell check as you type turned on, finishing a word the dictionary does not know plays a soft spelling sound, and the status line shows “Possible misspelling” with the word. The sound comes from your current sound pack; if the pack has no spelling sound, you hear the Windows beep instead. QUILL uses a sound here, not speech, so it never talks over your screen reader in the middle of a sentence.

The check waits until you have finished a word, with a space, a comma or a new line. It does not judge a word you are still typing, so “recie” on the way to “receive” never sets it off.

Some places are full of things that look like misspellings, so the live check stays quiet there: web addresses, email addresses, Markdown inline code (between backticks) and fenced code blocks. The F7 review still covers the whole document; only the alert as you type skips them.

You can switch the spelling sound on or off by itself in Tools > Sound Scheme (look for “Possible misspelling as you type”). The spell check as you type toggle turns the whole live check on or off.

Quiet in code files

In source and configuration files the live check says nothing at all. That covers .py, .json, .js, .css, .ps1, .log, .yml and the other coding file types. Almost every name and setting in a file like that is a word no dictionary knows, so you would hear nothing but wrong alerts.

Markdown is writing, so .md files are checked. Only the code blocks, inline code, web addresses and email addresses inside them are skipped.

The setting is spellcheck_skip_code_files, and it is on by default. Turn it off if you want the live check everywhere, whatever the file type.

F7 is never affected. The Spelling Review checks whatever document you run it on, a code file included. Pressing F7 is you asking for a check.

Spell check a document before saving

Turn on Settings > Editing > Spell check a document before saving (off by default) and QUILL opens the Spelling Review for you each time you save, so you can fix misspellings before the file is written. Fix or skip them as usual; the save then goes ahead with your corrections. This applies to Save and Save As for the document you are working on.

Spell-check language

Tools > Spell Check Language… chooses the language the spell checker uses. It affects both the F7 review and the check as you type.

English (United States) is built in and works offline straight away. Other languages are downloaded when you first choose them. Pick Spanish (Spain) or French (France), for example, and QUILL fetches that dictionary from its own verified source. The download is checksum-checked, and a progress window lets you cancel it. After that the language works offline, just like English.

QUILL remembers your choice between sessions. If you are offline, or you cancel the download, English keeps working and nothing else changes. The downloaded dictionaries are kept in your QUILL data folder, so reinstalling or upgrading QUILL never makes you fetch them again.

How a misspelling is said

Speech alone cannot tell you what is wrong with a misspelled word. “receive” and “recieve” sound the same, so hearing the word tells you nothing. The letters are the answer. So when you land on a misspelling, with Next or Previous Misspelling or in the F7 review, QUILL says the word, pauses, and then spells it.

The spelling comes as a second, separate announcement, so you can cut it off. Press your next key and the spelling is cancelled before you hear it. If you are moving fast you lose nothing, and if you want the letters they are there.

Twelve settings under Spelling in Settings control all of this. Both editors also gather them in a window of their own. In QUILL it is Spelling Announcements, on Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F6, or type its name in the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P). In QUILL Lite it is Tools > Spelling > Announcements. They are the same twelve settings in the same file, so setting them up once sets up both editors.

While you are typing

• Play a sound when you type a misspelling (spelling_alert_sound) plays the falling blip when you finish a misspelled word. Turn it off for silence.
• Also say the word when you type a misspelling (spelling_alert_speech) speaks the word as well. It is off by default, because being interrupted while you are writing costs more than it tells you.
• Shortest gap between two alerts for the same word (milliseconds) (spelling_alert_repeat_ms) is the shortest time before the same word is reported again, so one stubborn name does not become a drumbeat. Zero means every time. The default is 750.

Whichever way you set those two, the status bar always shows the word, for example “Possible misspelling: teest”, so you can read it with your screen reader whenever you like. QUILL does not speak that status line on its own; it is spoken only when Also say the word when you type a misspelling is on, which is what the setting means in QUILL Lite too.

Spelling a word out

• Spell misspelled words out letter by letter (spell_aloud_enabled) is the main switch.
• How letters are spoken (spell_aloud_style) chooses how the letters are said. Plain Letters (R, E, C) are fastest. The Phonetic alphabet (romeo, echo, charlie) is clear where B, D, E, P, T and V all sound alike. Letters, then the phonetic alphabet is for learning a word rather than checking one.
• Say which letters are capitals (spell_aloud_capitals) says “cap” before a capital letter, so you can tell MacDonald from Macdonald. It is worth having, because letters are always spoken as capitals, whatever the word does (several voices read a single lower-case letter as a word).

When the letters follow

There are three pauses, because the right wait is different in each place.

• Pause before spelling a word (milliseconds) (spell_aloud_delay_ms) is the pause in the F7 review, where you have stopped to decide. The default is 800 ms.
• Spell the word when you move to a misspelling (spell_aloud_on_navigation) and Pause before spelling when moving between misspellings (milliseconds) (spell_aloud_navigation_delay_ms) cover Next and Previous Misspelling. There you may just be passing through, so the default pause is shorter, 600 ms.
• Spell each suggestion as you arrow through them (spell_aloud_suggestions) and Pause before spelling a suggestion (milliseconds) (spell_aloud_suggestion_delay_ms) spell whichever correction you arrow onto in the suggestions. Choosing between two spellings by ear is as hard in a list as it is in the document.
• Spell the first suggestion on arrival (spell_aloud_first_suggestion) also spells the top suggestion when the review reaches a new word. It is off by default, because it doubles what you hear each time you arrive.

The thesaurus, Look Up and other word tools

The rest of the writing and language commands on the Tools menu are about words themselves: finding a better one, finding out what one means, and counting them. Chapter 4, Writing and editing, gives a short introduction; this is the fuller story.

Thesaurus (Shift+F7)

Tools > Thesaurus… (Shift+F7) opens a two-pane picker for the word you are on. It finds the word even when it is in another form, so “running” finds “run”, and when you choose a replacement it goes back in the form your sentence needs.

Look Up Word (Alt+F10)

Look Up Word… (Alt+F10) is a dictionary with no AI. Out of the box it uses the thesaurus, which works offline. Check Use online sources in the window and it also brings definitions, more words, and a Wikipedia summary from three free online services. Nothing goes online until you check that box.

Say Word Summary and Dictionary Status

• Say Word Summary (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+[) says what the thesaurus knows about the word you are on, without opening a window.
• Dictionary Status… (Alt+Shift+;) shows which spelling engine QUILL is using, how many words are in your personal, document and project dictionaries, and whether the thesaurus is installed.

Document Statistics (Ctrl+Shift+G)

Tools > Document Statistics… (Ctrl+Shift+G) gives you the number of words, characters, lines and paragraphs, and the reading time. It used to be called Word Count. It now has the same name and key as in Word and QUILL Lite.

Sounds, and turning them off

QUILL plays short sounds, called earcons, for things your screen reader does not mention, like a misspelling or a paste. Here is how to silence them all at once, change one, or build a set of your own.

Quiet mode

Alt+Shift+M silences every sound at once. Press it again to bring them back. It is one key so you can reach it while the noise is happening: on a call, in a quiet room, or when you have simply heard enough for today. The setting is shared with QUILL Lite, so silencing one editor silences both.

The Sound Scheme window

Tools > Reading and Dictation > Sound Scheme… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+O) lists every sound QUILL can make, and lets you hear them.

As you arrow through the list, each event plays as you land on it. That turns a list of about a hundred and forty sound names into something you can browse by ear. It is a checkbox under the list, so if you are hunting for one row you can turn it off and pass the rest in silence.

Each row tells you everything about itself: its group, the event, whether it is switched on, which file it plays and how long that file is. Your screen reader reads it all as you arrive, so you never have to Tab away to find out. The buttons underneath work on the row you are on:

QUILL refuses a file that is not a WAV, is longer than ten seconds, or is bigger than two megabytes, and tells you why when you choose it. Better to hear about it then than to have the event go silent later with no clue why.

• Save As Scheme saves the whole set under a name you choose, as an ordinary folder with the sounds copied into it. It keeps working after you tidy your Downloads folder, and you can zip it up and send it to a friend.
• Delete Scheme removes one of your own schemes. The schemes that come with QUILL cannot be deleted.
• Restore All Defaults puts every event back and switches them all on. It always works completely, because QUILL never overwrites the sounds it ships.

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

The sounds themselves

The Ink pack that comes with QUILL has a sound for every event. That includes the ones desktop programs have had for decades: open, close, cut, copy, paste, delete, undo, redo, print, information, question and task finished. Those are the moments a screen reader says nothing about; nothing is announced when a paste lands, for example.

Related sounds share a tone and differ by direction, so you learn a family once instead of one sound at a time.

• Undo and redo are the same figure, played backwards from each other.
• Open and close are one pair of bells, rising and falling. App start and app exit are the same pair, one note longer.
• Cut, copy and paste are one dry wooden tick in three gestures. Delete is that tick dropped an octave and a half, with a breath of noise underneath.
• Nothing to undo does not move in pitch at all, because nothing moved.

Starting with a blank document, or not

When you start QUILL without opening anything, it gives you an empty Untitled document, as most editors do. If you always open an existing file and would rather not close a blank one every time, turn off open_blank_document_at_startup, under General in Settings.

Turning it off changes only that one case. A file you double-clicked, a file named on the command line, the documents from your last session and recovered unsaved work all still open. QUILL Lite has the same setting, with the same name, in Preferences.

Spelling keys at a glance

These work straight from the document, without opening a dialog first.

Add Word to Dictionary (Ctrl+Alt+F9) teaches your personal dictionary the word at the cursor, so a name or a word from your work stops being called a misspelling, in this document and every other. If the word is already there, QUILL tells you and changes nothing.

What you learned, and where to go next

You can now check a whole document with F7, or one word with Alt+Shift+F7, and hop between misspellings with Ctrl+F7. You know how to put the most common mistakes first, how QUILL spells a word out and how to tune that, and how to pick a spell-check language. You met the thesaurus, Look Up Word and Document Statistics, and you can silence QUILL’s sounds with Alt+Shift+M or change them in the Sound Scheme window.

To practise with QUILL open, try the lesson “Spelling, words, and the thesaurus” in Help > Tutorials… (Ctrl+Alt+F1).

Next, Chapter 8, Reading, reviewing and listening, shows you how to have your work read back to you and how to check a document before you share it.

Chapter 8: Reading, reviewing and listening

This chapter is about taking things in rather than typing them. You will have QUILL read your document to you, look closely at text you did not write, see the formatting that normally stays hidden, and compare two versions of a file. Later on it covers turning documents into audiobooks, and keeping your place in everything you listen to. Start with Read Aloud. The rest is there when you need it.

Read Aloud

Read Aloud speaks your document in a voice of your choosing, separate from your screen reader. It is handy for proofreading by ear, for resting your ears from a fast screen reader voice, or for simply listening to a long piece. You can start, pause, stop, preview, and choose a voice.

Starting and stopping

Everything for listening lives on Tools > Reading and Dictation:

• Read Aloud is a submenu:
  • Start / Pause (press the QUILL key, then R) starts reading from the cursor, and pauses or carries on when you press it again.
  • Voice… and Settings… choose the voice and how fast, how loud and how high it speaks.
  • Generate Audio… saves the reading as a sound file instead of playing it, described below.
  • Announcement Backend… chooses how QUILL’s own short messages reach you: automatically, through your screen reader, or on the status bar only.
  • Announcement Trace (in Settings)… opens Settings at the switch that keeps a record of QUILL’s announcements. It is only useful when support asks you for it, and it never records your document.
• Stop Reading (press the QUILL key, then Shift+R) stops the current reading straight away.
• Say Selected (Ctrl+Shift+Y) reads the text you have selected.
• Read All (Alt+F8) reads from the cursor to the end of the document.
• OCR Image…, OCR Clipboard Image and OCR Screen Capture… turn a picture of text into text you can read. There is more on them under OCR Image, later in this chapter.

Generate Audio… makes a recording of your document in your Read Aloud voice. It uses the selection if you have one, and the whole document if you do not. Choose a name and a type in the save window: a Wave file always, and MP3, M4A, M4B audiobook, OGG, Opus or FLAC as well when the free ffmpeg tool is on your computer. Making audio from your documents, later in this chapter, covers the bigger jobs.

There is one setting worth knowing about. Move cursor to follow Read Aloud (in Settings > Read Aloud) makes the cursor select each sentence as it is read, so the caret tracks what you hear and stops where the reading stopped. It is off by default. With a screen reader running, moving the selection makes the screen reader say “selected” over the Read Aloud voice. If you are sighted or have low vision and want the cursor to follow along, turn it on.

The rest of the Read Aloud page in Settings tunes the voice:

• Read Aloud engine chooses which speech engine reads. Choosing a voice, below, explains them.
• Read Aloud rate is the speed of the Windows voice in words per minute, from 80 to 450. The default is 200.
• Read Aloud volume runs from 0 to 100. The default is 100.
• Read Aloud pitch runs from 0 to 100. The default is 50.
• Read Aloud sentence pause (milliseconds) adds a pause between sentences, up to two seconds. The default is no extra pause.
• ElevenLabs Read Aloud voice and ElevenLabs Read Aloud model are used when the engine is ElevenLabs. Pick a voice in the Voice Browser rather than typing one; left blank, ElevenLabs uses its default voice and model.
• AI Voice provider, AI Voice model and AI Voice choose the cloud voice used by Read Aloud with AI Voice and by audio export: OpenAI (the default), Google Gemini, or ElevenLabs (export only). Leave the model and voice on Provider default unless you have a favourite.

Choosing a voice

Read Aloud uses voices on your own computer. The Windows system voice runs on SAPI 5. It is always there, works offline and needs no download, so Read Aloud works the moment QUILL is installed. DECtalk, eSpeak NG, Piper, and Kokoro (neural, offline) are extra downloads from Speech Center, which keeps the installer smaller. Before any download starts, QUILL tells you what is available right now and what it suggests you do next. For cloud voices, see Read Aloud with AI Voice, which covers OpenAI and Google Gemini voices.

The Kokoro voice models (about 120 MB), the classic DECtalk runtime (about 2 MB), and the eSpeak NG engine with its voice data (about 40 MB) are not in the installer. The first time you choose one of these voices, QUILL downloads it for you from its own verified source. The download is checksum-checked and has a progress window you can cancel. Your other voices, including the SAPI 5 system voice, keep working while it downloads. If you are upgrading from a version that bundled these, your existing copies are kept and keep working, so there is nothing to download.

Manage Voices is the Speech (Offline) tab of the Speech Settings dialog. It lists SAPI 5, DECtalk, Piper, Kokoro, and eSpeak NG. ElevenLabs, the only cloud voice, has its own Speech (Online) tab, so local and cloud voices are never mixed in one list. The Set as Default button (also on the voice list’s right-click menu) applies your engine and voice choice at once, without closing the dialog with OK.

To hear a voice before you choose it:

1. In Manage Voices, select the voice.
2. Press the Preview button.

If the voice is already downloaded, QUILL speaks the preview phrase with that voice’s real model. If it is not downloaded yet (a Kokoro voice, for example), QUILL plays a short pre-recorded sample so you can still hear it before you decide. The rate, volume, pitch, and speed controls only apply to real speech, so they stay dimmed until the voice is downloaded.

Starting a new preview stops the one already playing, so previews never overlap. Some neural voices take a moment to get going. While they do, QUILL plays a short earcon and, by default, says “Generating preview, please wait”. You can turn either off on its own: the earcon in Tools > Reading and Dictation > Sound Scheme…, and the announcement in Settings > Accessibility and Announcements. While a preview is generating or playing, the Preview/Test button becomes a Stop button, so you can cancel it at any time.

Voices in other languages

Read Aloud speaks more than English. The Windows engine lists every voice installed on your PC, in any language. Add one in Windows Settings under Time & language > Speech > Manage voices (Italian’s Elsa, say, or a Spanish, French, German, or Japanese voice) and it appears in QUILL’s voice list, ready to use, with nothing to download from QUILL.

The offline neural voices go further too:

• Kokoro includes Spanish, French, Hindi, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese voices. They are part of the voice pack you already downloaded, so picking one just works.
• The Piper catalog includes Italian voices (Paola and Riccardo) that you download like any other.
• eSpeak NG offers those languages from its built-in data.

Pick the voice whose language matches your document, and Read Aloud, audiobook export, and batch speech all speak it correctly.

