Documents

Creating, opening and saving documents

New and Open

File > New (Ctrl+N)	An empty Untitled document, in a new tab
File > Open (Ctrl+O)	A file picker
File > Open Recent	The last ten documents, most recent first
File > Save (Ctrl+S)	Write to the document's path, or ask for one
File > Save As (Ctrl+Shift+S)	Write to a new path, and keep editing that one
File > Save a Copy	Write to a new path, and keep editing the original
File > Save All	Every modified tab
File > Reload	Discard unsaved changes and re-read from disk

Save a Copy is the one whose behaviour is easy to assume wrongly. After Save As, you are editing the new file. After Save a Copy, you are still editing the old one and a snapshot has been written elsewhere.

You can also name files on the command line, and each one opens in its own tab:

bpad notes.md server.log
bpad --line 427 server.log

Opening a large file

A document is loaded whole. There is no separate mode for a big one and no flag to choose one -- a large file loads or it fails trying, which is what Notepad does (ADR-0063).

Editing itself does not care about size. The text is held in a rope, so an insert in the middle of a very large document costs the same as an insert anywhere else, and scrolling costs what is on screen rather than what is in the file.

Renaming a document

Note > Semantic Rename... proposes a semantic filename and shows it to you before anything happens. The shape is:

Title_DDMMMYYYY.ext        Quarterly_Review_10SEP2026.md

The title comes from the document -- its first heading, or its first meaningful line -- and the date is the day it is being named. You get the proposal, you approve it, and only then is anything renamed.

Nothing is renamed silently, ever. That is a project rule rather than a feature of this dialog.

Deleting a document

There is no Delete row, and that is deliberate. This product does not delete your files. Use your file manager, where deletion goes to a recycle bin or trash you can get things back out of.

The same reasoning covers everything else this product will not do on your behalf: it will not seize a file association (ADR-0012), it will not clean up files left behind by features that have been removed (ADR-0070), and it will not run anything (ADR-0057).

When the file changes underneath you

If a document changes on disk while it is open, you are told and asked what to do. Nothing is overwritten and nothing is discarded until you say which one you want.

Closing

Close Tab (Ctrl+W)	One document
Close Other Tabs	Everything except the one you are in
Close All Tabs	All of them

Anything unsaved prompts. If the program stops without getting the chance to ask -- a crash, a power cut, a kill -- see Undo, history and recovery, because the work is probably still there.

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This page is generated from docs/user/02-documents.md and edits made here will be overwritten. Change the source and open a pull request.