A text document opens on its Read tab, looking just as it will when you edit it, but read-only, because editing is a deliberate act, not something you fall into by clicking a file. Click Edit to write in it. There is no Save button: a document is written back when you put it down, like a sheet of paper. There are four kinds—plain text, rich text, Word documents and web pages. A web page gets a real browser to be read in, a paragraph editor to be written in, and the editor from Visual Studio Code for its source. Sticky notes are text documents too, because that is all a note is.

Reading

Opening a Text Document

Double-click a text file, in a folder or in a launcher pane, and it opens in the View, the middle of the screen. The tab says Read, not View, because View is also what a listing's menu calls how its icons are drawn. What you get depends on the kind of file:

Three exceptions are worth knowing. A script—.bat, .cmd, .ps1, .py, .vbs and the like—is run when you double-click it, as it would be anywhere else; right-click it and choose Edit to open it in Notepad. A .reg file is shown as the text it is and never merged into the registry, because a double-click should not quietly rewrite your machine. And a .docm, a Word document with macros, goes to Word, since running the macros is Word's job.

An empty file has nothing to read, so it opens already on Edit. A file with Windows' Read-only attribute has no Edit tab at all; untick the attribute on its Properties panel, down the right-hand strip, and the tab appears. That panel also counts a text file's words, lines and characters.

Plain Text

A plain text file is shown on a white page in a fixed-width font, with the lines as the file has them and scroll bars for the ones that run off the edge. If you'd rather see them folded at the window's edge, choose View > Word Wrap. