Quill User Guide

QUILL stands for Quality, Usable, Inclusive, Lightweight, Literate.

QUILL: A quality, usable, inclusive, lightweight, and literate editor built for everyone who writes, codes, learns, and creates.

Quill is a screen-reader-first writing and reading environment for Windows. It is designed to feel calm, predictable, deeply keyboard-friendly, and respectful of your focus. It is also ambitious. Quill is not only a place to write plain text. It is a place to open difficult documents, inspect structure, navigate long material, compare revisions, prepare content for Markdown or HTML, and work with accessibility and extraction issues without leaving the editor.

This guide is aligned to QUILL 1.0.0, built by Blind Information Technology Solutions (BITS) together with Community Access.

This guide is written as a companion, not a reference wall. Read it from the beginning if you are new to Quill. Dip into the sections that matter most if you already know what kind of work you want to do.

Quill is also in beta. Expect polish, depth, and real daily utility. Also expect rough edges, unfinished flows, and the occasional surprise. If you find something confusing or broken, that is useful information. Quill is becoming stronger because real people are trying it on real work.

Table of Contents

• Start Here
• What Quill Feels Like
• Your First Session
• Getting Around QUILL
• Command-Line Launching
• The Main Window
• The Menu Bar Reference
• Writing and Editing
  • Import and Export
  • Batch Conversion
• Search, Replace, and Deep Navigation
• QUILL Quick Nav Mode
• Formatting and Markup Work
• Tools for Reading, Review, and Inspection
• GLOW Workflows Inside QUILL
• Accessibility and Low-Vision Features
• Quill on macOS
• Profiles, Keyboard Packs, and Customization
• Trust, Recovery, Sessions, and Safety
• Working with Different Document Types
  • Plain text
  • Markdown
  • HTML
  • RTF
  • CSV and TSV
  • Word (.docx and .doc)
  • EPUB
  • PowerPoint (.pptx and .ppt)
  • Excel-style spreadsheets (.xlsx and .xls)
  • PDF and OCR-derived text
  • Import / Convert Document — free-first conversion and OCR
  • Remote files (FTP, SFTP, HTTPS, WebDAV, S3)
  • GitHub Remote Files
• Quill Radio and the QuillVille family
• Sleep Timer
• Starting QUILL automatically
• Braille Mode (BRF, BRL, PEF, UEB)
• Help, Learning, and Daily Confidence
  • Context-Sensitive Help (F1)
  • Personalising QUILL
  • Fixes in 0.7.0 Beta 2
• Translation and Community Localization
  • How the Translation Pipeline Works
  • Contributing Translations
  • Translation Roles and Responsibilities
  • Speech String Guidelines
• Checking for Updates
• Beta Feedback and Bug Reporting
• A Fast Shortcut Tour
• Control Reference
• Glossary of QUILL Terms

Start Here

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, profile, and optional features in about two minutes. Complete it or dismiss it; you can re-run it from Help → Personalise QUILL at any time.
2. Press Ctrl+N to create a new document, or press Ctrl+O to open one.
3. Type a few lines.
4. Press Ctrl+Shift+P to open the Command Palette. Type guide, spell, compare, or glow and notice how quickly Quill turns intent into action.
5. Press F6 to move into the status bar and hear how Quill treats even the bottom of the window as a working surface.
6. Press 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 see its keyboard shortcuts.

If you ever feel lost, press F1 for immediate help on the focused control, or use Help → What Can I Do Here? for document-context guidance. Think of those commands as the editor quietly putting a mentor beside you.

What Quill Feels Like

Quill is built around a few promises.

• The keyboard is never second-class.
• Screen readers are not an afterthought.
• Every major action is reachable from the menu, the palette, and the command system.
• Documents open locally and stay local unless you explicitly choose a network-aware action.
• The editor should tell you what changed, where you are, and what is possible next.

In practice, that means Quill spends a lot of attention on focus movement, meaningful status updates, discoverable commands, and native Windows controls. It also means Quill tries to reduce fear. When you open a recovered draft, compare two files, or inspect extraction quality, the point is not to feel clever. The point is to feel safe.

Your First Session

Imagine your first meaningful visit to Quill.

You launch the app. There is no splash screen. The window appears quickly, with a menu bar, an editor, and a status bar. If Quill detects a screen reader, it adjusts its hints and announcement style. If Quill notices an earlier crash or autosave state, it offers recovery instead of silently hoping you forgot.

From there, a natural first session looks like this:

1. Open a file with Ctrl+O or create one with Ctrl+N. Turn on Settings > General > Use simple file open dialog if you prefer a smaller, screen-reader-friendly file picker.
2. Read or write in the editor.
3. Use Ctrl+Shift+P to explore commands without memorizing everything.
4. Use the Navigate menu to jump by line, heading, block, region, or page.
5. Use the Tools menu for spelling, word count, extraction review, compare, macros, and regex help.
6. Open Help → Open Keyboard Reference to see the exact shortcuts that exist in your current configuration. This reference is generated dynamically, so it always reflects your current feature profile and any custom keybindings.