Text cleanup for speech

Real documents are full of typography that trips up speech engines. The optional text cleanup pass (turn it on in Read Aloud settings) fixes curly quotes, em and en dashes, ellipses, invisible spaces, ligatures, bullets, symbols, fractions, and emoji, the same way every time. It also speaks phone numbers, emails, and URLs clearly. For each type you choose whether to announce it, speak it, or speak it and then repeat it, which makes an address easy to catch. Cleanup runs first, before anything else, so live Read Aloud and batch export sound the same.

Teaching QUILL how to say a word

Tools > Speech > Manage Pronunciations… teaches QUILL how to say particular words: names, brands, acronyms, and technical terms. Each entry is a substitution, either literal or a regular expression, and can be case-sensitive. QUILL applies it silently to the text just before speaking, so a correction is heard everywhere speech happens, in batch export and live Read Aloud alike.

• A dictionary can be global (all projects) or belong to one project.
• An entry can target a specific engine.
• You can preview an entry to hear the result.
• A small starter dictionary already covers common terms.

SSML Builder and SSML playback

For fine control over how a passage is spoken, the SSML Builder dialog writes <speak> markup for you from ordinary controls: emphasis, pauses (<break>), say-as, phonemes, and prosody. A read-only preview shows the markup it made, so you never type the tags yourself. Read Aloud plays this markup natively on SAPI 5 and eSpeak NG, so the pauses and emphasis happen instead of being read out.

Read Document in Browser (experimental)

Your web browser has voices QUILL’s own engines cannot reach, including Microsoft Edge’s “Online (Natural)” voices. This optional feature reads your document with them.

To turn it on:

1. Open Settings > Experimental.
2. Check the acknowledgement box.
3. Turn on Read the document aloud in your browser.
4. Apply Settings. It works straight away, with no restart.

A Read in Browser (Experimental) item then appears under Tools > Reading & Dictation > Read Aloud, and the command palette gains Read Document in Browser (Experimental).

When you use it, QUILL writes a self-contained, accessible reader page and opens it in the browser you chose under Settings > General > Preview browser. The page has:

• a labelled Voice picker. Each voice is marked “on this device” or “online”, and the list is filtered to your QUILL display language. Check Show all languages to see the rest.
• a Speed slider.
• Play and Stop buttons.

Focus lands on Play, changes are announced through a live region, and Escape stops. Reading goes section by section, so even a book-length document stays reliable. Pause keeps your place and tells you where you are (“Paused at section 12 of 300”), and resuming carries on from that section. Stop goes back to the top. Your voice and speed are remembered between sessions, and the document text carries your display-language tag so a screen reader reading the page pronounces it correctly.

About privacy: QUILL itself makes no network call, and no audio file is made. Voices marked “on this device” speak locally. The browser’s “Online (Natural)” voices are made in the voice company’s cloud, so choosing one sends the text being read to that service. Pick an on-device voice to keep everything local. The reader page holds your document text. It is written to QUILL’s app-data folder and deleted when you close QUILL, so no plain copy is left behind.

Voice commands on the same menu

The Speech menus also hold QUILL’s voice commands. They are listed here so you know what they are when you meet them. Chapter 9, Dictation and transcription, covers them properly.

• Voice Command (Offline) (Tools > Speech) is push-to-talk for QUILL. Run it, speak one command such as “save file”, “word count” or “next heading”, then run it again to stop and act. Recognition happens entirely on your computer with the offline speech engine, and only a safe list of non-destructive commands can ever run, so a misheard phrase cannot do damage. Say “cancel” or “never mind” to give up. Turn it on with the Voice commands (push-to-talk) setting. It is off by default and always off in Safe Mode.
• Voice Conversation Mode (Tools > Speech) is the hands-free version. Run it once and QUILL listens for a command, then keeps a short follow-up window open after acting, so you can chain commands (“next heading”, then “read aloud”, then “word count”) without arming it again. A sound marks every state: a rising chime when conversation mode starts, a soft two-note when the microphone opens, a gentle rise when your command is recognized (with a brief moment to say “cancel” before it runs), a sparkle when the action finishes, a quiet tick while QUILL is working, and a calm falling tone if nothing matched. Run it again, or say “stop”, to turn it off. The nine cues are Sound Events you can retune or replace in any sound pack. Four settings let you pace it to your own rhythm: the pause that ends a command, the cancel window, the follow-up window, and the “still working” tick interval. Set any of them to 0 to switch that part off. It uses the same on-device recognition and the same safe list as Voice Command, and is also off in Safe Mode.
• Listen for Hey QUILL (Tools > Speech) turns on always-listening. QUILL listens continuously, on your computer, for the phrase “Hey QUILL”. Say “Hey QUILL, save file” to run a command straight away, or just “Hey QUILL” to start one. The status bar shows that the microphone is live and plays a reminder now and then, so an open microphone never takes you by surprise. Run the command again, or say “stop”, to end it. The Listen for ‘Hey QUILL’ (wake word) check box on the Transcription page of Settings is the same switch, so turning it on in either place turns it on in both; check it and press OK, and QUILL starts listening straight away. If voice commands are off, QUILL tells you and leaves the box unchecked. Normally listening stops when you close QUILL, so the microphone is never on by surprise the next time. Turn on Keep listening for “Hey QUILL” across restarts and QUILL picks up listening again when it starts. Off in Safe Mode.
• Speak Voice Status (Tools > Speech) tells you what the voice features are doing right now: whether QUILL is listening for “Hey QUILL”, whether conversation mode is on, and whether it is listening for a command. When none of them is, it says “Voice is not listening right now”, which is the quick way to be sure the microphone is closed.
• Ask a question by voice. In conversation or wake mode, if you speak a question rather than a command (starting with “ask”, or shaped like a question, such as “how do I save my document”), QUILL opens Ask QUILL with the question filled in and ready to send. You press Enter to send it, so a person always decides what reaches the AI. This needs AI set up. Questions are the only thing voice ever sends to a network service, and never on their own.

For the complete reference (every voice mode, every spoken command, and the privacy rules) see Voice Interaction.

Tools for Reading, Review, and Inspection

These tools help when a file is hard to read, or when you need to know exactly what is in it. They answer questions like “which kind of space is that?”, “where does the bold end?” and “did this scan come through properly?”

Describe Character at Cursor

Some characters sound the same but are not: a curly “smart” quote and a straight apostrophe, a no-break space and an ordinary space, an invisible zero-width space that quietly breaks a search, or a stray byte-order mark pasted from the web. Tools > Advanced > Describe Character at Cursor (Ctrl+Shift+C) tells you exactly what sits under the cursor. It says the answer where you are and leaves it in the status bar, so you can read it again.

When you want to study a character, Character Details (Ctrl+Alt+C) opens the full description in a read-only window, the same kind F1 help uses, so your screen reader can read it all in one pass or line by line. It gives:

• the character’s name (for example “No-break space” or “Right single quotation mark”),
• its Unicode code point in both hexadecimal and decimal,
• its category in plain words (uppercase letter, dash punctuation, control character, and so on), and
• a note for the invisible characters that are easy to miss, plus a flag when the character is not ASCII.

If the cursor is at the very end of the document, it tells you so instead of guessing.

Reveal Codes (Alt+F3)

QUILL keeps formatting codes hidden, so your editing text stays clean and fast. Reveal Codes lets you see and hear every one of them when you ask. If you used WordPerfect, you will know it: this is the same idea, built for a screen reader.

Press Alt+F3 (or check View > Reveal Codes) to open a pane below the editor. It shows your document as an ordered stream of bracketed codes and text: [Bold On], [Font: Arial], [Size: 14], [Center], [Heading 2], [Link: ...], [Tab], [¶ Hard Return], [No-Break Space], [Smart Quote], and so on. The editor itself does not change. Reveal Codes is a window onto the hidden formatting, not a different way of editing.

Reveal Codes is hidden by default and costs nothing until you open it.

QUILLBee’s tip: Not sure whether a word is really bold, or where the bold stops? Press Alt+F3, arrow to it, and you will hear “bold on” right where it starts. Press Alt+F3 again to close the pane.

Moving between the panes

F6 moves through the regions (Editor, then Reveal Codes when it is shown, then the Status Bar), and Shift+F6 goes back, just like switching windows. The two carets stay in step however you move: arrow keys, word jumps, Home and End, Page Up and Page Down, a mouse click, or a jump from Find. Move in the editor and the pane follows to the same spot. Move in the pane and the editor’s cursor follows to the matching place. Sit in whichever you like and your place in the document comes with you.

Moving through the codes

In the default Flowed view the pane reads like your document with the hidden formatting showing, and the caret moves the way it does in the editor:

• Left Arrow and Right Arrow move one character at a time, but step over a whole code in one go. One press moves you across [Bold On] and your screen reader just says “bold on”. It is never spelled out letter by letter.
• Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right move by word, stopping at each code.
• Up Arrow and Down Arrow move by line and read the new line, as in the editor.
• Home and End go to the start and end of the line. Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End go to the top and bottom of the document.
• Land on a code and you hear it named as one thing: “bold on”, “tab”, “centred”, “font Arial”. An opening code also tells you how far its formatting reaches (“bold on, 12 characters”).

While you arrow through the pane, your screen reader does the talking. The region is named once when you arrive, and after that you hear the character, word, line, or code your screen reader reads. QUILL puts its fuller phrase (for example “italic on, 15 characters”) quietly in the status bar, where you can read it whenever you want it. Jumps you ask for (next or previous code, go to the matching pair) and mouse clicks are still spoken by QUILL.

If you would rather hear QUILL’s own phrase on every arrow press, turn on Reveal Codes: Speak Codes Aloud in the command palette. It is off by default.

In either view you can also jump code to code, skipping the plain text, and from an opening code to its matching close.

Editing a run in place (F2)

1. Move onto text that sits between a pair of formatting codes, for example the words inside [Bold On] ... [Bold Off].
2. Press F2. The pane limits you to just that stretch of text, and you can edit it freely.
3. Press Enter to put your change back into the document, or Escape to cancel.

The codes around it are left exactly as they were. The whole stretch edits as one piece, so a run that contains a [Tab] or a code inside it (bold text with one italic word, say) comes along together. The inner codes appear as their markup and are put straight back when you press Enter. If you press F2 on plain text with no formatting around it, QUILL tells you there is nothing to edit there.

Views and how much it says

In Settings > Editing (or on the View menu) you can choose:

• Flowed (the default): the interactive pane described above, with codes shown inside the running text ([Bold On]Hello[Bold Off]), movement by character, and F2 editing. It is the closest to the classic WordPerfect look and the most natural layout on a braille display.
• Structured: one item per code in a list. It is clear and labelled, and good for scanning structure. Your screen reader reads each item as you arrow through it. Movement by character, word and line, and F2 editing, belong to the Flowed view only.
• Verbosity: quiet (just the code name), balanced (adds how far an opening code reaches), or detailed (adds Unicode notes for invisible characters).

QUILL remembers your view and verbosity between sessions.

EPUB Navigator

When you open an EPUB, the navigator lets you move chapter by chapter instead of scrolling blindly through one long block of text.

Chapter headings are also placed in the text itself, so single-key heading navigation (H and Shift+H) walks every heading in the book, not just the chapter breaks. Many older or home-made EPUBs never used real headings at all. For those, QUILL works the headings out from the book’s layout (a paragraph styled as a title or chapter, or a short bold line on its own), so heading navigation and the chapter outline still work where they would otherwise be empty.

Equations are spoken, not skipped. When a chapter contains mathematics (MathML, or LaTeX written as a math span or between $$...$$ or \(...\) delimiters), QUILL turns each equation into plain words and places it in the text as “Math Equation: …” so you hear the formula as part of its sentence. It uses the same math speech as the editor: the MathCAT engine when it is installed, and QUILL’s built-in reader otherwise. A formula QUILL cannot understand is read as its plain source instead of being dropped, and a book with no math reads just as before.

OCR Image

OCR Image… (on Tools > Reading and Dictation) reads the text out of a picture, using optical character recognition on your own computer. Nothing happens behind your back: you choose the image, confirm, and hear progress as it works.

Two more commands on the same menu skip the file altogether:

• OCR Clipboard Image reads the picture you have just copied, for example with the Print Screen key or Copy Image in a web browser. If there is no picture on the clipboard, QUILL tells you so.
• OCR Screen Capture… takes a picture of the screen and reads it. QUILL asks whether you want The whole screen or The active window, with the active window already chosen.

Both show you the recognised text to review, just like OCR Image.

Document intake and extraction quality

When you bring in a scanned PDF or another hard-to-read file, the text QUILL pulls out may not be perfect. These commands help you check. Instead of assuming every import is right, QUILL helps you ask whether the extraction is good enough, what may have been lost, and whether you should quote from it directly.

Comparing documents

When you have two versions of something (a draft and the edited copy, or your file and the one that came back by email), comparing them tells you exactly what changed. Everything happens on your own computer. You can compare one file with another, review several open documents, move through the differences one at a time with both documents following along, and make a summary of what changed.

The Comparison menu

Tools > Comparison holds:

• Compare with File…
• Compare Open Documents
• Next Difference / Previous Difference
• Announce Current Difference
• Difference List…
• Toggle Synchronized Navigation
• Toggle Ignore Whitespace
• Compare Options…
• Generate Accessible Report
• Create Difference Summary
• Copy Current Difference / Copy All Differences

Toggle Ignore Whitespace decides whether spaces count as a change. Each press moves one step and says where you are: exact (every space counts), ignore trailing (spaces at the ends of lines do not count), then ignore all (no difference in spacing counts), and back to exact. Use it when one copy went through a program that tidied the spacing and you only care about the words.

Generate Accessible Report writes every difference into a new Markdown document, under a heading that names the two files and says how many differences there are. Because it is an ordinary document, you can read it at your own pace, search it, and save or send it.

Moving through the differences

Once a comparison is open, these keys do most of the work:

• Ctrl+Alt+Shift+. moves to the next difference.
• Ctrl+Alt+Shift+, moves to the previous one.
• Ctrl+Alt+Shift+D reads the current difference.

The compare dialog is a list you can review with your screen reader, one difference at a time, entirely from the keyboard.

Compare sounds

If you use a sound pack, compare mode plays short earcons: one when a comparison opens, one when it closes, separate ticks for moving to the next or previous difference, and a soft “blocked” tone when you reach the first or last difference and there is nothing further. You can turn each one on or off in Tools > Reading and Dictation > Sound Scheme… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+O), under the Compare section. The topic on sound notifications and earcons has more about sound packs.

Making audio from your documents

QUILL can turn your writing into audio files: a single document, a whole folder, or a chaptered audiobook ready to publish. This section is for when you want something to keep, share or put on a phone. Live listening is Read Aloud, earlier in this chapter.

Audiobook and Batch Speech

Tools > Speech > Audiobook & Batch Speech… (Ctrl+Shift+Grave then Y) is the guided home for audio production. It turns a whole folder of documents into speech audio in one pass, and it builds chaptered audiobooks from documents, from a folder of recordings, or from both. It is a wizard that asks one thing at a time. It is listed in the command palette under “Audio Studio…”. It replaced the old single-page Batch Export to Speech Audio dialog; every option is still there, spread across clear steps, and your saved project settings still fill everything in.

What do you want to make

The first page asks what you want to make. It remembers which one you chose last time and selects it for you.

• Narrate documents into an audiobook or speech audio. The steps are: What should I read? (folder, file types, filters); Who should read it? (engine, voice with a preview button, pace, round-robin voices, voice casting rules, translated editions); How should chapters work? (chapter mode, spoken headings, the transition sounder and its volume, pauses); Output and diagnostics (format, existing-file policy, loudness, incremental-rebuild reuse, dry run, temp folder); the book page (optional, to put everything together into one audiobook); and a summary in plain words.
• Combine audio files into one chaptered audiobook. A shorter path: pick the folder of recordings, describe the book (title, author, narrator, cover, M4B or MP3, ACX loudness), review the summary, and Start. Each file becomes one chapter, and you always review the chapter list before the book is built. There is more on this under Build an audiobook from a folder of recordings, below.
• Edit an existing audiobook. Pick a finished MP3 or M4B and it opens in the Chapter Workbench, described below. A file with no chapter markers opens as one chapter, ready to split up.

Moving through the wizard

Each step is announced as you arrive (“Step 2 of 7: What should I read?”). Back and Next move between steps. Skip to summary jumps ahead when your saved project profile already fills every page, so a repeat run is three keystrokes. The work runs in the background with progress for each file, and you can cancel it. It uses the same speech engine as live Read Aloud, so the voice you audition is the voice you get.

The source pages offer a list of recent source folders, and the edit path’s file picker remembers recently opened audiobooks. Both lists are kept between sessions, are separate from your recent documents, and never grow without limit.

What should I read

• Source folder, and whether to include subfolders.
• The file types to include: .docx, .md, .html/.htm, .txt.
• Optional include/exclude filters: patterns separated by semicolons or commas, matched against the file name and its path.
• Skip files larger than (MB): a maximum file size, in megabytes (0 means no limit). One accidental 400 MB export in a folder can no longer take over an overnight run. Any file over the limit is left out, and the live document count on the same step changes as you change the limit. Press Count documents to hear the settled count.

Who should read it

• Engine, voice, and pace. Any offline engine (SAPI 5, DECtalk, Piper, Kokoro, eSpeak NG), with a Preview button to hear the voice first.

• Round-robin voices read each article or heading in a different voice, cycling through a list you build:

  1. Pick a voice from the Round-robin voices combo box.
  2. Press Add voice.
  3. Repeat for each voice, and use Move Up, Move Down and Remove to set the order.

  Article 1 uses the first voice, article 2 the second, and so on, starting again at the top when the list runs out. The list uses voices from the engine you selected, so the sound quality stays consistent, and changing the engine clears it. Leave the list empty to use the single chosen voice.

• Voice casting lets you say exactly who reads what, on top of the rotation. On the same page, add rules: a pattern plus the voice that should read every matching chapter. A pattern matches the heading title as a wildcard (Chapter *, *interview*, or an exact title, ignoring case) or a section number (#1 for the opener). The first rule that matches wins; chapters no rule matches go to the rotation or the single voice. Rules use voices of the selected engine (switching engines clears them) and are saved in job files. A dialogue-heavy drama or an interview show can cast its voices on purpose instead of by rotation order.

• If a voice ever fails to speak (a broken system voice, a missing model, or a cloud voice the provider rejects), QUILL notes it and skips it on later runs, so one bad voice in a rotation cannot keep stopping your batches.

Your combine and round-robin choices are remembered for each project.

Translated editions

Also export in other languages (translated) makes a translated audiobook alongside the original.

1. Choose a language.
2. Pick a voice for it.
3. Press Add language. Repeat for as many languages as you want. Remove language drops one.
4. Choose Translate with: AI provider (any AI provider you have set up) or LibreTranslate (runs locally).

Voices are offered local ones first (eSpeak speaks nearly every language offline, plus any Windows voice installed for that language), then the premium multilingual cloud voices: OpenAI, Gemini, and ElevenLabs. Those need the matching provider API key, the same key the AI Voice feature uses. When you press Start, each document is translated and written as <doc> (<Language>).<ext> next to the original, with the same chapters, page-turn cue, and loudness. A pronunciation dictionary can be limited to one language, so it only affects that language’s narration. If a cloud voice you chose has no key set up, that language is skipped with a note and the run carries on.

You see the cost first for cloud runs. Cloud translation and cloud narration are paid by use, so if your choices would use a paid cloud service, QUILL shows a combined cost estimate and asks you to confirm before it starts. Runs that use only local engines and LibreTranslate start straight away.

How should chapters work

• Chapters turn a long document into a chaptered file you can move around in. Choose MP3 (ID3 chapter markers) or M4B audiobook (native MP4 chapter atoms, the Apple and audiobook format). Apple Podcasts, Overcast, VLC, foobar2000, and others recognize both.
• A transition sound plays between articles: a natural page-turn by default, or a different earcon from your active sound pack. Whichever you use is matched to the audio format automatically, so it always joins cleanly.
• You choose whether each heading is spoken, and set pauses between articles and between sentences, plus a short silence at the end that stops clipping.
• A very long section is split automatically at a safe sentence boundary, so no single passage runs past the engine’s time limit. The run report lists how many chapters each document got.
• Chapter mode: keep the whole document as one chaptered file, or choose Separate file per article to write each section under a heading as its own NNN - <heading> audio file, in a folder for that document.
• Combine empty headings: when a heading has no text of its own (a “Part” heading followed straight away by a “Chapter” heading), fold it into the next article that does have text and join their titles (“Part One: Chapter 1”), so you do not hear an empty chapter. Off by default. Turn it on with the Combine empty headings into the next article checkbox.

Output and diagnostics

• Output format: WAV (always available) or, when ffmpeg is installed, MP3, M4A, M4B (audiobook), Opus, FLAC, or OGG. When ffmpeg is missing, compressed formats fall back to WAV with a note for each file, instead of failing. MP3 has a quality setting, and WAV can be made to one sample rate and channel count throughout.
• Normalize loudness: check Normalize loudness to audiobook (ACX) level to bring every exported file to the same audiobook loudness, the standard the Build Audiobook tool uses. QUILL measures each file and re-levels it in two passes, without touching the chapters or their timing. Needs ffmpeg; without it, the file is saved as it is, with a note.
• If a file already exists: Skip (a cheap way to resume), Overwrite, or Rename so both are kept (name (2).mp3).
• Output layout: mirror the source folders or flatten everything into one folder. You can also rename outputs with a template such as {index:03d} - {stem}, which gives 001 - chapter-one.
• Audiobook metadata: album, author or narrator, genre, and year are written into compressed files. Each file’s title comes from its heading or name, and its track number from its position.
• Dry run: instead of speaking, write a <doc>.preview.txt for each document with the exact text that would be spoken (after cleanup, pronunciation fixes, and polish) and how many pronunciation substitutions were made. You can proofread what will be said before waiting on slow speech.
• Audition: check Audition on the output step to convert only the first document. You can judge the voice, the pace, and the loudness in a couple of minutes before you commit to an overnight run.
• Run report: optionally write a manifest.json and manifest.csv listing every file’s status, output path, length, and any error.

Incremental rebuilds

With Reuse unchanged audio from the last run checked (the default), QUILL takes a fingerprint of each document’s text together with every setting that shapes its audio. On the next run, documents that have not changed, and whose audio is still on disk, are reused instead of spoken again, and you hear “Reused … (unchanged since last run)”. Edit one chapter of a forty-document book and only that chapter is narrated again. Change the voice or any audio setting and everything rebuilds by itself. Uncheck the box to force a full rebuild. The fingerprints are kept in the source folder’s .quill/speech-cache.json; deleting that file also forces a fresh run.

The book page

• Look up book details. Type the title (and the author, if you know it) and press Look up book details. QUILL searches Open Library and MusicBrainz, two free public catalogs, and the match you pick fills in the author, genre, and year. QUILL asks before the first contact, and only the title and author you typed are sent. If the match has a cover image on Open Library and you have not set one, QUILL offers to download it as cover.jpg next to your audio and fills the cover field. Say no and nothing is fetched.
• Spoken credits. Check Add spoken opening and closing credits and QUILL narrates the usual audiobook frame (“My Book. Written by Jane Doe. Narrated by Sam Reader.”) in the run’s own voice, as the first and last chapters.
• Polish during the build. The audio source page’s Trim silences from each recording and the book page’s fade-in / fade-out / tempo controls are applied while the audiobook is built. Each chapter file is prepared first (silence trimmed from the start and end, fades added, and the tempo changed without changing pitch) and then joined into the master. The prepared copies live in the build’s temporary folder, so your source recordings are never overwritten. If polishing one file fails, the build keeps going with that file as it was. The defaults (no trim, 0 ms fades, 1.0 tempo) leave the audio unchanged.

Settings that stay with the folder

A folder remembers its whole speech setup in <folder>/.quill/speech-project.json: engine, voice, output format, chapters, text cleanup, pronunciation dictionaries, metadata, and run policy. Set up a project once and run it again whenever you like. When you open the wizard on a folder you have set up before, those settings fill in by themselves, and your choices are saved when you press Start. Anything you change this run beats the folder’s saved settings, which beat your global defaults.

Job files go one step further. On the summary page, Save a job file writes a small .quilljob file that pins this exact run: folder, voices, chapters, mastering, and book details. You can edit it by hand. Load a job file on the first page brings everything back, filled in. Keep one per project, or edit it in Notepad between runs.

Running it without you

• Library mode (a checkbox on the combine-audio path) builds every subfolder as its own audiobook in one unattended run. Point it at a folder of book folders and come back to a shelf of finished masters, each titled after its folder.
• The watch action “Build audiobook from the folder” keeps a drop folder working for you. Whenever new recordings land in a watched folder, its chaptered master is rebuilt automatically. A batch of files arriving together causes one rebuild, not many.

Export to Translated Speech Audio (one document)

Tools > Speech > Export to Translated Speech Audio is the one-document version of the translated export above. It translates and narrates just the document you are editing, with no folder involved.

1. Pick the output format.
2. Choose Translate with: any AI provider you have set up, or local LibreTranslate.
3. Add one or more language + voice targets, the same way as in the wizard. Local voices are listed first, then the premium cloud voices.
4. Press Export.

QUILL writes <doc> (<Language>).<ext> next to your document. If the document has unsaved changes, QUILL offers to save first, so your latest edits are the ones translated. As with the wizard, a combined cost estimate appears before any paid cloud run.

The dialog also has an “Open in Audio Studio” button. It closes the dialog and opens the Audiobook and Batch Speech wizard with your document already filled in, for when you want chapters and the rest.

Build an audiobook from a folder of recordings

The wizard’s Combine audio files path (Tools > Speech > Audiobook & Batch Speech…, the second choice on the first page) joins a folder of existing audio files into one chaptered audiobook, the kind your audiobook or podcast app moves through track by track. Where the narrate path turns documents into speech, this one stitches a folder of audio (your own recordings, or speech QUILL exported earlier) into a single master.

• Point it at a folder of audio files. Each file becomes one chapter, in natural sort order, titled from the file name (a leading track number such as 01 - is removed).
• Edit the chapters before building. The dialog lists the chapters, and works fully from the keyboard. You can rename the selected one (type a new title and press Rename or Enter), move it up or down, merge it into the chapter above (the two files then play as one chapter with one marker), or remove it from the book. Restore original undoes every edit in one press.
• Bring your titles with you. Import titles… reads chapter names, in order, from an Audacity label track, a CUE sheet, plain timestamp lines, Podcasting 2.0 chapters JSON, or a CSV spreadsheet. Any sheet with a “Title” column works, and so does a simple number,title list, so a chapter list you keep in Excel can name your MP3 files in one step. Export titles… writes the current list back out as text.
• Honest numbers, before and after. The run log starts with a pre-flight check. It names files whose sample rate, channels, or format differ (the build still works; it re-encodes them) and gives an estimated length and size. After the build, QUILL re-reads the finished book and tells you what a player will actually see: “verified 24 chapters”, or exactly what went wrong. A plain-text chapter report and a Podcasting 2.0 ...chapters.json file are written next to the book.
• Choose M4B audiobook (native MP4 chapter atoms, the Apple and audiobook format) or MP3 (ID3 chapter markers). You can move by chapter in both in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, VLC, foobar2000, and others.
• Check Normalize loudness to ACX (Audible/audiobook) spec to bring the master into the loudness range audiobook platforms require (RMS between -23 and -18 dB, peak under -3 dB). After the build, QUILL measures the result and says in the status bar whether it met the ACX range.
• Fill in the book’s title, author, narrator, genre, and year. A cover image in the folder (named like cover.jpg, folder.png, and so on) is picked up automatically, or you can browse for one.
• The build runs in the background, and the status bar tells you when it is done.

The Chapter Workbench

The Workbench is where you fix a finished audiobook by ear. Reach it from the wizard’s Edit an existing audiobook path.

The chapter list and the player

The chapter list reads each row in full (“3. The Long Road, starts 1:02:03, runs 12:40”). Press Enter on a chapter to hear it.

The built-in player has Play/Pause, Stop, Previous and Next chapter, Rewind and Forward, a position slider that speaks minutes and seconds, and a volume slider. The current chapter is announced as playback moves into it.

• It remembers where you stopped in each book and picks up there next time.
• It has a playback speed control, from 0.75x to 2x, with the pitch kept natural.
• It answers “Where am I?” with the whole picture: “Chapter 4 of 24: The Long Road. 3:12 into the chapter, 9:28 left in it. 1:02:03 of 7:41:00 in the book, 6:38:57 remaining.”

Playback normally uses Windows’ built-in media engine, with nothing to install. For gapless audio, exact seeking, and instant chapter jumps even in 8-hour books, download the mpv player engine from Help > Download Optional Components (about 44 MB, checksum-verified; its licenses and a source offer come inside the download). The player switches to libmpv the next time it opens. If you prefer, you can instead put a libmpv-2.dll into the data folder’s engine-packs\mpv folder, or set the QUILL_LIBMPV environment variable to point at one. If the DLL is missing or broken, QUILL quietly stays on the built-in engine.

Fixing the chapters

• Split at playhead: listen for the spot where a chapter should begin, pause there, and press the button. The chapter is cut in two exactly at that point. This is how you fix a book whose chapters landed in the wrong places.
• Set start to playhead: move an existing boundary. Select the chapter, park the playhead where it should start, and press. The previous chapter’s end moves with it, so there are never gaps.
• Merge into previous, Rename (type and press Enter), and Restore original (one press undoes every edit).
• Add chapter… puts a marker at the playhead, or at a time you type, and asks what to call it. Past the end of the last chapter it adds a new one at the end instead of refusing.
• Delete chapter removes a marker only. The audio joins its neighbour, and unlike Merge it works on the first and last chapters too.
• Edit chapter… opens a small window for the title and the exact start and end (and a chapter link and image, if you publish with Podcasting 2.0).
• Preview chapter plays just that chapter and stops at its end.

Nudging a boundary until it sounds right

Nudge back and Nudge forward move the selected chapter’s start by one step. From the chapter list, Alt+Left and Alt+Right do the same, and adding Shift moves ten steps at once.

• The Step box goes from 100 milliseconds up to 10 seconds, and remembers your choice for next time (audio_studio_chapter_nudge_ms, half a second to start with).
• Hear boundary plays three seconds before the marker and two after it, then stops. It is the quickest way to tell whether a boundary falls in the middle of a sentence.
• Check Hear after each nudge to have that happen automatically after every press. It is off by default, so you only get sound on every keypress if you ask for it.
• Each nudge speaks only the new time (“0:00:09.500”), so it keeps up when you hold the key down. The full sentence follows about half a second after you stop.
• Push a marker into its neighbour and it stops there and says “Cannot move further” once.

Finding chapters for you

• Propose chapters from silences… listens for silences in the recording, using ffmpeg’s silencedetect. A small dialog asks for the noise threshold (dB, default -30) and the minimum silence length (seconds, default 0.8), and QUILL suggests chapter boundaries in the middle of each silence. The suggestions land in the chapter list for you to review; nothing is applied without you. Press Restore original to undo. So one long recording is no problem: open a single 80-minute file (it opens as one chapter), press one button, review, and save.
• Propose AI titles… names a folder of track07-style chapters by listening to them. The first minute of each chapter is transcribed on this computer by the local speech model, so the audio never leaves your computer. Only that text goes to the AI you have set up (a local model keeps even the text on your computer). A short suggested title for each chapter lands in the list for you to review, and Restore original undoes the lot. Needs AI set up; not available in Safe Mode.

Checking, importing and splitting

• Check against ACX measures the file with ffmpeg’s loudnorm and shows a result with integrated loudness, true peak, and noise floor, plus a plain suggestion for each thing that fails (“Integrated loudness is -14.2 LUFS, target -20 plus or minus 3; make the recording 5.8 dB quieter”). The result is announced when the measurement finishes, however you close the dialog.
• Import chapters… replaces the whole list from Audacity labels, a CUE sheet, timestamp lines, Podcasting 2.0 JSON, or CSV. Export chapters… writes the list in any of the same five formats.
• Split into files… goes the other way: one audio file per chapter, named NN - Title, in a folder you pick. That gives you podcast episodes straight away, or tracks for players without chapter support.

Book details and tags

Book details (title, author, narrator, genre, year) are edited right in the Workbench. All tags… opens the full Tag Editor for everything else: twenty-six fields over five pages (main, details, publishing, sort order and cover art). They include track and disc numbers, composer, publisher, copyright, BPM, ISRC, language, grouping, the compilation flag, the four sort-order fields, and cover art you can load, save out or remove. Ctrl+Tab moves between pages. The five quick fields and the editor always agree with each other, in both directions.

You can also open the Tag Editor on its own, without the Workbench: check Edit the tags only on the Studio wizard’s Open a book page.

The same editor is in podHarvest. A file edited in one reads back exactly as you left it in the other, with the same fields, operations and keys. If you use both, you only learn it once.

Saving

Save writes an MP3’s edits in place: only the tags are rewritten and the audio is left alone. An M4B depends on what you changed. Tag edits alone also save in place and finish at once. A chapter change needs Save As, which copies the audio into a new file without re-encoding, so there is no loss of quality. Long saves run in the background, so QUILL stays responsive.

Publishing

Publish… offers ways to get the finished book out into the world. Each one is something you choose to do:

• Podcast feed: QUILL writes a complete .rss file next to the book (RSS 2.0 with iTunes and Podcasting 2.0 tags; chapter navigation uses the chapters.json file beside it). Upload the feed and audio wherever you like. Making the feed never touches the network.
• Folder feed (all episodes): run a whole show from one folder. Every MP3, M4B, or M4A master becomes an episode (the oldest file is episode 1), with its title from its tags or your own, your description for each episode (edited in an accessible episode list), its real publication date, length, and chapter link. The show settings are kept in the folder, so after each new build, one press of Write feed.rss now makes the complete feed again. Write show notes page makes an accessible show-notes.html beside it, with a heading for each episode, the descriptions, and chapter lists, ready to upload with the feed.
• SFTP upload: save a destination (host, folder, and the public web address that matches it), and QUILL uploads the book and its companion files over SSH, with the same strict host-key checking as editing over SSH. The password is kept in the Windows Credential Manager, never in QUILL’s settings.
• Auphonic: send the book to your own Auphonic account for professional post-production. QUILL uploads it, waits for the production to finish, and downloads the results into a folder next to the book. Your API token is also kept in the credential vault, and you can manage it in AI > AI Hub > Services with QUILL’s other service keys. Press Check account and load presets first: QUILL tells you whose account the token belongs to and how many processing credits remain, and fills the preset picker with your saved Auphonic presets. The confirmation then names the preset and your balance before anything uploads. QUILL asks before anything is uploaded.

Publishing is not available in Safe Mode. Every upload runs in the background and tells you when it is done. SFTP uploads and Auphonic transfers show a progress dialog that speaks whole-percent steps as the file moves (“Uploading book.m4b: 42%”) and has a real Cancel button. What cancelling does depends on when you press it, and QUILL tells you which happened:

• Cancelling an SFTP upload stops in the middle of the file. Files that already finished stay on the server.
• Cancelling Auphonic before the upload finishes means no production starts.
• Cancelling Auphonic after that leaves the production running in your Auphonic account and skips the download.

The Universal Audio Converter

Apart from the audiobook wizard, QUILL has a general audio converter. It changes audio files from one format to another, and pulls the sound out of video files, entirely on your computer using the bundled ffmpeg. It works in Safe Mode and never uploads anything. There are three ways in:

• Voices > Convert Audio…: the dialog, from the audiobook and batch speech wizard.
• quill convert: a command for scripts, for example quill convert *.wav --to mp3 --preset podcast --out ./done. Add --dry-run to see the plan first, --list-presets or --list-formats to see what is available, and any of the Advanced options (--bitrate, --sample-rate, --channels, --loudness, --gain, --high-pass, --trim-silence, --speed, --compress, --level, --fade-in, --fade-out).
• Convert from URL…: paste a link (YouTube, and the many sites yt-dlp supports) and QUILL downloads the best audio and hands it to the converter. This is the only part that uses the internet. yt-dlp is not bundled, so the first time you use it QUILL asks once, shows a rights notice (“only download content you have the right to use”), and installs the small yt-dlp component. It is not available in Safe Mode.

Building a batch

1. Add single files or whole folders. A folder is searched, and its layout of subfolders is copied into the output folder.
2. Choose the output format. Only formats your ffmpeg can actually make are offered, so a conversion never fails halfway for lack of an encoder.
3. Pick a preset: Just convert (change the container only), MP3 128/192/320, Podcast, Audiobook, Voice memo, Web Opus, Archival FLAC, or Hearing-aid mono.
4. Choose an output folder, or leave it to make a Converted folder beside the source.
5. Choose what happens when a file already exists: auto-number (never overwrites an original), skip, or overwrite.

The batch runs in the background on several files at once, so the window stays responsive. Progress shows in the status bar and, when QUILL is minimized, in the tray tooltip. The final summary is spoken and always names any files that failed, so a problem is never hidden behind “done”.

Advanced options

Check Advanced options to show more controls on top of the preset:

• exact bit rate, sample rate, channels (keep, mono or stereo), and bit depth
• loudness normalized to an audiobook (-20 LUFS, ACX) or podcast (-16 LUFS) target
• gain in decibels
• a high-pass filter to remove low rumble
• trim silence from the ends
• speed, a tempo change from 0.5x to 2x with no change in pitch
• a compressor and a volume leveler
• fade in and fade out, in seconds

Each control leaves the preset alone until you change it, so Advanced only overrides what you set on purpose. The effects are the same ones QUILL uses elsewhere, so the results match the rest of the app.

Media

QUILL also plays podcasts, recorded programmes and audiobook chapters. This part is about keeping your place in all of it, even across computers, and about letting it stop by itself when you fall asleep.

Continue Listening

Continue Listening… (in the Command Palette) is one list of everything you started and did not finish, newest first, with the kind named on every row: a podcast episode you are twenty minutes into, a recorded programme or LibriVox chapter you were halfway through. It answers the question “what was I in the middle of?” in one place.

• Resume starts the highlighted row where you left off.
• Forget This One drops the saved place and removes the row. The episode stays unplayed, because “I am not going back to this” and “I finished it” are different things. Clearing what you have given up on keeps the list worth opening.

Carry My Place Between Machines

If you listen on more than one computer, Carry My Place Between Machines… makes your place follow you. It needs two things: a folder both computers can see, and a recovery phrase.

The folder is yours. Point it at somewhere inside OneDrive, Dropbox, iCloud Drive, a network share, or even a memory stick you carry between the two. QUILL runs no server of its own and never holds your listening history. Everything is encrypted before it reaches the folder, so whoever runs that folder learns nothing but file sizes and times.

The recovery phrase is eight ordinary words, made up for you, something like earth dock hollow iris farm laser daisy amber. Write it down. It is the key, and QUILL cannot get it back for you if you lose it. Read My Phrase Aloud says it back numbered, one word at a time, which is just what you want while writing it on paper.

To set up the second computer, use the same window:

1. Open Carry My Place Between Machines… on the second computer.
2. Point it at the same folder.
3. Type the phrase from the first computer.

QUILL notices the folder is already set up and says so. If the phrase is wrong it tells you at once (“that recovery phrase does not match this folder; nothing was changed”) instead of half-syncing and failing later. Typing is forgiving about capitals, spacing and punctuation, and a word that is not on the word list is named, so you only need to check that one.

Sync Now runs it and tells you in a sentence what happened: what came back, what went out, and whether two computers disagreed about a place (the most recent wins, and you are told). It can also run when playback stops, if you like. If both computers remembered a different place in the same thing and they are more than a few minutes apart, QUILL treats that as a real disagreement and tells you, instead of quietly picking one.

Everything works normally with no sync at all. Nothing ever waits on the folder before playing.

Sharing your place with apps that are not QUILL

The sync above carries your place between two copies of QUILL. It is encrypted from end to end, which is right, and which is also why no other app can read it. If you listen on a phone with a podcast app that is not ours, it does not help you.

Listening Places is the other half, and it is a separate checkbox in the same window. In the folder you already chose, QUILL also writes a small, plain file in a published format that any podcast app is free to read and write. There is no account, no server, and no signup. The format is written down publicly, so another app can simply support it.

What that means for you:

• Turn on only the half you want. The encrypted QUILL-to-QUILL sync and the shared plain file are separate switches, because they reveal different things. You can use either, both, or neither.
• No recovery phrase is needed for this half. The shared file cannot be encrypted and still be readable by another app, so setting it up is one checkbox.
• Titles are left out unless you say so. Every show and episode is identified by a scrambled fingerprint instead of its name, so a folder you share with a family member does not become a list of what you listen to. A third checkbox, off by default, adds readable titles if you want them.
• Each device writes its own file. That stops a cloud drive ever making a “positions (Jeff’s conflicted copy)”, and it means a third and fourth device work with no extra setup.
• The most recent place wins, not the furthest. If you jumped back twenty minutes on purpose and then opened the episode somewhere else, that jump is kept.
• It reads at launch and when you press Sync Now, and at no other time. So a position from another device never moves the playhead under you in the middle of an episode.

Sync Now covers both halves in one press and reports on each.

Sleep Timer

Tools > Media > Sleep Timer… stops whatever is playing after a while, from one place.

1. Choose a preset (15, 30, 45, 60, or 90 minutes), or type your own number of minutes.
2. Press Start.

Over the last 20 seconds, playback fades gently down and then stops. Your volume is then set back to what it was before the fade, so pressing play later is not suddenly quiet. Open the dialog again while a timer is running to hear how much time is left, or press Cancel Sleep Timer (also in the Command Palette as Media: Cancel Sleep Timer) to stop the countdown early.

What you learned, and where to go next

You can now have QUILL read to you in the voice and language you like, and teach it how to say the words it gets wrong. You can inspect a character, hear the hidden formatting with Reveal Codes (Alt+F3), read an EPUB by chapter, and step through the differences between two documents. You know where QUILL makes audiobooks, fixes their chapters and publishes them, and how to keep your place in what you listen to.

To practise with QUILL beside you, open Help > Tutorials… (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and try “Have it read to you”, “See the formatting that is normally hidden” and “Inspect a document you did not write”. On the website, Rescue a scanned PDF and From document to published audiobook walk through the longer jobs.

Next, Chapter 9, Dictation and transcription, turns things around: you speak and QUILL writes.

Chapter 9: Dictation and transcription

This chapter is about turning speech into text. You will learn to talk straight into a document, to turn a recording into a transcript, and to have QUILL make meeting minutes or notes out of that transcript for you. Most of it runs entirely on your own computer, with no account and nothing uploaded. If you would rather speak than type, or you have a pile of recordings to get through, this chapter is for you. The parts about speech models, optional downloads and memory come last, for when you want to tune things.

Dictating into a document

QUILL gives you three ways to dictate. Live Dictation writes each phrase as you pause, which suits most people most of the time. Locked Dictation records a whole passage and writes it when you finish. Dictate (Offline) is the simple start-and-stop toggle on the Speech menu. All three put the words at your cursor, and all three work without an internet connection.

QUILLBee’s tip: Can’t remember what you are allowed to say? While Live Dictation is running (Ctrl+F11), just say “what can I say” and the whole list opens in a window.

Live Dictation (Ctrl+F11)

This is the dictation QUILL Lite has, in QUILL too, on the same keys. It lives at Tools > Speech > Live Dictation.

1. Put your cursor where you want the words.
2. Press Ctrl+F11.
3. Talk, then pause. Each phrase is written at the cursor when you pause. A soft tone tells you it arrived, and the words are read back to you.
4. When you are done, 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. Dictation On, the first row of the submenu, is checked while dictation is writing, and the status bar says what dictation is doing.

Nothing leaves your computer, nothing is downloaded, and no recording is kept, unless you choose OpenAI dictation with your own key (see “OpenAI dictation, with your own key” below). Unlike Locked Dictation, which records a passage and transcribes it afterwards, Live Dictation writes as you go.

The same submenu has more windows:

• Recent Phrases… (Shift+F11) lists the last twenty phrases of the session, with Insert Again and Copy.
• My Words and Phrases… (Alt+Shift+F10) is a window with Add Word, Add Phrase, Add Correction, Edit and Remove. It edits your dictation.md file for you.
• Switch Dictation Language (Ctrl+Shift+F11) swaps between English and Spanish. See “Switching between English and Spanish”.
• Start or Stop Live Transcript (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+PageDown) writes everything you say into a new document of its own. See “Live transcripts”.
• Dictation Context for This Document… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+PageUp) tells QUILL what this document is, in a sentence. See “Dictation Context for This Document”.

Here are the dictation keys in one place:

A few things that are good to know while you talk:

• Escape throws away the phrase being heard, and the words heard so far.
• Your words go where you were when you started speaking, even if you move the cursor while they are being recognised (see “Where the words go”).
• Pressing Ctrl+F11 in a second document moves dictation there.
• If your microphone goes away, dictation pauses, and it picks up again when the device is back.
• If the engine has a problem, QUILL quietly restarts it once before it tells you about a failure.

The full list of everything Live Dictation understands is its own page, Dictation commands, built from the same table QUILL itself reads. While dictating, say “what can I say” to open that list in a window.

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 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.

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 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.

Punctuation

You do not need to say punctuation. The built-in engines add full stops, commas, question marks and capitals by themselves. When you want a particular mark, say it (“comma”, “new paragraph”) and your word wins. If a pause splits a sentence and the next part begins with a word like and or which, the full stop the pause put in is taken back out.

Punctuation and layout, anywhere in a phrase. You can say “period”, “comma”, “question mark”, “open quote” and “close quote”, brackets, “hyphen”, “dash”, “slash”, symbols like “at sign” and “percent sign”, “new line”, “new paragraph” and “tab”. Say “literal” first to write one of them as a word.

What you hear

After each phrase you hear a soft tone and the words read back to you, so you know what landed without reading the line. The read-back says the punctuation too, by the same names you would use to dictate it. You say “Hello, world.” and you hear “Hello comma world period”. A new paragraph is read as “new paragraph”, a quotation mark as “open quote”, and so on. That happens whatever punctuation level your screen reader is set to, so you always know whether the comma went in.

A few things are left quiet because saying them would only get in the way: an apostrophe or a hyphen inside a word (“don’t”, “well-known”), and the point or comma inside a number (“3.5”, “1,000”). A web address reads the way you would say it: “example.com” is “example dot com”. In Spanish you hear the Spanish names, “coma” and “punto”.

The status bar and a braille display show the real characters, for example “Dictated: Hello, world.”, so on braille you read exactly what was written.

If you would rather hear just the words, turn off Say punctuation marks in the read-back in More Dictation Settings. To choose a tone only, the words only, both or neither, use What you hear after each phrase in Dictation Settings.

Letters, numbers and symbols

Most of the time you just talk and the engine writes words. For the moments when you need something exact, an email address, a file name, a heading in a Markdown file, here is what you can say.

Spelling a whole run. Say “start spelling”, then the letters, then “stop spelling”. The phonetic alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie…) is the reliable way. Say “capital” before a capital letter and “space” for a space. While you are spelling, punctuation goes in with no spaces around it, and “dot” (or “point”) writes a full stop. So “start spelling, juliet dot sierra mike india tango hotel at sign echo x-ray alpha mike papa lima echo dot charlie oscar mike, stop spelling” writes j.smith@example.com. Say “all caps” and every letter after it is a capital, until you say “no caps” or the phrase ends.

Spelling one word. Say “spell” and the letters, all in one phrase: “spell bravo alpha delta” writes bad. You do not need to start and stop spelling for that. A sentence that only happens to begin with the word “spell” (“spell it out for me”) stays words.

Spell that. If a name came out wrong, say “spell that”. The last phrase is selected, and the very next phrase you say is spelled and takes its place. After that one phrase you are back to ordinary dictation.

Capitals and spacing that stay on. These last until you turn them off, or until dictation stops, and the status bar shows you which are on:

• “caps on” and “caps off” (or “capitals on” and “capitals off”): every word starts with a capital, handy for titles and names.
• “all caps on” and “all caps off”: everything in capitals.
• “no space on” and “no space off”: the words are joined with no spaces and no automatic capitals, for web addresses and file names.

Marks for Markdown and code. These can go anywhere in a phrase:

Starting a line. These only work as the first words of a phrase. If the cursor is not at the start of a line, QUILL starts a new one first:

Because they only count at the start, “the heading two lines down” in the middle of a sentence is written as words, just as you meant it.

