Editing

Editing

Typing, selecting, cut, copy, paste and select-all behave the way they do everywhere else. This page covers the parts that are this product's own.

The full key list is in the shortcuts reference, which is generated from the same constant the Help > Keyboard Shortcuts dialog shows, so the two cannot disagree.

The menus from the keyboard

F10 opens File. From there:

Left / Right	The menu beside this one. Left from File is Help, and Right from Help is File
Up / Down, Home / End	Move through the rows
Enter or Space	Run the row
Esc or F10	Close the menu and go back to the document

A menu opened with the mouse answers the same keys. The keyboard can land on a greyed row, because a greyed row's label is often the reason it is greyed; Enter on it does nothing. While a menu is open, what you type goes to the menu and never to the document.

A bare Alt does not open the menus, as it does in Notepad. On Linux a window that loses the keyboard to Alt+Tab is sent the Alt release before it is told it has lost focus, so it cannot tell Alt+Tab from Alt pressed alone. Every Alt+Tab away would open File behind you. ADR-0088 has the detail.

Screen readers

The menus and their rows, the tabs, the find and replace bar, Go to Line and the questions the program asks all say what they are to a screen reader, through UI Automation on Windows and AT-SPI on Linux. It has not yet been tried with NVDA or Orca, so it is not called accessible; that pass is planned for 1.0 (ADR-0088). What is known:

• On Linux a menu does not say whether it is open. The toolkit reports it on Windows only.
• A greyed menu row says "unavailable" in its description, because on Linux the disabled state itself does not reach the screen reader.
• Under --editor-view the document is not a text box to a screen reader. Its visible lines are there as separate labels, with no caret and nothing to say they can be edited. The default surface is a standard text box.

Line operations

Ctrl+D	Duplicate the current line
Alt+Up / Alt+Down	Move the current line up or down

These need the custom editor surface, which is off by default -- start with --editor-view to get it. See The two editor surfaces below.

Overtype

Insert switches between inserting and overtyping, as it does in Notepad. While overtype is on, the status bar says Overtype, the caret is drawn heavier, and each character you type replaces the one after the caret.

It never replaces the end of a line. Typing past it adds to the line rather than pulling the next one up, and Enter still splits the line. A selection is replaced whole, in either mode.

Ctrl+Insert and Shift+Insert are copy and paste, and leave the mode alone. The mode belongs to the window, not to a document: it stays as it is when you switch tabs, and it is off whenever the program starts.

It works in both editor surfaces, with one difference in undo. In the default surface each overtyped character takes two presses of Ctrl+Z to undo, because the toolkit's text widget records a replacement as a removal and an insertion. Nothing is lost -- it is only slower. Under --editor-view a run of overtyping undoes in one step, the way a run of typing does.

Zoom

Ctrl+= and Ctrl+- change the editor font size; Ctrl+0 puts it back. This is the same setting as font_size in the config file, so a zoom you like can be made permanent by writing it down -- see Settings.

Indentation

Format > Indentation chooses between a literal tab and spaces, and sets how many columns a tab advances to (2, 4 or 8).

The default is a literal tab. Notepad when you want it means Tab inserts a tab; silently rewriting it into spaces is exactly the kind of surprise that promise rules out, so spaces are something you ask for.

Insert

Insert holds Markdown constructs -- bold, italic, a link, a code block, a table. They wrap the selection if there is one and otherwise leave the caret where you would want it.

These need --editor-view too, for the same reason the line operations do: they have to know where the caret is.

The two editor surfaces

The product draws text two ways, and which one you get is a flag.

	Default	--editor-view
Drawn by	The toolkit's own text widget	This product's editor surface
Typing, selection, clipboard	The toolkit	This product
Duplicate line, move line, Insert	unavailable	available
Status bar with Ln, Col	no	yes

The reason is that the toolkit's text widget will not say where the caret is, and a feature that has to know cannot be built on it (ADR-0018). Everything that does not need the caret -- Find, Find Next, Go to Line, the note layer, saving, encoding -- works identically in both.

The default is the toolkit's widget because it is the better-behaved one for ordinary typing on every platform. --editor-view is opt-in, and the decision to keep both has been re-examined and reaffirmed.

What this product will not do while you type

It does not run anything (ADR-0057). There is no execution in this product at all -- no scripts, no cells, no interpreters, nothing auto-triggered by content.

It does not reach the network. Core editing never depends on a cloud or AI service (ADR-0006). The product works identically with the network cable out.

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This page is generated from docs/user/03-editing.md and edits made here will be overwritten. Change the source and open a pull request.