That first session matters because it teaches the most important Quill habit: you do not need to hunt. If an action exists, Quill wants you to be able to reach it from where you already are.

Getting Around QUILL

QUILL is designed so you never need to memorize an action to reach it.

F1 — help on the focused control

Press F1 on any focusable control — a dialog field, a button, a menu item, the editor itself — and a small help dialog opens. It tells you what the control does and what keyboard shortcuts apply to it. The full text lands in one read-only field so your screen reader announces everything in one pass when the dialog opens.

• F1 — help on the focused control
• Ctrl+F1 — open the full User Guide
• Shift+F1 — open “What Can I Do Here?” for the active document context

See Context-Sensitive Help (F1) for full details.

F1 works the same way in every Quill app – Radio, Cast, the Media Player, Audio Studio, Inkwell, Weather, the Converter and Beacon – and it answers two questions at once. First it says what the window you are standing 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 asking for a number of seconds says so, and says which number it starts at.

Controls whose own name already teaches – “Reload the highlighted source from the internet” – answer with that name plus a line on how to drive a control of that kind (“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 at once than press F1 in each place, every authored sentence in the family is collected in one document: the F1 help reference. The default keyboard shortcuts have a companion document of the same kind: the keyboard reference. Both are generated from the app itself, so they cannot fall out of step with what QUILL actually does.

The QUILL key

The QUILL key is Ctrl+Shift+Grave (the back-tick/grave key above Tab). It is a layered prefix chord that opens most of QUILL’s power features without ever leaving the keyboard.

Heads up: the chord reads as QUILL Key + <key> everywhere you see it. Menus, the About > Keyboard Reference page, the QUILL Key Help dialog, the cheat sheet, and the status bar all show the chord in the branded form (QUILL Key + S, QUILL Key + Shift+O, and so on). The stored binding is still Ctrl+Shift+Grave, <key> — only the user-visible label moves. The display rewrite is one function (format_binding_for_display), so the entire product speaks the same label and a rebrand in quill/branding.py follows everywhere.

It operates in two primary layers:

1. Prefix Mode (One-shot). Press it once and QUILL arms a short-lived prefix. The next key you press runs a chord command (like G for Go to Anything or M for Markdown paste), and then the prefix expires.
2. Browse Mode (Locked). Press the QUILL key twice in a row, and QUILL locks Quick Nav (Browse) mode on. In this mode, single-letter keys (like H for headings, P for paragraphs, or S for sentences) move the cursor through the document structure. This mode stays active until you press Esc.

The QUILL key is its own tiny language: every chord is data-driven from the keymap, which means every chord is fully remappable in Preferences → Keyboard → Keymap Editor. The full cheat sheet is one keystroke away (QUILL Key + ?).

QUILL key sound. When the QUILL key is pressed and the prefix arms, QUILL plays a short two-tone earcon (quill_key_pressed) — a quick double-ping distinct from all other sounds — so you get instant audio confirmation without waiting for speech. This earcon is included in all bundled sound packs and can be toggled individually in Tools → Reading & Dictation → Sound Events….

Detection note. On some keyboards or drivers, Windows reports the grave/back-tick key differently than expected. QUILL now uses three independent detection strategies (character code, Windows virtual key VK_OEM_3, and physical scan code 0x29) so the key is recognized on any layout.

macOS note. Use the physical Control key, not Cmd, for the QUILL key on macOS: Cmd+Shift+ `` is macOS’s own reserved “cycle windows” shortcut and never reaches QUILL. If you’d rather use Cmd, reassign that system shortcut in System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Mission Control first.

Reassigning chord commands. Open Preferences → Keyboard → Keymap Editor, find the command you want to move, and type a new chord binding in the form Ctrl+Shift+Grave, X (replacing X with the key you want). The Keymap Editor stores chords in this Ctrl+Shift+Grave, X grammar; menus and the cheat sheet display them as QUILL Key + X. Conflict detection prevents accidental double-bindings.

The Keyboard Manager: search, record, and diagnose

The Keymap Editor is built for fast, confident customisation, however you think about shortcuts:

• Search two ways from one box. Type part of a command’s name to filter the list. Or type a shortcut — ctrl+alt+m, Control + Shift + K, even a QUILL chord like quill, s — and the editor flips to reverse lookup, telling you exactly which command that key is assigned to, or that it is “unassigned and available.” You do not have to remember whether a key is free; ask it.
• Forgiving spelling. Modifiers can be written however you like: control, ctrl, or ctl; in any order (shift+ctrl+k equals ctrl+shift+k); in any case. QUILL normalises what you type and stores the tidy form, so mac-style Cmd stays distinct from Ctrl and is never confused with it.
• Record Keys. Prefer to press the combination rather than spell it? Choose Record Keys, press the chord, and QUILL fills it in for you.
• Honest conflicts with one-step reassignment. If you assign a key that is already taken, QUILL names the command that owns it — by its friendly title, not an internal id — and offers to move the key here, freeing it on the other command. No silent clobbering, no guessing.
• Diagnostics and self-heal. Run Diagnostics audits your whole keymap and reports duplicate shortcuts, bindings for commands that no longer exist, unreadable bindings, and any key that is “assigned but inert” (one the editor cannot actually fire). For the repairable problems it offers a one-click Heal that removes the bad entries and re-applies your keymap so menus and shortcuts line up again.

Default QUILL-key chords:

• QUILL Key + N — enter Quick Nav (browse) mode for the next action. If the browse_mode_sticky setting is on, the mode stays locked until Esc; otherwise it expires on the QUILL-key timeout. Press the QUILL key again (without a chord) to lock it on regardless of the setting.
• QUILL Key (pressed twice) — lock Quick Nav mode on until Esc. This is the most common path: first press arms the prefix, second press locks browse mode.
• QUILL Key + G — open Go to Anything (Quick Nav search).
• QUILL Key + M — paste the rich HTML clipboard as Markdown at the cursor.
• QUILL Key + V — open the browser preview for the current document.
• QUILL Key + Shift+O — open from remote (FTP / SFTP / HTTPS / WebDAV / S3 / GitHub).
• QUILL Key + W — save to remote.
• QUILL Key + Shift+M — manage saved remote sites.
• QUILL Key + A — selection actions when text is selected (also expands an abbreviation manually mid-word).
• QUILL Key + Shift+A — open the abbreviation manager.
• QUILL Key + E — toggle abbreviation expansion on or off.
• QUILL Key + X — open the Copy Tray dialog.
• QUILL Key + Shift+1–Shift+9, Shift+0, Shift+-, Shift+= — copy the selection to slots 1–12 of the Copy Tray.
• QUILL Key + ? — show the QUILL key cheat sheet.
• QUILL Key + Esc — cancel the prefix without firing any command.

Command Palette

Ctrl+Shift+P opens the Command Palette — a searchable list of every registered command. Type any part of a command name to filter. Press Enter to run it. This is the fastest way to reach any action without memorizing its key or menu path. Searching guide, spell, compare, or glow from the palette is a good first practice.

Search matches more than the command name. Multi-word queries match in any order (url open and open url both find Open From URL…), a command’s shortcut text is searchable (ctrl+o finds Open), and common intent words are understood as aliases — settings finds Preferences…, quit finds Exit. As you arrow through results, QUILL speaks each command’s shortcut along with its name — the palette teaches the keystroke while it dispatches, so you graduate off the palette instead of depending on it.

Every on/off command in the palette says which way it is currently set: Toggle Soft Wrap (currently On), Toggle Dark Mode (currently Off), and so on 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 checkmark; a palette list cannot, so the state lives in the name instead. You should never have to throw a switch to discover which way it was set.

When a command cannot run right now, the palette says why, not just that it can’t: a command disabled by a safety advisory reads and speaks as “(unavailable: Turned off by a safety update: …)”, and trying to run it repeats the reason. You should never have to guess why QUILL refused.

Navigation anchors

The status bar (F6 to focus it) is a working surface, not decoration. Each cell announces meaningful information and most cells open a related dialog when you press Enter or click. Shift+F6 moves focus back to the editor.

Reach any menu from the keyboard: Alt+F for File, Alt+E for Edit, Alt+V for View, Alt+T for Tools, Alt+H for Help. All menu items have keyboard mnemonics.

The Navigate menu groups document-level movement: go to line, go to heading, go to entry in notebook, heading organizer, outline navigator, back and forward location history, and structural next/previous. When you need to move across a large document, start there.

The Simple File Open dialog

QUILL can open files through either the standard Windows file open dialog or a keyboard-friendly Simple File Open dialog that lists files in a focused list, with a small filter, recent locations, and a hidden-files toggle. Both dialogs are reached from the same place — File > Open… or Ctrl+O — and the active dialog is chosen by Settings > General > Use simple file open dialog. The setting is off by default; turn it on if you prefer a minimal, screen-reader-friendly picker.

The Simple File Open dialog has:

• A Path field at the top showing the current folder. Type a path and press Enter to navigate (folders) or open (files). Use Ctrl+L to focus the path field from anywhere in the dialog. Paste paths in whatever form you have them: File Explorer’s “Copy as path” quotes, %APPDATA%-style environment variables, file:// links, and ~ all work — QUILL cleans them up for you.
• A Filter dropdown with the file types the dialog will show. The default, Supported files, includes plain text, Markdown, HTML, and Rich Text. Switch to Plain text, Markdown, HTML, or Rich Text to narrow further, or to All files to see everything.
• A Files list of folders and files in the current directory. Folders are prefixed with [dir]. Use the Up button (or press Backspace in the list) to go to the parent folder.
• A Hidden toggle to show or hide files whose names start with a dot or whose Windows hidden attribute is set. Ctrl+H toggles this from the path field or the file list (on macOS, use Cmd+Shift+. — the Finder convention — since Ctrl+H is the system Hide shortcut).
• A Recent button that opens a popup listing recently opened files for one-click re-open.
• A Use Windows Dialog button that opens the standard Windows file dialog for one invocation. The setting does not change; the next time you press Ctrl+O you are back in the simple dialog. Use this when an edge case (a long file path, a custom file association) calls for the native picker.
• An Open button and a Cancel button. Press Enter to open the selected file, Escape to cancel.

The status line below the list announces the current directory, the number of visible entries, and any errors. Permission-denied and not-a-directory errors keep the dialog open so you can correct the path and try again.

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 opened from File > Open Recent may have been renamed or deleted since; a file on a USB stick or a network share is simply not there when the drive is not connected.

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.

Nothing else happens — no crash, no dialog to dismiss, and QUILL stays exactly where it was, so you can press Ctrl+O and pick something else. Choosing a folder where a file was expected says that instead, rather than failing halfway through reading it.

Your Recent list is left alone on purpose. A file that is missing today may be a USB stick you plug back in tomorrow, so QUILL does not quietly forget it when an open fails.

There is an opt-in tidy for people who would rather not keep dead entries: recent_files_auto_clear_missing in your settings file, off by default and not yet exposed in Preferences. Even switched on it only removes entries on this PC’s own fixed drives — files on removable and network drives are never even checked, because “not connected” is not the same as “gone”.

Command-Line Launching

Quill supports command-line startup options for scripted workflows and direct navigation.

Supported options:

• --help: show command help and exit.
• --version: print QUILL version and exit without launching the UI.
• --safe-mode: launch with optional state disabled.
• --reset-profile: reset feature profile store before launch.
• --diagnostics: start with diagnostics tracing enabled.
• --dump-stacks: write a thread-stack dump and exit.
• --line N: 1-based line for the first startup file.
• --column M: 1-based column for the first startup file.
• --goto FILE[:LINE[:COL]]: open a file at an optional 1-based line and column in one argument. This is the compact form of --line/--column, handy when an external tool (a linter, a search result, a build error) hands you a file:line:column string. Example: --goto main.kt:27:5.
• --diff LEFT RIGHT: open two files directly in compare mode, landing on the first difference without opening each file by hand.
• --new-window: force a new process instead of forwarding to an existing instance.
• --wait: when forwarding to an existing instance, wait for that instance to close.

Use quill.exe (the bundled launcher — installed or portable, this is what you actually have) as the command. 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 typing the full install path. If you skipped that option, use the full path instead (typically "%LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Quill for All\quill.exe" for a per-user install), or a source checkout, where the equivalent command is python -m quill.

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

The Main Window

Quill keeps its main window intentionally simple.

Menu bar

The menu bar follows the Windows and Office order you likely expect:

• File
• Edit
• View
• Insert
• Format
• Navigate
• Search
• Tools
• Window
• Help

The menu bar is exhaustive rather than decorative. If Quill can do something, there is almost certainly a menu path for it.

Editor surface

The editor is the heart of Quill. It is where writing happens, where extracted text lands, where reports open as ordinary tabs, and where compare summaries feel like first-class documents rather than pop-ups.

The editor supports:

• plain text writing
• Markdown-aware authoring
• HTML-aware authoring
• structural navigation
• selection helpers
• text cleanup
• spell and thesaurus workflows
• link insertion and link following
• compare-driven review

Tabs and document switching

Quill is multi-document. Each open file lives in a notebook tab. You can:

• move between documents with Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab
• close the active document with Ctrl+W
• use the tab context menu to close one tab, close other tabs, or close tabs to the right
• reveal a saved document in File Explorer directly from the tab context menu

Quill also opens generated artifacts as tabs. The welcome guide, keyboard reference, and compare summary all feel like normal working tabs. That is deliberate. Artifacts should stay close to the work that created them.

Status bar

The status bar is interactive. It is not just a strip of passive text.

Use F6 to move into it. Once there, you can move between cells and activate them. Depending on your layout and current state, the status bar can surface:

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

You can reorder or hide status items through Tools → Customize & Support → Status Bar Layout…. Right-click a focused status cell to Activate, Hide this item, or open Status bar settings…. On the Notifications (or Background Tasks) cell the context menu also offers Clear All Notifications, which empties the notification list in one step without opening the dialog. Use Restore Defaults in status bar settings to reset visibility and order. When title mode is set to full path, Quill automatically hides the duplicate file-path status cell. The current-message cell hides itself the same way whenever its text exactly matches another currently-visible cell’s — it never says the same thing twice.

Region cycling

Use F6 and Shift+F6 to move between major regions. Quill treats region movement as a first-class accessibility feature. If you write, inspect, and navigate entirely from the keyboard, this becomes second nature quickly.

When Show Tab Control is on (View menu) and at least one document is open, the document tab bar joins the F6 rotation as the Document Tabs region, so the tab strip is reachable from the keyboard rather than being skipped. The cycle is Editor → Document Tabs → (Preview, when split open) → Status Bar. From the tab bar, the left and right arrows move between tabs, and Enter, Space, or Tab returns focus to the editor on the selected document.

Tab key: indent or insert a tab character

By default the Tab key runs Quill’s smart line indent: it adds one indentation level to the current line (or every line in the selection) at the start of the line, and Shift+Tab outdents. On a Markdown list item Tab and Shift+Tab nest and promote the item. Each of these actions is spoken, so a screen reader confirms the indent even though the caret stays in place.

If you would rather have Tab type a literal tab character at the cursor — the way a plain text editor behaves — toggle Tab Mode with the QUILL Key + U chord (this is Quill’s equivalent of the VS Code “Tab key” toggle; Ctrl+M itself is reserved for the mark ring, and Ctrl+Alt+ chords are avoided as screen-reader-hostile). The current mode is shown in the Tab Mode status-bar cell (Indent or Tab char), mirrored by the checkable Format → Tab Key Inserts Tab Character menu item, and the new mode is announced when you switch. While Tab Mode is set to insert a tab character, Shift+Tab still outdents so a stray indent can be removed without leaving the mode. The setting applies to the current session.

How the indent is spoken, and how wide it is. When you indent with Tab (or outdent with Shift+Tab), Quill speaks the line’s new indentation depth — for example “4 spaces”, “8 spaces”, or “1 tab” — so you always know how deep the line sits, not just that it moved. Two settings control the indentation itself: Number of spaces per indent level (Settings; 1–8, default 4) sets the width, and Insert tab characters instead of spaces (Settings) switches between space and tab indentation — the spoken depth follows whichever you choose. If you prefer the shorter “Indented lines” message, turn off Announce indentation depth on Tab (Settings → Accessibility).

The Menu Bar Reference

This section walks the entire menu bar in the order you will encounter it.

File

The File menu is the full document lifecycle.

• New creates a blank document.
• Open… opens a document from disk.
• Open Recent returns quickly to recently used files. If you turn on Drop missing recent files automatically in Settings (General), entries whose file has been deleted from a fixed internal drive are removed from the list. Files on USB, removable, or network drives are always kept, so unplugging a drive never clears its history.
• Open from URL… downloads a document or text resource through an explicit safety flow that confirms host and expected size.
• Open from Remote, Save to Remote, Save Copy to Remote, and Manage Remote Sites… (in the Open from Remote submenu) open, save, and administer saved sites over FTP, SFTP, HTTPS, WebDAV, and Amazon S3 (or any S3-compatible service). Each remote operation is explicit, runs over a verified TLS context, announces host and expected size, and never writes to disk before you confirm.
• Snapshots lets you save and reopen groups of documents as a single workspace snapshot, similar to lightweight workspaces in Visual Studio Code.
• New from Clipboard opens a new document seeded with the current clipboard text.
• Save writes the current document.
• Save As… writes to a new path, converting the document to the file type you choose in the dialog. Quill keeps your text as portable Markdown-style markup, so picking Rich Text Format (*.rtf) writes real RTF, HTML (*.html) writes a standalone web page, and Text (*.txt) writes clean prose with the markup removed. Choosing Markdown (*.md) keeps the markup verbatim. The file’s extension always decides the format; if you type a name without an extension, the selected type supplies one. When Save As changes the format, Quill can reload the file so the editing surface matches it — for example, opening a freshly saved .rtf in the Rich text editor. By default it asks first with a Yes/No prompt (reloading replaces the editor contents with the saved file); set Settings → Editing → Reload after Save As to match the format to Reload automatically or Keep current surface to skip the prompt.
• Save All writes every modified open document.
• Save As Plain Text… exports a clean plain-text version. Because plain text has no links, Settings → Editing → Links in plain-text export controls how Markdown links are written: 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. This setting also applies whenever Save As writes a .txt file. If the document carries hidden formatting (fonts, colours, alignment), Quill offers to keep it with an Illumination — see below.

Keeping formatting in a plain-text file: Illuminations

A plain .txt file has nowhere to store fonts, colours, or alignment, so saving formatted text as plain text normally drops the formatting. Quill gives you a choice, named after the decorative layer a scribe paints over a manuscript: an Illumination is a small companion file, yourfile.txt.illumination, that holds the formatting beside the clean text. Your .txt stays genuinely plain — readable in Notepad, e-mail, or anywhere — and when you reopen it in Quill, the matching Illumination restores every font, colour, and alignment exactly.

What happens when you save formatted text as plain text 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, no prompt.
• Save plain text and drop the formatting — the classic lossy save; the .txt is clean and any old Illumination beside it is removed.