Voice commands

Commands, as a whole phrase after a pause:

• “scratch that” removes the last phrase
• “undo that”
• “select that”
• “capitalize that”, “all caps that”, “no caps that”
• “delete word”, “delete sentence”
• “read that”
• “go to beginning of line”, “go to end of line”, “go to top”, “go to end of document”
• “select sentence”, “select line”, “select paragraph”
• “go to start of paragraph”, “go to end of paragraph”
• “spell that”, “caps on”, “no space on” and the others in “Letters, numbers and symbols”
• “copy that”, “copy all”, “show clips”, “show snippets”
• “stop dictation”

Commands with words after them, said at the start of a phrase:

• “select” and some words, “go to”, “go before” or “go after” and some words, “correct” and some words (see “Moving and selecting by voice”)
• “paste clip three”, “insert snippet” and a name, “insert abbreviation” and a trigger (see “Snippets and clips by voice”)
• “switch to Spanish” (see “Switching between English and Spanish”)
• “dictation context” and a name (see “Dictation Context for This Document”)

If you have typed into the last phrase since you said it, the commands that change it leave it alone, and tell you so.

That is the everyday set. Every command and every mark, in English and Spanish, is on the Dictation commands page, and “what can I say” opens the same list while you dictate.

Moving and selecting by voice

You can move around and pick out words by saying them, without reaching for the keyboard. Say these at the start of a phrase:

• “select” and the words, for example “select the blue car”. QUILL looks back from the cursor for the nearest place those words appear, and if they are not behind you, it looks ahead. Whatever you say next replaces them.
• “select” one set of words “through” another, for example “select dear Sam through regards”. Everything from the first to the last is selected.
• “go to” or “go before” and the words puts the cursor just before them. “go after” puts it just after.
• “correct” and the words selects them and tells you “Correcting the blue car. Say the new words”. Say the right words and they take the place of the wrong ones.
• “select again” or “select next” moves on to the next place the same words appear, and “select previous” goes back to the one before.

And these as a whole phrase: “select sentence” (or “select this sentence”), “select line”, “select paragraph”, “go to start of paragraph” (or “go to beginning of paragraph”) and “go to end of paragraph”.

You do not have to be exact. Capitals, punctuation and accents do not matter, and numbers match either way, so “select two cats” finds “2 cats”. Your corrections from My Words and Phrases are applied first, so the words are found the way you taught QUILL to spell them.

You hear the outcome once: “Selected: the blue car”, “Before the blue car” or “After the blue car”. If the place is three or more lines away from where you were, the line number is added, like “Selected: the blue car, line 40”.

If the words are not in the document, nothing moves. Your phrase is written as ordinary text instead, and you hear “Not found, written as text.” Say “scratch that” to take it back out. This works with every speech engine, and the short exact commands, like “select that” and “go to top”, still do what they always did.

Snippets and clips by voice

The Copy Tray, your snippets and your abbreviations all answer to your voice too.

As a whole phrase, on its own:

• “copy all” (or “copy everything” or “copy document”) copies the whole document, just as Copy All does.
• “copy that” copies the phrase you just said.
• “show clips” (or “open copy tray” or “show copy tray”) opens the Copy Tray dialog.
• “show snippets” opens the list from Insert Snippet.

With words after them, at the start of a phrase:

• “paste clip three” (or “paste slot three”) writes what is in Copy Tray slot 3. Any slot from 1 to 12 works. If the slot is empty, you are told so and nothing is written.
• “insert snippet” and its name, for example “insert snippet sign off”. You do not need the exact name: QUILL ignores capitals, punctuation and spaces, tries the whole name first, then a name that starts with what you said, then one that contains your words. If several snippets match, you hear how many and the list opens so you can choose. If none do, you hear “No snippet called sign off” and nothing is written.
• “insert abbreviation” (or “expand abbreviation”) and its trigger writes what that abbreviation stands for.

A snippet with blanks to fill in is written with each blank as its name in square brackets, like [name]. Say “select name” and then the real name, and the blank is filled.

Whatever goes in, it goes in as one phrase: one Ctrl+Z takes it out, and so does “scratch that”. The read-back keeps it short, “Snippet sign off” or “Pasted slot 3”, rather than reading the whole thing to you. These commands do not work while Just write what I say is on, because commands are off then.

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.

With any engine you can also say “correct” and the words that came out wrong, then say the right ones (see “Moving and selecting by voice”), or “spell that” to spell the last phrase out (see “Letters, numbers and symbols”).

Speech engines for Live Dictation

Speech engines. You have four to choose from:

• Moonshine, the default. It is fast even on a modest computer.
• Whisper, a little slower. Try it if Moonshine often mishears you. Moonshine and Whisper are both built in, and both are English. This Whisper comes with QUILL; it is not the whisper.cpp engine that transcription uses, which downloads the first time you need it.
• Windows speech recognition works in any speech language installed in Windows, but adds no punctuation of its own.
• Windows voice typing hands over to Windows+H, where none of the commands apply.
• OpenAI, only with your own OpenAI key and only if you choose it. Your speech is sent to OpenAI; see “OpenAI dictation, with your own key” below.

Larger models you download for better accuracy join this list; see “Better accuracy: optional speech models” below.

The wake phrase

The wake phrase. Switch on Listen for the wake phrase while dictation is off in Dictation Settings, then say “Quill dictate” (or a phrase of your own, at least two words) to start without touching the keyboard. Anything you say after it in the same breath is written.

While the wake phrase is on, the microphone is open whenever QUILL is the window in front. Nothing it hears is written, kept or sent unless it begins with the wake phrase, and the microphone closes when another program comes to the front. It never listens in the background.

Your own words and phrases

Your own words and phrases. Edit My Words and Phrases… in Dictation Settings opens your dictation.md, the same file Locked Dictation reads. Vocabulary entries correct near misses to your spelling. Replacements (say => write, with \n for a new line) are spoken phrases of your own.

Dictation Settings (Alt+Shift+F6)

Dictation Settings – Alt+Shift+F6 (press Alt+Shift+F6) is where Live Dictation is set up. Each choice is listed here with its setting name in brackets:

• The speech engine (windows_dictation_engine).
• The dictation language (windows_dictation_speech_language): English, or Spanish. See “Dictating in Spanish” below.
• The language for Windows speech recognition (windows_dictation_language).
• The microphone (windows_dictation_microphone, saved by name).
• What you hear after each phrase (windows_dictation_phrase_feedback): a sound, the words read back, both (the default), or neither.
• What “dash” writes (windows_dictation_dash): em dash, spaced en dash, or two hyphens.
• The start, stop and error tones (windows_dictation_cue_sounds).
• Saying “Dictation on” and “Dictation off” (windows_dictation_announce).
• The wake phrase (windows_dictation_wake_enabled, windows_dictation_wake_phrase).
• The stop phrase (windows_dictation_stop_phrase). It is “stop dictation” until you choose your own words, said on their own after a pause. “stop dictation” always works too.

Five finer choices sit beside them:

• Automatic punctuation for Moonshine and Whisper (windows_dictation_auto_punctuation). Turn it off and you say every mark.
• The pause before a phrase is written (windows_dictation_pause): Short (half a second), Normal (under a second), Long (about a second and a half), Longer (2 seconds) or Longest (3 seconds). The two longest are for when you like to take your time between words. The cost is that every phrase waits that long before it is written.
• Remove filler words such as um and uh (windows_dictation_remove_fillers).
• Stop dictation after silence (windows_dictation_silence_minutes): never, 1, 5 or 10 minutes.
• Just write what I say (windows_dictation_continuous), for talking in one long run. A pause then puts in no full stop, plays nothing and reads nothing back, and voice commands are written as words. Only spoken marks and the stop phrase are still obeyed.

When you stop in the middle of a thought. Sometimes you pause to think halfway through a sentence, and the engine puts a full stop there. If the phrase ends on a word no sentence ends on, such as “a”, “the”, “of”, “to”, “and”, “but”, “my”, “very” or “really”, QUILL takes that full stop back out and joins the next phrase on. So “this is a very” [pause] “good test” comes out as one sentence: “This is a very good test.” A full stop you said yourself is never taken back.

Test Microphone records four seconds and tells you how loud it was and what the engine heard. Better Accuracy: Speech Models… (Alt+B) opens the optional models described in “Better accuracy: optional speech models” below. More Dictation Settings… (Alt+A) opens the window described next.

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.

In settings files these are windows_dictation_hold_to_talk, windows_dictation_preview, windows_dictation_ai_send, windows_dictation_ai_pause, windows_dictation_ai_remove_fillers, windows_dictation_ai_auto_punctuation, windows_dictation_openai_consent, windows_dictation_openai_model, windows_dictation_readback_marks and windows_dictation_transcript_timestamps.

A failure is always spoken, whatever these settings say. If the read-back plays through speakers, the microphone can hear it, so use headphones or choose a sound only.

Dictating in Spanish

You can dictate in Spanish. This is new, so treat it as something to try, and tell us how it goes.

To switch it on, open Dictation Settings (Alt+Shift+F6), move to Dictation language, choose Spanish, and press Enter. That’s all. To go back, choose English the same way. There is a quicker way too, with one key or by voice; see “Switching between English and Spanish” below.

What works now:

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

Commands stay in English for now. “Scratch that”, “select that”, “new paragraph” and the rest work exactly as they do in English. Spanish commands are on the way, once a native speaker has checked them.

Punctuation. With automatic punctuation on (the usual setting), Whisper puts in the commas, full stops and question marks for you, so just speak. 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 we don’t want “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 whole list.

This is new, and we’d love to hear from you. 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.

Switching between English and Spanish

If you write in both languages, you do not need to open Dictation Settings each time. Any of these switches you over, even in the middle of dictating:

• Press Switch Dictation Language (Ctrl+Shift+F11). Press it again to go back.
• In English, say “switch to Spanish” or “Spanish dictation”.
• In Spanish, say “cambiar a inglés” or “dictado en inglés”. The accent on “inglés” is optional, so it works however the engine writes it.

You hear “Español.” or “English.” so you know where you are. QUILL remembers the choice, so next time you start dictating it is in the language you last used.

The first time you switch to Spanish in a session it can take a few seconds, because the speech engine is getting ready for the new language (with Moonshine, which only knows English, that means loading Whisper). After that, switching back and forth is quick, because both stay ready until you close QUILL.

QUILL does not guess the language phrase by phrase. You choose it, and it stays that way until you switch again. That means a Spanish name in the middle of an English sentence will be heard as English; for those, add the name to My Words and Phrases, or say “spell that” and spell it.

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.
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 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 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.

Talking to the AI

You can have a spoken conversation with AI help. Open the AI Conversation window (see the AI 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.

Where the words go

Where the words go. Into the document you started in, replacing any selection. Each phrase is one step for Ctrl+Z.

Your words go where you were when you started speaking. If you move the cursor, or switch to another tab or 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, if you speak while another tab, window, program or dialog is in front, nothing is written: dictation stops and tells you why. Closing the document stops it too. A live transcript is the one exception, and the next section explains it.

Live transcripts

A live transcript is for when you want everything written down and you do not want to steer: a meeting, a lecture, a long think out loud. Press Start or Stop Live Transcript (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+PageDown). QUILL opens a new, untitled document, never the one you were working in, and writes everything it hears into it.

It behaves differently from ordinary dictation, on purpose:

• It just writes. Voice commands are written as words; only the stop phrase is obeyed. There is no tone and no read-back after each phrase, no wake phrase, and it never stops because the room went quiet.
• It tidies as it goes. Filler words like um and uh are left out, and automatic punctuation is on.
• A long pause starts a new paragraph. Four seconds or more of quiet, and the next words begin a fresh paragraph. If you turn on Time stamps in live transcripts in More Dictation Settings, each paragraph starts with the time in square brackets, like [10:42].
• The words always go at the end. You can switch to another document, or another program altogether, and the transcript carries on writing at its own end. If you go back into the transcript to read or fix something, your place is kept and new words still arrive at the bottom.

The status bar keeps a count, for example “Live transcript: 12 minutes, 1,840 words”, and Dictation Status (Alt+F9) tells you the same.

To stop, press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+PageDown again, or Ctrl+F11. You hear “Live transcript stopped, 1,840 words.” The document stays open and is not saved yet, so save it when you are ready. Until then QUILL’s recovery protects it, the same as any unsaved document.

The very first time you start one, you hear: “Please record other people only when they have agreed.” It is said once, and that is the only reminder.

A live transcript listens to your microphone. It does not hear sound playing on the computer itself, so for an online meeting it picks up what reaches the microphone, not the other people’s voices through your headphones. When it is done, you can turn it into minutes or notes with a Transcript Action (see “Transcript Actions” later in this chapter).

Dictating into other programs

Dictation does not have to stay inside QUILL. Dictate Anywhere lets you dictate into your email, a web form, a chat window, almost anything with a place to type. It is run by Quill Inkwell, QUILL’s free companion app for abbreviations, so Inkwell needs to be on your computer (QUILL’s Open Quill Inkwell, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F11, offers to fetch it if it is not).

Setting it up the easy way:

1. In QUILL, open Dictation Settings (Alt+Shift+F6), then More Dictation Settings… (Alt+A).
2. Press Dictate in Other Programs… (Alt+O). Your dictation settings are saved and handed to Inkwell, and Inkwell starts.
3. If you have not chosen a key for it yet, Inkwell asks you for one now. Pick a key you do not use for anything else.

You can also choose the key yourself in Inkwell: File > Dictate Anywhere Key…. There is no key until you choose one.

Using it:

1. Go to the other program and put the cursor where you want the words.
2. Press your Dictate Anywhere key.
3. Speak, then pause. Each phrase is typed in where the cursor is.
4. Press the key again, or say “stop dictation”, when you are done.

The same engines, your own words, and most of the commands work just as they do in QUILL: punctuation, spelling, “spell that”, “caps on”, “no space on”, switching to Spanish, and “scratch that”. “Scratch that” works by pressing Backspace for you, so it only works while the same window still has the focus.

Anything that needs to read what is already in the other program cannot work there: “select”, “go to”, “correct”, clips and snippets. If you say one of those, you are told “That works in QUILL’s own documents” and nothing happens.

Out of respect for your privacy and your other programs, Dictate Anywhere will not type into a password box, into a program running as administrator (unless Inkwell is too), into Inkwell’s own window, or into QUILL itself. In QUILL, just use Ctrl+F11. Each time, you are told why in a sentence.

Inside other programs the read-back starts as a tone only, because your screen reader already echoes what is typed. Inkwell keeps its own copy of the dictation settings: in Inkwell, Dictation > Dictation Settings… (Ctrl+Alt+D) opens the same window you know from QUILL, and Dictation > Dictate Anywhere (Ctrl+D) turns it on and off from the menu. Inkwell uses the same My Words and Phrases file as QUILL, so the names you taught QUILL come out right everywhere. Dictate Anywhere is off in Safe Mode.

Dictation Context for This Document

You can tell QUILL, in a sentence, what the document in front of you is: “A formal letter to my landlord about the boiler”, or “Notes from the Tuesday book club”. Some engines use that to choose words and style better.

Press Dictation Context for This Document… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+PageUp). The window has:

• This document is: a box for your sentence.
• Start from a saved context: a list of contexts you saved before, then a few starters: Formal letter, Note to a friend, Technical writing, Meeting notes and Story. Choose one to fill the box, then change it as you like.
• Also save it as a context named: give it a name if you will want it again.
• Who uses it: a line you can read but not change, saying which of your settings will use the context.

QUILL remembers the context for that document, by where it is saved, so it is there next time you open it. For an untitled document it lasts until you close QUILL. You can also pick a saved one by voice: say “dictation context” and its name, for example “dictation context meeting notes”.

Who uses it. OpenAI dictation sends it along with your speech, so names and words fit the subject. Tidy Dictated Text (Ctrl+F3) uses it beside your My Dictation Instructions. The engines on your own computer cannot use it, and the window tells you so. Your context only goes where your speech or text is already going; it is never sent anywhere new.

Dictation Status

Not sure whether dictation is listening, or in which language? Press Dictation Status (Alt+F9). You hear what dictation is doing right now, including the engine and the language, and during a live transcript, how long it has run and how many words it has written.

Alt+F9 is also Locked Dictation’s status key. When Locked Dictation is recording or paused, it tells you about that; the rest of the time it answers for Live Dictation.

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.

If dictation will not start, it tells you why: no microphone, microphone access turned off for desktop apps in Windows Settings, Privacy and security, Microphone, or (for Windows speech recognition) no speech language installed.

Live Dictation and Locked Dictation each keep their own microphone choice.

Dictating well

Dictation gets much better with a few habits, and none of them are hard. This is what is worth knowing before you sit down to dictate for the first time.

Your microphone

Any microphone works, but the closer it is to your mouth and the further from everything else, the better your words come out.

