Tutorial 1: Your first hour with QUILL

Goal: a comfortable, personalized QUILL in about an hour, plus the three habits that make every other feature discoverable.

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 named set of feature switches that keeps the menus focused. Pick the simpler option if in doubt; nothing is lost, only hidden.
  3. You land in a tabbed editor. Type a sentence. Press Ctrl+S and save it anywhere. That is the whole core loop; 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 — press Escape.
  2. Type compare, then glow, then read. Notice how much exists.
  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 never need the menu path — palette, type a fragment, 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 disappears the moment it is spoken. Press Alt+Shift+E to open the Spoken Echo — the last twenty things QUILL announced, newest first, in a read-only list you can arrow through and copy from. Missed an announcement? It is in the Echo.

5. Make it yours (fifteen minutes well spent)

  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 everything QUILL can fetch on demand — speech engines, neural voices, spell-check languages — with install status and sizes. Nothing here is required; take 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 installed — the rest of these tutorials add power one workflow at a time.

Next: Own the keyboard.