A few things worth knowing: the Illumination travels as a separate file, so if you copy or e-mail only the .txt, the formatting won’t come along — keep the pair together (or use Markdown/Word/RTF, which carry formatting inside one file). And if you edit the .txt in another program, Quill notices the text no longer matches the Illumination and opens it as plain text rather than re-applying formatting to the wrong words. If you’d rather a single self-contained file that preserves everything, save as Markdown (which keeps the formatting inline) or Word/RTF (which turn it into native formatting).

• Reload from Disk throws away in-memory edits and reloads the file from storage after confirmation.
• Restore Backup… lets you restore a saved backup version.
• Page Setup… and Print… support paper and print workflows. Print Studio… goes one step further: it reports a spoken/textual preview — “3 pages, Letter, default margins” — the screen-reader equivalent of a visual print preview, then lets you choose all, odd, or even pages, print in reverse order, or skip the first page (handy if page 1 is pre-printed letterhead) before handing off to the same print dialog Print already uses.
• Header and Footer… builds a header and footer for the current document from named presets — Title left, page number right, Filename and date, Roman numerals for front matter — or your own combination of a small set of tokens (title, filename, date, page number) placed left, center, or right. Turn on Different first page for its own separate header/footer, and choose numeric or Roman page numbering with a starting number of your choice. It’s saved with the document and drawn on every printed page, whether you use Print or Print Studio.
• Run Current File executes the saved file with its associated tool, and Open Target at Cursor opens the path or link under the caret.
• Rename Current File… and Delete Current File… manage the file on disk from inside the editor.
• Close Document closes the current tab.
• Exit closes the application.

The File menu is also where Quill quietly proves that it respects risk. Reload is explicit. Backup restore is explicit. URL opening is explicit. Nothing important is hidden behind a side effect.

Edit

The Edit menu is where writing muscles live.

Standard clipboard commands are here:

• Undo
• Redo
• Cut
• Copy
• Paste
• Copy With Source
• Select All

Quill then goes further with selection- and navigation-aware editing:

• Find…, Replace…, Find Next, Find Previous, and Find All Matches all live here. Replace includes a Replace All action in its dialog, so bulk replacement stays in one place.

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

  • Extended mode (special characters). Choose Extended in the Mode list and 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 — non-breaking space, curly quotes, zero-width space, soft hyphen, and more — so the invisible characters that quietly wreck a document become findable, nameable things. Replacements understand the same escapes, so “replace every non-breaking space with a plain space” is a first-class, two-field operation.
  • A spoken match count as you type. Pause for a moment and QUILL says “17 matches” — you know the query is right before you commit to it.
  • Peek navigation. Ctrl+Down and Ctrl+Up step through matches while focus stays 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. Browse first, then press Enter when the query is right.
  • Spoken match context. Every found match is announced as the sentence around it (“line 40: …the quick brown fox…”), not a bare position, and wrapping past the end of the document is always announced.
  • A Direction group that announces its name. The Up/Down choice is a real labeled group, so your screen reader says “Direction” when you reach it.
  • One dialog, always. Ctrl+F while it is open returns you to the search field; Ctrl+H switches it to Replace in place; Ctrl+L jumps back to the search field from anywhere in the dialog; Escape closes and returns to your text. Count answers “how many?” without moving anywhere.

  The setting ships off while the dialog is validated with every screen reader — the Windows dialog remains exactly as it was, and you can switch back at any time. This is the first phase of the unified search plan; scopes beyond the current document (folders, the Vault) arrive in later phases.

• Word Prediction… opens inline word and tag suggestions.

• Extend Selection Mode turns selection growth into a dedicated mode.

• Selection submenu includes Select Line, Select Paragraph, Select Block, Select to Start or End of Line, Select to Start or End of Document, and a nested Recent Marks (Ring) group (set a temporary mark, jump to previous marks, swap cursor and mark, list recent marks).

• Follow Link opens the link under the caret. (Link insertion now lives in the Insert menu.)

• Paste HTML as Markdown converts rich clipboard HTML to Markdown as it pastes.

• Paste Markdown as HTML does the reverse: clipboard Markdown is rendered to a clean HTML fragment (the same renderer as the live preview and HTML export) and inserted at the cursor. Unbound by default; give it a key in the Keymap Editor.

• The deletion group — Delete to Line Start, Delete to Line End, Delete to Document Top, Delete to Document Bottom, and Delete Paragraph — removes text relative to the cursor.

Preferences… and Customize Menus… live with the rest of Quill’s configuration under Tools -> Customize & Support.

View

The View menu controls how Quill presents your document on screen without changing your content.

• Toggle Soft Wrap changes line wrapping without modifying the file.
• Auto Side-by-Side Preview opens a live preview beside the editor automatically.
• Show Tab Control toggles the visible document tab strip.
• Wrap Find Searches controls whether Find wraps past the end of the document.
• Start With No Document Open makes Quill open into an empty workspace instead of a starter document.
• Preview…, Preview Side by Side, Focus Preview, and Browser Preview… open rendered views of the current document.

Live preview while you type. The side-by-side preview (Ctrl+F6 to focus it directly — it also joins the F6 region rotation while open — or turn on Auto Side-by-Side Preview) updates silently in place as you edit — the rendered content is swapped without reloading the page, so your braille display and screen reader are not interrupted, nothing is re-announced from the top, and your reading position is kept. This is the recommended live preview for screen-reader and braille users. The external Browser Preview (in your web browser) can also follow your edits, but because a real browser reload is a full page navigation, QUILL refreshes it only after you pause typing (not on every keystroke) and keeps your place on each refresh — landing back at the section you are editing, or at your previous scroll position — rather than jumping to the top.

Jump from the preview back to the editor. Reading the side preview and want to edit what you just heard? Open the context menu on a block — a heading, paragraph, list item, quote, table, or code block — with the Applications key, Shift+F10, or a right-click, and choose “Go to this location in the editor”. The editor caret moves to that block’s source, focus follows, and QUILL announces where you landed. Pressing Enter on a block does the same thing when your screen reader passes the key through, but the context menu is the reliable path: in browse mode there is no way to ask “where is the virtual cursor?”, while a context menu always targets the exact element you are on. The jump is offered when the preview matches your document verbatim; a preview that expands Vault links does not offer it, because the positions would no longer line up.

Preference-style toggles that used to live here — theme/dark mode, system-tray mode, title-bar path style, dirty-title style, persistent undo, spell-check-as-you-type, and word-prediction-as-you-type — now live in the registry-driven Settings dialog (Tools -> Customize & Support -> Preferences…), where they are persisted in one place.

Insert

The Insert menu adds structured content at the cursor.

• Insert Link… creates a format-aware link.

• Heading submenu: insert Heading 1 through 6, Decrease Level / Increase Level, and Style Headings… (font, size, alignment) for the current level or all levels.

• List submenu: Bullet, Numbered, Task, List Manager…, and Structured List Studio… (F2).

• Insert Code Block, Insert Footnote, Insert Table…, Insert Block Quote, Insert Horizontal Rule, Insert HTML Tag…, and Insert Markdown Tag….

• The two tag pickers are dimmed where they do not apply, and exactly one of them is ever live: Insert Markdown Tag in a Markdown document, Insert HTML Tag in an HTML one, and neither in a plain document or a rich text one. Markdown used to stay enabled in a plain document too, which was the mirror image of the HTML row’s rule and worse by ear than by eye: an enabled row promises the command will work, and a document that quietly became half-Markdown is not something you can see you did. Navigate ▸ Set Document Language… turns the rows back on in one keystroke.

• Format-aware inserts. Block quote, horizontal rule, table, and image insert Markdown in a Markdown document and HTML in an HTML document. If the document’s format isn’t set yet (a brand-new or plain buffer), QUILL asks “Markdown or HTML?” the first time, then remembers your answer for that document and stops asking. These carry direct authoring shortcuts: Insert Table is Ctrl+Alt+T, Insert Block Quote is Ctrl+Alt+Q, and Insert Horizontal Rule is Ctrl+Alt+H — alongside the Ctrl+Alt+1–6 heading chords and Ctrl+Alt+7/8 list chords. All remain rebindable in the Keymap Editor.

• Insert Snippet… and Manage Snippets… for reusable text with placeholders.

• Special Character… (Shift+F2) opens a picker for the 357 characters a keyboard has no key for. Search by name (dash, euro, acute, arrow) or by a word Unicode does not use but people do (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 updates 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 in no group still resolves, so the picker reaches every character Unicode has. That replaced the bare code-point prompt this command used to be. QUILL says what it inserted, in Describe Character’s words, because most of the list is invisible on the page. QuillLite has the same picker on Edit > Insert > Special Character…. (This moved from F2, which now opens the Structured List Studio; both keys are remappable.)

• Line Break (Shift+Enter) ends the line without starting a new paragraph — the same chord Word uses for the same thing. This is the distinction a blank line cannot make: in Markdown, a blank line between two lines makes them two paragraphs, while a hard break makes them two lines of one. It is what you want for an address block, a verse, or a scene-break run of lines that should sit tight against each other.

  QUILL writes the break in whichever spelling Preferences → Editing → Markdown line break style (markdown_hard_break_style) names, and says which one it used. The default is a backslash at the end of the line, because the alternative — two trailing spaces — is invisible on screen, silent to a screen reader, and stripped by many tools when they save. QUILL always reads both, so a document written elsewhere in the two-space style still renders correctly here.

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

• Date and Time submenu inserts a date, time, or both at the cursor. The bundled com.quill.bundled.insert-tools Quillin owns this submenu; it is the canonical home for date and time snippets. See Date and Time submenu below.