• A headset is best. A USB or Bluetooth headset with a boom microphone stays the same distance from your mouth however you move your head. That steadiness matters more than price.
• Place it just off to the side. About two fingers from the corner of your mouth, not straight in front, so your breath does not puff into it.
• A laptop’s own microphone will do in a quiet room, but it also hears the keyboard, the fan and your screen reader. If words keep coming out wrong, a headset is the first thing to try.
• Check it. Test Microphone in Dictation Settings (Alt+Shift+F6) records four seconds and tells you how loud you were and what the engine heard. If it says you are quiet, move the microphone closer before you turn anything up.

The room

A quiet room helps more than any setting. A television, a radio or a conversation across the room gets heard as words. Close a door if you can. Hard, bare rooms echo; a room with soft furnishings sounds better to a microphone than a kitchen does.

Speaking in phrases

Talk in phrases, the way you would read a sentence aloud to someone, and pause at the natural places. Each pause sends a phrase to be written, so a phrase is also the size of thing “scratch that” takes back.

• Speak at your normal pace. Slowing down to one word at a time actually makes it harder for the engine, because it uses the words around each word to work out what you meant.
• Finish the thought before you pause where you can. If you do stop halfway, on a word like “the” or “and”, QUILL joins the two halves for you (see “When you stop in the middle of a thought”).
• If you are a thoughtful speaker who often pauses between words, and dictation keeps writing your sentence in pieces, choose a longer Pause before a phrase is written in Dictation Settings. Longer waits two seconds and Longest three. Your words will appear a little later after each pause, but they will come out whole. If you talk quickly and want your words fast, Short is for you.

Punctuation: say it or let it be

With Moonshine, Whisper and the downloaded models, automatic punctuation is on, and for ordinary writing the easiest thing is to just talk and let the engine put in full stops, commas and question marks.

Say a mark when you want something particular: “new paragraph” to start one, “colon” before a list, “open quote” and “close quote” around a quotation, or a comma the engine would not have guessed. Your spoken mark always wins. If you would rather say every mark yourself, turn Automatic punctuation off, and the engine will write only what you say.

Two habits that help: say “new paragraph” as a phrase of its own, and say “period” at the end of a sentence you want to be sure is finished. The read-back says each mark by name, so you always hear whether it went in.

Fixing mistakes as you go

Every engine gets a word wrong now and then. Fixing it by voice soon becomes a quick loop:

1. “scratch that” takes back the whole last phrase. Say it again, a little more clearly.
2. “correct” and the wrong words (for example “correct red rocks”) selects them. Say the right words and they replace the wrong ones.
3. “select” and some words does the same for anything further back.
4. “spell that” is for a name or a word the engine has never heard. Spell it with the phonetic alphabet in your next phrase.
5. Recent Phrases (Shift+F11) shows what was written for your last twenty phrases, so you can see what went wrong.
6. When you are done, Tidy Dictated Text (Ctrl+F3) can fix sound-alike words, names and punctuation in a paragraph or a selection with AI, if you have a ChatGPT subscription or your own OpenAI key (see “Tidy Dictated Text” later in this chapter).

If the same word comes out wrong again and again, add it to My Words and Phrases (Alt+Shift+F10). That fixes it for good, in every engine.

Dictating with a screen reader running

QUILL was built for this. Two things make it smooth:

• Wear headphones. If the read-back and your screen reader come out of speakers, the microphone hears them, and they can end up in your document. With headphones, the microphone only hears you.
• Choose what you hear. After each phrase QUILL plays a soft tone and reads the phrase back, marks and all, so you can check it without moving the cursor. If that is more than you want, set What you hear after each phrase in Dictation Settings to a sound only, and read the line with your screen reader when you choose to. If you would like to hear the words but not the marks, turn off Say punctuation marks in the read-back in More Dictation Settings.

While dictation is listening, QUILL keeps the speech engine light enough that your screen reader stays quick. If you find it slowing down, see “On a modest computer” and the choices below.

Choosing a speech engine

• Moonshine (built in) is the place to start. It is quick on any computer and good with a clear voice and a decent microphone.
• Whisper (built in) is a little slower and sometimes better with accents or a busier room. It is also what QUILL uses for Spanish.
• A downloaded model, such as Nemotron or Parakeet, is more accurate, especially with names, accents and fast speech, and still runs entirely on your computer. It needs a reasonably capable computer; see “Better accuracy: optional speech models”.
• OpenAI, with your own key, is the most accurate of all and is very good with names, but your speech is sent to OpenAI and they charge you for it. See “OpenAI dictation, with your own key”.

Try one for a day before you judge it. Everyone’s voice suits a different engine.

Spanish

Everything here holds for Spanish too. Use Whisper or a many-language downloaded model; the larger ones are much better in Spanish than the built-in one. Let automatic punctuation do the marks, and switch languages with Ctrl+Shift+F11 or by saying “switch to Spanish” (see “Switching between English and Spanish”).

On an older or slower computer

Stay with the built-in Moonshine; it uses very little. Choose Normal or a longer pause rather than Short, close programs you are not using, and keep the laptop plugged in while you dictate, because battery saver slows everything down.

Practice: try these

Here are two short paragraphs to read aloud. Start Live Dictation with Ctrl+F11 in a new document, read each line as one phrase, and pause at the end of each. Then compare what you got with what should come out.

Practice one: let the engine punctuate. Just read these naturally, with no marks:

Dear Sam [pause] thank you for the lovely flowers they arrived this morning [pause] I will see you on Saturday at the market [pause]

What should come out, more or less:

Dear Sam. Thank you for the lovely flowers, they arrived this morning. I will
see you on Saturday at the market.

If “Dear Sam” came out with a full stop you do not want, say “scratch that” and try “Dear Sam comma new paragraph” instead.

Practice two: say the marks. Read these exactly as written, marks and all:

heading two shopping list [pause] bullet milk comma eggs and bread [pause] bullet ask Sam about the party question mark [pause]

What should come out:

## Shopping list
- Milk, eggs and bread
- Ask Sam about the party?

Then try “correct eggs”, say “butter”, and listen to it change. If “Sam” came out as some other word, say “correct” and that word, then “Sam” again.

To practise with QUILL leading you step by step, see the dictation lessons in the Tutorials, described at the end of this chapter.

Locked Dictation (Ctrl+F9)

Locked Dictation is a keyboard-only way to dictate a longer passage without opening a dialog or leaving the editor. It uses the same on-device Whisper engine and microphone as Dictate (Offline), so nothing is uploaded.

1. Put your cursor where the text should go.
2. Press Ctrl+F9. QUILL says “Locked dictation on.”
3. Speak as long as you like, across sentences and paragraphs.
4. Press Ctrl+F9 again to finish. QUILL transcribes what you said and inserts it at the cursor as one undoable edit.

There used to be a press-and-hold F9 mode. It was removed, because a held key repeats and announces itself endlessly under a screen reader.

Stopping, pausing and checking

• Stopping safely. While recording, Escape stops and keeps your speech for transcription. Shift+Escape cancels and throws it away. A session also stops by itself after five minutes, and it stops and keeps your audio if QUILL loses focus.
• Pause and status. Ctrl+Shift+F9 pauses or resumes the session. Alt+F9 speaks the current state without changing anything. When Locked Dictation is not recording, the same key answers for Live Dictation instead (see “Dictation Status”).
• Distinct sound, one-time hint. Locked Dictation plays its own sounds, and the very first time you dictate, QUILL speaks a short hint about the keys.
• Remappable. Ctrl+F9 and the rest are only the defaults. Change them in the Keymap Editor (Tools > Customize and Support > Keymap Editor…).

To use Locked Dictation you need an offline speech model installed (Tools > Speech > Manage Speech Models) and the optional microphone-capture support. In Safe Mode, dictation is turned off.

Nothing is lost

Nothing is lost. Your audio is saved to a recovery folder before transcription starts, and a transcript that cannot be safely inserted is kept for you to review.

Dictation History & Review. Tools > Speech > Locked Dictation > Dictation History & Review… lists every recording whose transcript was never inserted: ones left behind by a crash, and ones that could not be placed safely. For each you can insert it at the cursor, copy it, or discard it. Enter inserts the selected row. If anything is waiting for review when QUILL starts, QUILL tells you and points you here, so dictated speech is never silently lost.

Locked Dictation settings

Dictation Settings. Tools > Speech > Locked Dictation > Dictation Settings… holds the choices the dictation engine reads:

• the session time limit
• stop and keep speech when QUILL loses focus
• intelligent insertion spacing
• a reset that brings back the one-time first-use hint

Parakeet 3 and silence

Parakeet 3: the most reliable dictation engine, and QUILL prefers it once you install it. Whisper has a well-known flaw for dictation. Give it silence (a pause while you think, a breath before you stop) and it sometimes invents text, most famously a phantom “thank you”. Parakeet 3 only writes words when it actually hears them, so silence produces nothing.

Parakeet 3 is an NVIDIA model. It knows 25 languages, detects the language by itself, runs on the CPU only, and is about a 650 MB download from Manage Speech Models. Once its model is installed, dictation switches to it automatically. If you have chosen an engine yourself, that choice is always respected, and removing the model simply returns you to Whisper. Nothing else changes: same keys, same review, same recovery.

Silence is trimmed before transcription. QUILL removes the quiet lead-in and tail from each dictation take before the engine hears it. A recording with no speech in it at all gets the “no speech” sound, so no engine gets the chance to make something up. This applies to every engine, Whisper included, and there is nothing to set.

Teach dictation your words

Teach dictation your words. A small file called dictation.md in your QUILL data folder holds your own vocabulary (so names and jargon come back spelled right), spoken-to-written replacements (such as “new line” becoming a real line break), and spoken command phrases of your own. It applies to Locked Dictation and the Dictate (Offline) toggle.

Your vocabulary is used twice. Engines that accept a hint, such as Whisper, are steered toward your words before they transcribe. Then every engine, including Parakeet 3, which takes no hints, gets a fuzzy correction pass afterwards. It recognises near misses by spelling and by sound, so “charge b” comes back as “ChargeBee” exactly as you wrote it, capitals and all. Names split in two, words run together, and “R&D” heard as “r and d” are all repaired. Ordinary words are left alone.

The Voice Interaction guide (voice-interaction.md), in its section “Teaching dictation your words,” explains the file format and how to choose a speech engine (Whisper’s small models, Parakeet 3, or Nemotron).

Filler words

Filler words can be removed, but only if you ask. This option is off by default. Turn it on with the dictation_remove_fillers setting, and hesitations like “uh” and “hmm” are taken out of your transcripts. It pays attention to language: “um” is only removed when your dictation language says that is safe, because in Portuguese “um” means “a” or “an”, and in German it means “at” or “around”. When QUILL cannot tell the language, it only removes sounds that are fillers in every language.

Dictate (Offline)

Dictate (Offline) on Tools > Speech is a simple toggle that speaks straight into your document.

1. Choose it, or press the QUILL key (Ctrl+Shift+Grave) then Shift+D. QUILL plays a start tone and the status bar shows “Dictation listening”.
2. Speak.
3. Choose it again to stop. QUILL plays a stop tone, transcribes what you said in the background, and inserts the text at your cursor as one undoable edit. The status bar shows the word count.

Dictation Microphone… on the same menu chooses which microphone this dictation uses, or the system default.

Transcribing a recording

When you have a recording rather than a live voice, QUILL can turn it into text in three ways: with Live Dictation’s speech engines (Shift+F5), with the offline engine from Tools > Speech, or with a cloud service from the AI menu. Whichever you use, you get a draft to read and correct, because automatic transcription is never perfect.

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. Transcribe a Recording listens to it and writes down what was said, using the same speech engines as Live Dictation: the two built in, any you downloaded, or OpenAI with your own key. It works in the background, so you can keep writing while it listens, and it tells you when it is done. It is the same command, with the same window and the same key, in QUILL Lite.

How it differs from the other two ways in this section: it needs nothing downloaded and no ffmpeg, because it uses the models dictation already has and reads recordings with parts of Windows; it can use any speech model you downloaded for dictation; and it writes paragraphs, with times if you want them, straight into a document. Transcribe Audio or Video (Offline) is the one for video files, captions and speaker labels, and AI > Transcribe Audio File is the one for Transcript Actions such as meeting minutes.

Your first transcription, step by step

1. Press Shift+F5, or choose Tools > Speech > Live 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. The transcript is not inserted into the document you are editing. When it is ready, its completion notice appears in Notifications; activate that notice when you are ready to open the privately saved transcript.
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.” The completion notice stays in Notifications so you can open the result later.

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, 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 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

• The document in front stays untouched. There is no destination picker, and the transcript is not inserted into the text you were editing.
• Open it when you are ready. QUILL saves the transcript privately and adds a completion notice to Notifications. Activate that notice to open the transcript in the editor. Save the document with Ctrl+S if you want a separate file in a location you choose.

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 completed recording gets its own notice in Notifications. Activate a notice to open that transcript. 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 what it said. Open Notifications to find and reopen a completed transcript. Shift+F9 opens Activity, which keeps every transcription this session, finished or failed, with the reason when something went wrong.

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 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.

Transcribe on your computer

QUILL can transcribe entirely on your computer, with no cloud account and without uploading your audio. No AI account or key is required, and you do not need to turn on Artificial Intelligence to use it.

1. Choose Tools > Speech > Transcribe Audio or Video (Offline)….
2. Pick an audio or video file.
3. Choose a transcript format: plain text, Markdown, or HTML.
4. Keep working while it runs in the background. QUILL tells you when it is done and how many words it produced, and opens the result as a draft document you can edit.

The first time you transcribe or dictate offline, QUILL may need to fetch its speech engine and a model. It offers to do that for you. The Speech section later in this chapter explains models and engines.

Supported formats and FFmpeg

Supported formats. You can pick MP3, M4A, AAC, FLAC, OGG, Opus, WMA, WAV, MP4, M4V, MOV, MKV, WebM, or AVI.

If ffmpeg is installed, QUILL converts the file for you before transcribing, so you never have to make a WAV yourself. QUILL does not ship ffmpeg, but it can fetch it:

• Tools > Speech > Download FFmpeg… downloads the official build (about 110 MB, with a progress bar you can cancel) and sets it up.
• Or install it yourself once (for example, winget install Gyan.FFmpeg) and QUILL finds it on your PATH.

ffmpeg is open source (GPL/LGPL) and comes straight from the official builder. QUILL never bundles or redistributes it. Without ffmpeg, the whisper.cpp engine needs a 16 kHz mono WAV, while the Faster Whisper engine can handle the other formats by itself.

Captions and speaker labels

• Generate Captions (Offline)… on Tools > Speech transcribes a file with timestamps and saves the result as SRT or VTT caption files.
• Speaker attribution. If you download the “Small English with speaker detection” model (in Manage Speech Models), QUILL marks who is speaking when. Each turn is labelled “Speaker 1”, “Speaker 2”, and so on in the transcript, in bold in Markdown and HTML. It tells the turns apart; it does not name the people.

Transcribe Audio File

If you have AI set up, AI > Transcribe Audio File… sends a recording to OpenAI Whisper in the cloud.

1. Choose AI > Transcribe Audio File…. A file picker opens.
2. Pick the audio file. Supported formats: MP3, MP4, M4A, WAV, WEBM, OGG, FLAC (maximum 25 MB).
3. Choose your options:
   • Language: detect it automatically, or pick a language for better accuracy.
   • Speaker diarization (uses Deepgram): works out who is speaking when. Each turn is labelled Speaker 1, Speaker 2, and so on, with timestamps. This needs a Deepgram API key set up in AI Hub.
   • Translate to English: transcribes audio in any language and gives you an English translation in one step (Whisper translation mode).

When the transcript is ready, QUILL asks “What would you like me to make of this?” and offers a short list of Transcript Actions, chosen to suit the recording. Pick one and QUILL turns the transcript into a finished document, such as meeting minutes, action items, study notes or a clean draft, and opens it for you to review and edit. Or choose “Just keep the transcript” to go to the viewer, where you can copy it, insert it at the cursor, or open it as a new document. If AI is turned off, you go straight to the viewer.

AI > Translate Audio File to English… goes straight to the Whisper translation, skipping the language step.

Transcript Actions

A transcript is rarely what you actually need. You want the minutes, the action items, or a clean draft. Transcript Actions make that last step one choice away. You can reach them in two places:

• Right after transcription, in the “What would you like me to make of this?” chooser described above.
• Any time, on text you already have, with AI > Transcribe Audio > Transcript Actions…. Paste in a transcript or notes (or select part of your document) and pick an action.

