Tutorial 1: Your first hour with QUILL

Goal: in about an hour, set QUILL up the way you like it, and learn three habits that help you find everything else.

1. Install and first launch

  1. Run the QUILL installer and launch QUILL.
  2. The startup wizard asks how you like to work and picks a feature profile. A profile decides which features show in the menus, so they stay short. If you are not sure, pick the simpler option. Nothing is removed, only hidden, and you can change it later.
  3. You land in a tabbed editor. Type a sentence. Press Ctrl+S and save it anywhere. That is all you need to get started; everything else is optional.

To revisit the choice later: Preferences > Profiles and Features.

2. Habit one: the command palette

Press Ctrl+Shift+P. This is the searchable list of every command in QUILL.

  1. Type spell, arrow through the matches, then press Escape.
  2. Type compare, then glow, then read. There is a lot in there.
  3. Pick any match and press Enter to run it.

The palette shows each command's current shortcut next to its name, so using the palette teaches you the keyboard as you go. When someone (or a tutorial) names a command, you do not need to know which menu it is in. Open the palette, type part of the name, and press Enter.

3. Habit two: F1 everywhere

Press F1 in the editor. Open any dialog (try Preferences) and press F1 again. Context-sensitive help describes the control you are on and how to use it. When you are lost, F1 is the answer before the manual is.

4. Habit three: the Spoken Echo

Speech is gone as soon as you hear it. Press Alt+Shift+E to open the Spoken Echo. It shows the last twenty things QUILL said, newest first, in a list you can arrow through and copy from. Missed an announcement? It is in the Echo.

5. Make it yours (about fifteen minutes)

  1. Verbosity: palette > verbosity. Choose how chatty QUILL is, from near-silent to fully narrated. There are quiet modes (Ctrl+Shift+Q) for when you need the editor to just be quiet.
  2. One key rebind: Preferences > Keyboard. Search a command you will use daily, choose Record Keys, press the combination you want. If the key is taken, QUILL names the current owner and offers a one-step swap.
  3. Optional components: Help > Download Optional Components lists the extras QUILL can download for you, such as speech engines, natural-sounding voices and spell-check languages, with their sizes and whether they are installed. You do not need any of them; take only what you want.

6. What you did not have to do

No AI setup, no accounts, no cloud consent, no extensions. All of that is off until you ask for it. QUILL is a complete editor as soon as you install it. The rest of these tutorials each show you one more thing you can do.

Next: Own the keyboard.