• Insert Emoji… (Alt+.) opens the Accessible Emoji Picker: browse or search all 3,781 standard emoji by name, keyword, symbol, or a typed smiley like :), each with a real spoken description of what it looks like. See Insert Emoji: browse or search 3,781 emoji below.

• File Content… inserts the contents of another file at the cursor.

• Insert Equation… (Ctrl+Shift+E) opens a two-step prompt for inserting a LaTeX or MathML equation. Type the formula in LaTeX notation — for example E=mc^2 or \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a} — or paste a MathML fragment. If the input is LaTeX, a second step asks whether to display it inline (\(...\)) or as a block ($$...$$). If a LaTeX equation is already selected when you press Ctrl+Shift+E, the delimiters are stripped and the bare formula pre-fills the prompt. MathML input (starting with <math) is inserted verbatim without a mode step. Browser Preview and HTML export render equations using MathJax 3; see Math Equations later in this guide for the formula gallery, symbol abbreviations, structural exploration, and Word export.

Quill treats Markdown and HTML as working surfaces, not special-purpose export formats, so tag insertion lives here beside the structural inserts.

Word prediction and snippets

Quill separates live prediction from snippet insertion so the hotkeys feel like a modern editor:

1. Press Ctrl+. to open Word Prediction (also on Edit -> Word Prediction…).
2. Type to surface matching document words, HTML tags, and Markdown tags.
3. Use arrow keys to choose a result and press Enter to insert it.

For setup and maintenance:

• 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 Preferences -> Install Starter Snippet Packs to install sample libraries for daily writing, developer flow, and support/accessibility notes.
• In General Preferences, toggle Word prediction and tag IntelliSense or Expand snippet triggers while typing as needed.

Snippets support placeholders such as ${input:name}, ${choice:a|b}, ${date}, ${time}, and ${cursor}.

Date and Time submenu

Insert -> Date and Time is a submenu, not a single command. The bundled com.quill.bundled.insert-tools Quillin owns it and contributes three snippet-backed items:

• Insert Date — inserts today’s date at the cursor using the project’s current ${date} format.
• Insert Time — inserts the current time at the cursor using ${time}.
• Insert Date and Time — inserts both, separated by a single space.

The submenu is built by routing Quillin contributions whose parent is Date and Time. If you disable the bundled insert-tools Quillin, the submenu is still present but its items go with it. Enable or disable it from Preferences -> Quillins if you want to replace these with your own date/time snippets.

Insert Emoji: browse or search 3,781 emoji

Insert -> Insert Emoji… (Alt+.) opens the Accessible Emoji Picker, the opposite workflow from Special Character…: instead of “I know the exact code point,” it is “I don’t know the code point, help me find one.” There is no picture grid anywhere in this dialog — a grid of small images is exactly the design that shuts out anyone who cannot see it. Everything here is a category list and a named results list, the same shape as QUILL’s other browse-and-search dialogs.

Two ways to find an emoji:

• Search (the box at the top) matches, in this order: the emoji symbol itself if you paste or type one in; a legacy typed alias like :), :D, or <3; a substring of the official Unicode name or a keyword (for example “grin,” “dog,” or “heart”); and, as a last resort, a substring of the emoji’s own description, so a half-remembered phrase like “melting” or “puddle” can still turn up the right result even when it is not one of the emoji’s listed keywords.

• Category (the list on the left) browses Unicode’s own grouping, in this size order:

  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 returns to whichever category you last selected.

Arrow through the results list and the Description pane updates for each one: its category and subgroup, its official name, its keywords, any legacy typed alias, and a real one-to-two-sentence description of what it actually looks like — colors, shapes, expression, pose — not just a restatement of its name. Press Insert, or press Enter directly on a result, to write the emoji at your cursor and close the dialog; Cancel or Escape closes without inserting anything.

Favorites and Recent. Two more entries sit above the nine Unicode categories in the category list:

• Favorites lists emoji you’ve starred. Select any emoji, anywhere — a category, a search result, Recent — and press Add to Favorites (the button relabels to Remove from Favorites once it is one) to add or remove it.
• Recent fills itself in automatically with the last 30 emoji you’ve actually inserted, most-recently-used first.

Removing an emoji from Favorites, or letting old entries age out of Recent, only changes what appears in those two shortcuts — it never removes the emoji from the picker itself. It’s still exactly as findable under its usual category or by search either way.

The catalog behind this — all 3,781 standard emoji, their categories, keywords, legacy aliases, and descriptions — ships as a single bundled file. Using the picker makes no network connection, in Safe Mode or otherwise; the catalog was generated entirely offline ahead of time by QUILL’s own maintainer tooling (quill/tools/generate_emoji_catalog.py — see the PRD’s Accessible Emoji Picker section for the full maintenance runbook).

The full catalog, grouped by category, is listed below for reference.

Smileys & Emotion (169)

People & Body (2261)