The built-in actions are:

• Meeting Minutes: attendees, decisions, action items with owners, follow-ups.
• Action Items: every task and commitment as a numbered list you can act on.
• Executive Summary: a short briefing for leadership.
• Interview Notes: questions, answers, strengths, concerns and an assessment.
• Study Notes: a lecture or talk turned into organized notes.
• Q&A Extraction: every question and its answer in clean Q&A format.
• Clean Up & Draft: spoken rambling turned into a clean, readable draft.
• Follow-Up Email: a warm, ready-to-send recap with next steps.
• Key Quotes: the most notable quotes, word for word, with who said them.
• Decisions Log: just the decisions made, each with its reason and owner.

QUILL puts the most likely ones first for the recording in front of you. A meeting with several speakers starts with Minutes and Action Items; a single voice starts with Clean Up & Draft. Every action is always there, though. The finished document opens in a new window, so your original transcript is never overwritten. Transcript Actions use whichever AI provider you have set up in the AI Hub.

Automate transcription with watch folders

A watch folder lets you set a rule once: drop a file in this folder, and QUILL deals with it. You will find the commands on Tools > Watch Folder.

The Watch Folder menu

• Watch Folder Monitoring (in Settings)… turns on or off the automatic opening of supported files dropped into a folder you have chosen.
• Watch Folder Profiles… sets the folder path, whether subfolders count, what happens at startup, and how often the folder is checked.
• Watch Folder Queue… shows what is happening right now and the settings in use.

Watch folders are good for “drop and open” work: copy supported files into one folder and let QUILL open them in the background. They respect Do Not Disturb and run quietly.

Transcribing arriving audio

Each watch profile runs one action on every file it picks up. As well as opening, moving, copying, converting, running a macro or a sandboxed transform, and OCR, a profile can transcribe arriving audio. Any audio or video file dropped into the folder is transcribed on your machine with the offline speech engine, and a transcript is written next to it. Nothing is uploaded.

Choose the Transcript format in the profile:

• plain Text (.txt)
• SubRip captions (.srt)
• WebVTT captions (.vtt)
• Markdown (.md)

The caption formats carry timestamps. If the engine returns no timed parts, they fall back to plain text, so you never get an empty caption file. This needs no consent. If no speech model is installed yet, the profile tells you to download one from Tools > Speech > Manage Speech Models.

There is also a separate Transcribe audio (OpenAI Whisper) action for cloud transcription, once you have turned on AI and set up a key.

Making minutes automatically

A transcribe profile can also chain an AI Action onto each recording:

1. In Tools > Watch Folder > Watch Folder Profiles…, point a profile at a folder (for example, Meetings).
2. Choose a transcribe action (offline or OpenAI Whisper).
3. Under Then make, pick a Transcript Action, such as Meeting Minutes.

From then on, every recording that lands in that folder is transcribed, and the minutes document is written next to it, with a name like standup-meeting-minutes.md. If AI is off or no provider is set up, you still get the transcript. The action step is skipped with a note, never an error.

The Watch Folders page in Settings

• Enable folder watching by default starts watching your enabled profiles each time QUILL starts. It is off to begin with. Watch Folder Monitoring (in Settings)… brings you to Settings so you can turn it on.
• Default watch folder: if you just want one folder where anything you drop gets opened, you don’t need a profile. Put the folder here, and QUILL opens each new supported file that lands in it. Blank to begin with.
• Start watching automatically is the switch that watches your default folder, from the moment QUILL opens and for as long as it runs. It works on its own, so you can watch the default folder without turning on Enable folder watching by default, which starts your profiles. Safe Mode turns both off. Off to begin with.
• Include subfolders: turn this on and files in folders inside your default folder count too. Off to begin with.
• Process existing files on start: normally QUILL only opens files that arrive after it starts watching. Turn this on to have it open what’s already waiting in the default folder as well. Off to begin with.

Your profiles each have their own folder and their own Include subfolders, existing files and startup choices; these four only decide for the default folder.

• Poll interval (seconds) is how often a watched folder is checked, from 2 to 300 seconds. The default is 5.
• Watch folder: play a sound on each check plays a short tick every time the folder is checked, so silence means the watcher has stopped rather than found nothing. Off to begin with.
• Watch folder: let results interrupt speech announces a newly opened file straight away, cutting across whatever is being said. Off means the notice waits its turn.

Speech

Tools > Speech is where QUILL keeps its on-device speech tools: the transcription and dictation commands you have already met, and the speech models and engines that make them work. You do not have to understand any of this to dictate. Come here when you want a more accurate model, a lighter one for an older computer, or a different engine.

Manage Speech Models

Manage Speech Models… lists local speech models with their download size, accuracy and speed, and helps you pick one that will run well on your computer.

• The dialog opens with a one-line summary of your machine: its RAM, and whether a GPU was found.
• Each model shows roughly how much memory it needs. A model too big for your RAM is flagged.
• The best fit for your computer is marked “Recommended for your computer.”
• A larger model warns you when there is no GPU, because it will be slow on the CPU.

Choosing what to do. Pick a model, then choose an action: Download this model if it is not installed, or Remove this model from my computer if it is. Before a download starts, QUILL warns you if there is not enough free disk space.

Downloads run in the background and show progress. You can keep working. A progress window shows a percentage and has a Cancel button you can press at any time, and QUILL announces progress as it goes. Cancelling cleans up the partial file. Models come over a secure connection from the Hugging Face Hub and are stored on your computer. Downloading is turned off in Safe Mode.

Manage Speech Models is the Dictation (Offline) tab of the Speech Settings dialog. When more than one local engine is available, it asks which Speech Engine to use. A Set as Default button (or a right-click option) chooses which downloaded model QUILL uses without switching engines. QUILL remembers your choice and uses it for transcription, captions and dictation.

Choosing a speech engine

Choosing a speech engine. QUILL uses the whisper.cpp engine by default. You can add two more optional engines, each by installing what it depends on:

• Faster Whisper (fasterwhisper dependency): a faster engine for many languages. It runs inside QUILL and uses your GPU automatically when you have one.
• Vosk (vosk dependency): a very low-resource, CPU-only English engine that runs on a ~40 MB model with no GPU. It is ideal for older or smaller machines where the other engines are impractical. Its models download from alphacephei.com (verified HTTPS, integrity-checked) through Manage Speech Models.

Each engine has its own models, so download a model after switching. All of them run entirely on your computer. Faster Whisper does not label speakers; for speaker attribution, use the whisper.cpp speaker-detection model.

Getting the offline engine

Download Offline Speech Engine… The private, on-device speech engine (whisper.cpp) is not bundled in the installer. The first time you use offline dictation or transcription, QUILL offers to download it for you: about 8 MB, checksum-verified, with a progress bar you can cancel. It is turned off in Safe Mode. You can also fetch it any time from Tools > Speech > Download Offline Speech Engine…, or from the all-in-one Help > Download Optional Components list described below. If you are upgrading from a version that bundled the engine, your existing copy is kept and keeps working, with nothing to download.

The installer does not include it and has no option to add it. In a portable copy you can also place the executable under tools\speech\whispercpp yourself. You do not need to install anything else or change your PATH. Then download a model from Manage Speech Models.

Offline dictation also needs microphone-capture support (the optional sounddevice package). If it is missing, QUILL tells you, and you can still use Windows dictation.

Download Vosk… Vosk is a tiny, very light offline dictation and transcription engine for older or low-memory computers with no graphics card. It is not bundled. Tools > Speech > Download Vosk (or the Optional Components list) installs it when you ask, checksum-verified and turned off in Safe Mode, from QUILL’s own verified download, falling back to the public package index. whisper.cpp stays the default engine; Vosk is the lightweight fallback when you need it.

Hugging Face Token

Hugging Face Token… on Tools > Speech is optional. QUILL’s speech models are open source (MIT) and need no Hugging Face account to download. If you fetch a lot of models and run into Hugging Face’s rate limits, a free access token raises them.

The first time you open it, QUILL explains the steps: sign in or sign up at huggingface.co, open Settings > Access Tokens, and create a token with the Read role. It offers to open the token page in your browser, and then you paste the token in. The box hides what you type, and the token is stored in Windows Credential Manager, never in a settings file. Leave the box blank to remove a saved token.

Cloud transcription providers

The offline engines keep everything on your machine. If you also want a cloud provider, for example OpenAI Whisper for its accuracy, install the OpenAI Whisper Transcription Quillin (a bundled extension) and set up an OpenAI API key in AI Hub. It then shows up as a provider on the Dictation (Online) tab of Speech Settings. That tab is kept apart from the offline engines, so local engines (install once) and cloud ones (API key, paid per use) are never mixed in one list. If no cloud provider is installed, the tab tells you how to add one.

Cloud providers are opt-in and never silent:

• Audio is uploaded only when you choose to transcribe a file with that provider. Never offline, and never in Safe Mode.
• The watch folder’s offline transcription always uses the on-device engines, so a cloud provider can never upload your audio automatically.
• An extension that adds a provider contains no code and asks for no network permission. QUILL does the upload itself, through its own checked network path, so the extension never sees your audio or your key.

Developers can read more in the Quillin guide, “Transcription providers”.

The Transcription page in Settings

• Transcription provider preference is Local first (the default) or Cloud first, for when you have both kinds of provider.
• Show cloud transcription providers lists cloud providers beside the ones on your computer. On to begin with.
• Auto-open Status Page on model download opens the Status Page whenever a speech model starts downloading. Off to begin with.
• Status page refresh announcements is how often the Status Page speaks its updates: Quiet (the default) says nothing on its own, Normal speaks about every thirty seconds, and Verbose about every ten.
• QUILL Whisperer safe mode lock stops speech-model downloads and retries while leaving the status pages working.
• Voice commands (push-to-talk) and Voice conversation mode turn on the voice commands described in Chapter 8.
• Voice recognition engine chooses what listens for voice commands: Follow main engine, whisper.cpp (accurate) or Vosk (fast, light), which suits always-listening best.
• Four settings pace conversation mode, all in milliseconds, and 0 switches each part off: Conversation: pause before a command ends (ms) (2000 to begin with; 0 uses the engine’s own pause), Conversation: cancel window before acting (ms) (900), Conversation: keep listening after a command (ms) (3000) and Conversation: ‘still working’ tick interval (ms) (2000).
• Conversation: your name (optional) lets QUILL use your name in its prompts, as in “Listening, Sam.” Leave it blank for plain prompts.
• Conversation: speak prompts aloud speaks the welcome and follow-up prompts with your Read Aloud voice. It is off to begin with, so QUILL does not talk over your screen reader; the sounds and the status bar still tell you what is happening.

Download Optional Components (Help menu)

To keep the installer small, QUILL fetches several large or optional pieces only when you want them. Help > Download Optional Components… is the one place to see, get, test and remove them all.

Everything here is optional. The base app, and the SAPI 5 voices built into Windows, work without any of it, so download only what you need. In portable mode, components install into your portable data folder, so your whole setup travels with you on the drive.

What is in the list

The list puts the most important first:

• Pandoc: document conversion for Word, ODT, EPUB and RTF.
• PDF and Office text extraction (MarkItDown, pdfplumber and pypdf): lets Import read the text out of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and PDF documents without Pandoc or LibreOffice. Scanned or image-only PDFs still need File > Import > OCR either way.
• The braille translation pack: liblouis tables and BRF profiles for the Translation submenu and for BRF and embossing export.
• Dictation (offline speech): a guided setup covering Whisper.cpp, Faster Whisper and Vosk, described below.
• Kokoro and Piper neural voices, and eSpeak NG and DECtalk voices.
• Audio: export, playback & chapters: FFmpeg for exporting compressed audio, the mpv playback engine, and MP3 audiobook chapter markers, all in one place. Each piece is fetched only when its feature is first used.
• The MathCAT math-speech engine.
• Git and the GitHub CLI: portable fallback copies for Tools > Git and GitHub > Local Git and the Codespaces and Copilot commands on Tools > GitHub. The section “Downloading git and the GitHub CLI”, where this guide covers Git and GitHub, has more.
• The Node.js runtime, for Node Quillins and the Developer Console’s TypeScript interface. It comes last, as the extra people use least.
• Any non-English spell-check dictionaries.

Each row shows whether it is Installed or Available to download, and its size. Selecting a row shows a plain description of what it gives you and what it costs.

Download, Test, Remove and Set as Default

• Download fetches a component you do not have yet, checksum-verified, with its own progress.
• Test proves an installed component works, so you can trust it before you rely on it. A voice speaks a short sample so you actually hear it. The offline speech engine transcribes a spoken phrase and tells you what it heard. Tools report their version. If a component just needs one more piece, Test takes you straight to it: the guided engine-and-model picker for offline speech, or Manage Voices for a voice engine with no voice yet. An unfinished setup is not treated as an error, and QUILL only offers to send a bug report when a test really fails.
• Remove deletes QUILL’s downloaded copy of a component and turns its features back off. Removing a voice engine you were using, for example, switches Read Aloud back to the system voice. It only ever removes copies QUILL downloaded, never a system tool or a shared install.
• Set as Default: for a voice engine (Kokoro, Piper and the other Read Aloud engines), the Set as Default button here makes that engine, and a voice you pick from it, your Read Aloud default without opening another speech dialog. The button is only available for a component that can be a Read Aloud default, and only once it is installed. The same Set as Default is also in Manage Speech Models and Manage Voices (with a right-click option on the list), for the offline dictation model and for voices. Downloading a model or voice engine makes it the default automatically; use these when you want to switch back to one you already have. Voice previews stop cleanly when you move to another before the first one finishes.

Setting up offline dictation

The Dictation (offline speech) row opens a guided setup instead of a plain download. It takes you one step at a time, and a banner at the top always says which step you are on and the one thing to do next:

1. Pick and install an engine: Whisper.cpp (light and fast), Faster Whisper (most accurate), Parakeet 3 (the most reliable for dictation, described earlier in this chapter), or Vosk (tiny, best for old or low-memory machines).
2. Download a model. The best fit for your computer is already selected.
3. Choose Test dictation to make sure it works, then set it as your default.

QUILL remembers the engine you chose, so the setup reopens where you left off instead of going back to the built-in engine.

Pandoc on demand

Pandoc downloads itself when you need it. You do not have to visit this dialog first. The moment you Import or Export a Word, ODT, EPUB or RTF document (or run Convert File) without Pandoc, QUILL offers to download the official, pinned build right there: about 45 MB, verified, with a progress bar. The conversion is ready as soon as it finishes. Plain text and Markdown never need Pandoc, which is why it is not bundled.

On a Mac

On macOS, several of these come from Homebrew rather than a QUILL download.

• The braille translation pack download contains a Windows lou_translate program, so on macOS QUILL points you to brew install liblouis instead. QUILL finds a Homebrew liblouis by itself, so no download is needed.
• Pandoc and Tesseract work the same way. Install them with Homebrew (brew install pandoc, brew install tesseract) and QUILL finds them.
• LibreOffice, used to import older Office formats and Apple Pages, is found automatically at its standard /Applications/LibreOffice.app location on macOS (it is never on PATH there). Install it from libreoffice.org or with brew install --cask libreoffice if you need those imports.

Performance and Memory

QUILL is built to run all of its AI and speech features on a modest computer with no graphics card and not much memory. It does that by being careful with memory, never by switching features off. Two settings under Settings > Performance and Memory control it:

• Unload idle models after (minutes) frees the memory used by an AI, read-aloud or dictation model you have stopped using. The next time you need it, QUILL loads it again by itself. Set it to 0 to keep models loaded until you close QUILL.
• Low-resource mode (one model at a time) keeps only one model loaded at a time and prefers the smallest model that fits. It never turns off AI or speech. It loads them one at a time, so you wait a moment for a reload in exchange for using much less memory. On a machine with very little memory it turns on automatically and tells you once, out loud, so it never takes you by surprise.

You do not have to touch either of these. QUILL picks sensible defaults for your machine, but they are there if you want to tune how much memory it uses.

What you learned, and where to go next

You can now dictate with Live Dictation (Ctrl+F11), pressing it to start and again to stop, or holding it while you talk once you turn that on, with Locked Dictation (Ctrl+F9) or with Dictate (Offline), and teach QUILL your own words in dictation.md. You know that your words go where you started speaking, how to see them while you talk with Nemotron or OpenAI, how to say “correct that”, how to talk to the AI out loud, and what OpenAI dictation sends and how to turn it on or off. You can spell, select, correct and move by voice, put in snippets and Copy Tray slots, switch between English and Spanish with Ctrl+Shift+F11, keep a live transcript with Ctrl+Alt+Shift+PageDown, and dictate into other programs through Quill Inkwell. You can transcribe a recording on your own computer or with AI > Transcribe Audio File…, turn it into minutes or notes with Transcript Actions, and set a watch folder to do all of that for you. You also know where speech models, optional components and the memory settings live.

To practise with QUILL beside you, open Help > Tutorials… (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and try “Write by talking”. The same track, “How much QUILL says”, also has five short dictation lessons: “Punctuation and symbols by voice”, “Fix a word by voice”, “Snippets and clips by voice”, “Switch to Spanish and back” and “Make a live transcript”. Each takes a few minutes, with QUILL telling you what to say. The Dictation commands page and the Voice Interaction guide are the best companions to this chapter.

Next, Chapter 10, AI, when you want it, shows what the assistant can do with your writing, including the AI behind Transcript Actions.

Chapter 10: AI, when you want it

This chapter is about the AI help built into QUILL, and the first thing to know is that you never have to use it. QUILL is a complete editor without it, and nothing you write is sent anywhere until you ask. If you would like a paragraph summarised, tidied or explained, QUILL’s own free AI is ready with no account and no key. If you already pay for ChatGPT, or have your own key, you can use those instead, and further on you will find the library where you can save your own prompts, skills and agents.

QUILL’s own free AI

You do not need an account, a key, or a decision about which company sees your writing. QUILL runs its own AI service, it is free, and it is the first thing in the AI menu (the &AI menu, so Alt then A opens it).

What the AI menu offers

The first five are the same five commands QUILL Lite has, so anything you learn in one editor you have learned in both. Three of the five keys are the same as well. Usage and Connect differ: in QUILL, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F7 to F12 open the other QuillVille apps, so QUILL uses F2 and F4 for those two, while QUILL Lite, which has no apps to open, uses Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F9 and F10.

What it works on

The free AI works on the selection. With nothing selected it takes the paragraph you are in, or else the section. It never sends the whole file.

Nothing is applied without a keystroke from you. Every answer arrives in a window with Replace and Insert buttons, and both go through the ordinary undo list. If you typed over the text while the answer was on its way, Replace is not offered, and QUILL tells you so instead of writing the answer somewhere it does not belong.

You never wait for it, either. Requests run in the background, so you can keep typing, save, switch documents or close the window while an answer is coming.

QUILLBee’s tip: Changed your mind about an AI edit? Press Ctrl+Z. It comes back out exactly like anything else you typed.

The Free AI Assistant pad (Ctrl+Alt+G)

The pad has a list called What do you want done? with seventeen choices. Press a letter in the list to jump.

• The four basics: Summarize, Rewrite, Proofread and Explain.
• Ten writing tools: Shorten, Simplify, Make more formal, Make friendlier, Turn into a list, Find action items, Suggest headings, Continue writing, Write an email reply and Translate. When you choose Translate, a Translate into list appears with twenty languages.
• Three that need you to type: Ask a question about the document, Ask a general question, and Have a conversation.

Every one of them is a single request of the same size, so the writing tools cost no more of your allowance than Summarize.

Having a conversation

Choose Have a conversation in the pad, or press Follow Up in any answer window, and the AI Conversation window opens. Here you can talk back and forth, and each reply remembers what was said before.

1. Focus is in Your message. Type, then press Enter.
2. Each reply is read aloud as it arrives and added to the Conversation above. Press Shift+Tab to reach it.
3. Beside Send are Copy Last Reply, Insert Last Reply Below and New Conversation.

If you started with a question about the document, each follow-up keeps sending the same passages, so you can keep asking about them.

On the free AI each message counts as one request, and conversations have a monthly share of 40 of your 100 requests. The conversation so far goes with each message only as far as the ordinary size limit allows, so no message costs more than any other, and a long conversation slowly forgets its beginning. The window tells you the first time that happens. With your own OpenAI or Gemini key there is no such limit: the whole conversation goes, billed to your account.

There is a monthly, a daily and an hourly allowance, and a smaller one for a computer’s first 48 hours. Free AI limits, later in this chapter, has every number and every rule.

Nothing is sent until you ask

The free AI makes no request when QUILL starts, while you type, when you save, when you are idle or when focus moves. If you leave it switched on and never use it, QUILL makes no network call for it at all.

The first time you reach for it, QUILL shows you exactly what is sent and what is kept, and nothing leaves your computer until you accept. You can come to that same agreement three ways: AI > Privacy Agreement… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K), Preferences, and Customize Features. All three show the same answer, so they never disagree.

If you withdraw, QUILL signs this computer out of the free AI as well, so no sign-in is left behind for a service you have said no to. QUILL remembers which version of the agreement you accepted (the setting ai_privacy_accepted_version), so if what is sent ever changes in an important way, you are asked again.

Basic and Advanced menus

The AI menu starts out Basic. It shows the five free AI commands above, the Use Artificial Intelligence switch, and Show advanced AI features. Basic is for everybody who just wants a paragraph tidied up.

The full menu has much more: provider setup, Ask Quill, the agents, Proofread, Transform, Translate, Read Aloud, Transcribe, More, the AI Library and the AI Hub. It is worth having once you have chosen which company should see your writing and have a key to paste in.

Nothing is taken away in Basic. Every advanced command keeps its keyboard shortcut and stays in the Command Palette; Basic only changes what the menu offers. Check Show advanced AI features near the bottom of the AI menu and everything comes back at once. QUILL remembers your choice.

If you already had AI set up when you updated (you had run the wizard, or saved a provider key), QUILL leaves you in Advanced, so no menu you were using disappears.

Setting up AI with the wizard

The first item in the AI menu is Set Up AI…, labelled “start here” until you have used it. It is a short wizard that gets you to working AI in a minute, in plain words.

1. Welcome. A short note on what QUILL’s AI does, and that it is optional, shown to you before anything changes, and private by default.
2. How would you like AI to run? Pick one:
   • On your device with Ollama. Private and free. It runs on your computer with no account or key, and QUILL connects to Ollama installed there.
   • Use an AI account. The most capable models. Connect Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter or Ollama Cloud with a key you paste once, which QUILL stores safely on this computer.
   • Not right now. AI stays off, and you can set it up any time later.
3. Connect. For an account, pick a provider, paste your key, and press Test connection before you go on. For on-device AI, QUILL points itself at Ollama.
4. You’re all set. A short summary of what you can now do, and a Keep it simple checkbox that turns on Basic mode.

QUILL also offers the wizard when you reach for AI before it is set up, for example when you ask for minutes from a transcript, so you never hit a dead end. Run Set Up AI again whenever you want to change provider or mode.

Basic mode is the default on a new install, and it hides the whole advanced menu, not just the agents. The wizard’s Keep it simple checkbox turns it on, and Show advanced AI features turns it off.

Using AI for free

You never have to pay to use AI in QUILL. Besides QUILL’s own free AI, the Connect step of the wizard recommends two free paths and picks good settings for you.

• Most private, free. Pick Ollama (on your device). A model runs on your own computer: no account, no key, it works offline, and nothing you write leaves your machine. The quality is more modest than the big cloud models. If Ollama is not installed yet, do not install it by hand. AI > Set Up Local AI (Ollama)… does the whole job: it reports your computer’s memory, graphics card and free disk space, downloads and starts the official installer, downloads a model that suits your computer, and connects QUILL to it. Each step tells you what to do next, and it never moves on without you.
• Best quality, free. Pick OpenRouter. Choose Get API key to open OpenRouter’s key page in your browser, create a free key and paste it back. QUILL picks a strong free writing model for you (at the moment a free Llama 3.3 70B model). The model’s description says Free, so you always know a choice costs nothing.

Every provider that needs a key has a Get API key button beside the key box that opens the right sign-up page.

A few honest notes:

• Free cloud models can be slower and are rate-limited. Because the key is your own, that limit is yours alone; nobody else shares it, and it costs nobody anything.
• Free hosted models may keep or train on what you send, under their own terms. If your writing is confidential, use the private on-device option.
• What works on free models: everyday help works well, such as Rewrite, Summarize, Expand, Continue, Fix Grammar, Table of Contents, translating and proofreading. Ask Quill works too; on a small model it keeps its steps simple so it answers instead of stalling. The longest multi-step agent tasks are where a stronger paid model still does better. QUILL tells you when a task would benefit from one, but never stops you trying on a free model.
• QUILL tidies on-device answers for you. Small on-device models have a few habits. When you use Rewrite, Summarize, Expand, Continue or Shorten on the on-device model, QUILL gives the model worked examples first, then checks the answer for hedging (“it seems”, “arguably”), editorialising (“clearly”, “obviously”) and filler openings (“In today’s world”, “It is important to note”), and tries once more to remove them. Fix Grammar and Improve Reading Order are left alone, so your own wording is never changed. This happens only on the on-device model; cloud answers are left as they come.

You can change your provider or model any time from Set Up AI or the AI Hub.

AI Assistant

Beyond the free AI, QUILL has a full AI assistant. You can run it on your own computer (llama.cpp with a local GGUF model) or connect a provider: Ollama (local), Ollama Cloud, OpenAI, Claude, OpenRouter, Google Gemini, or a custom OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Every provider is optional, and you choose it yourself. Keys are kept in the Windows Credential Manager, with a DPAPI-encrypted file as a fallback, and are never written to disk as plain text. Where your keys are kept, later in this chapter, has the details.

Setting up an AI provider

Open AI > AI Hub… to set up your providers. The AI Hub is the one place for every provider’s key, model, Test Chat and key removal. If you are looking for the old AI Model and Connection or Forget API Key menu items, they are part of the AI Hub now.

• OpenRouter. Paste your key into the OpenRouter API Key field. One OpenRouter key reaches many models, including Claude, GPT-4o and Gemini.
• OpenAI. Paste your OpenAI API key.
• Ollama. No key needed. Install Ollama on your computer (ollama serve) and QUILL finds it by itself at http://localhost:11434. If you run Ollama on a different port or computer, change the Ollama Base URL setting.

You can also set a Default model for prompt runs (ai_prompt_default_model). Leave it blank and Ask AI and the Prompt Library use the same model, or name a more capable model here for prompt library work.

Ask Quill (Alt+Q) and Ask AI

AI > Ask Quill… (Alt+Q) opens the assistant as a conversation. You can ask questions, draft text, suggest edits, and run QUILL commands, and nothing changes until you approve it. The window shows the provider and model in use, and you can switch either one there.

When you only want a quick answer, with nothing to insert and no follow-up, use AI > Ask AI… from the Command Palette. It is a simple question and answer window.

1. Provider and Model already hold the last ones you used. If they are set up, focus goes straight to the Prompt field so you can start typing. If not, focus starts on Provider so you can set it up.
2. Type your question and press Ctrl+Enter, or the Send button. QUILL says “Sending…” and the button is unavailable until the answer arrives.
3. The answer opens in a read-only window. Read it with the arrow keys, and use Copy to Clipboard to copy all of it. Closing the answer brings you back to Ask AI, ready for a follow-up.

Clear empties the prompt field and puts you back in it.

Check Grammar with AI

Edit > Grammar > Check Grammar with AI sends the selected text, or the whole document if nothing is selected, to your AI model and asks it to review the grammar. The answer lists each correction as the original phrase, the corrected phrase and the reason. Nothing is changed for you; you make the corrections yourself.

Out of the box, the model is told to list only the corrections needed and not to rewrite the passage. To give it different instructions, open the Prompt Library, find the built-in “Check Grammar” prompt and edit its text. The command uses your version from then on.

Free AI limits, and when they start again

QUILL’s free AI is free because everybody shares it, so it has limits. Here is every one of them in one place. Free AI Usage (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F2) shows where you stand.

Your allowance at a glance

These are the service’s current settings. QUILL reads them from the service each time, so they can change without an update, and Usage always shows the numbers that apply to you right now.

“Any one kind” means Summarize, Rewrite, Proofread, Explain and Ask About This Document each have a monthly share of 60, so no single one can use up the whole month. The daily and hourly limits are there to stop something running away with a month’s worth in an afternoon. Ordinary work rarely comes near them.

When the counts start again

The service keeps time in UTC, not 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, an hour earlier in winter, so in North America the 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 brings no answer is not counted: if it was too long, if there was no connection, if the service had a problem, or if you had already reached a limit, nothing is used. 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, and 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 for a limit, which is worth including if you write to support. Nothing is used, nothing in your document changes, and the rest of QUILL carries on as normal. Wait until the time it gives you, 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 one spending ceiling for everybody together, and when that is reached the free AI pauses for everyone until the 1st. This is rare, and QUILL tells you when it happens.

A new connection starts smaller

For its first 48 hours, a computer that has just connected gets 15 requests, and then the full allowance starts on its own. You do not need to do anything. It stops somebody connecting over and over for a fresh allowance each time, and someone trying the free AI out rarely uses 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 reaches the internet through one address, and 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. The exact numbers are not published, so that nobody can use them to make connections by the hundred. Signing a computer out gives its place back.

If a class or a lab runs into these limits, write to support. Helping with exactly this is part of their job.

Asking for more

Choose Get Help from Support in the Help menu, and say what you need and why: a course, a deadline, a book. When this computer is connected, its support ID goes into the message by itself, 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 new-connection allowance early. The change applies from your next request. You do not need to sign out, reconnect or update, and Usage shows the new number the next time you open it.

Your support ID is also in Help > About 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, and every limit goes away: no monthly, daily or hourly allowance, no 2,250-word ceiling, and no smaller first 48 hours.

Setting up your key (Alt+F2)

AI > Use My Own AI Key… (Alt+F2) opens one window. Its parts, in Tab order:

• Provider. 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, never the other one. The choice is saved with your settings (ai_own_key_provider), and QUILL never guesses it from a key or a model name.
• About this. A read-only box that says exactly where your text goes. Arrow through it once.
• 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.
• Model. Every model your key can use for text, filled in from your account once the key is checked. For OpenAI, Luna 6 first, then the other GPT-6 models; for Gemini, 2.5 Flash first, then 2.5 Pro; then the rest by name. Each row says roughly what it costs, for example “gpt-6-luna, about $0.57 per 100 requests (estimate)”, so arrowing down the list is enough to compare them. Your choice is saved as ai_own_key_model. Models that cannot answer in text (speech, transcription, images, embeddings) are left out.
• Cost estimate. The chosen model’s estimated cost per request and per 100 requests, at that provider’s prices. These are estimates to help you compare, not the provider’s prices. A typical request is about a page in and a paragraph back. The real prices are at openai.com/api/pricing and ai.google.dev/pricing.
• 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.
• Test the Key. Checks the key with your provider, fills 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.
• Remove the Saved Key. Forgets the chosen provider’s key at once and puts AI help straight back on QUILL’s free service.

Press OK and the key is saved. QUILL says “AI help uses your own OpenAI key, with no limits”, or names your own Google Gemini key.

To change the model later, press Alt+F2. With a key saved, the list of models is there straight away. Pick another and press OK.

There is no separate switch to find. 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. With OpenAI chosen, a saved Gemini key just waits; the Status line tells you it is there, and choosing Google Gemini puts it to work. QUILL never decides from which key exists or from a model’s name, so a request never goes to a company you did not choose.

With a Gemini key, Ask About an Image works too. Gemini’s models can read pictures, which the free service and an OpenAI key here cannot, so Ctrl+F5 answers on a Gemini key just as it does on a ChatGPT subscription.

What changes with your own key

• Your text goes straight from this 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 count it keeps for the free service.
• OpenAI or Google bills you for each request, under that company’s 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+F2) opens a different window. It tells you which model is answering and that no allowance applies, and its Open My Usage button takes you to the usage page of your OpenAI or Google AI Studio account, where your requests and charges are. There is no Sign Out and no support ID in it, because neither applies. Help > About also 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, which covers QUILL’s servers. Your own key never touches them.
• The pad, what it can do, and what comes back are the same, down to the instructions sent with your text.
• There are no limits. Nothing is refused for being too long, the answer is not cut short, and Ask a question about the document sends the whole document instead of the three passages that match best, 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 cost with the model you chose (an estimate, not your provider’s bill), and that 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 the provider refuses it and charges nothing.

Where your own key is kept

In Windows’ own credential store, not 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 keeps it in an encrypted file instead. QUILL and QUILL Lite share the key, so a key saved in either works in both, and removing it in either removes it from both.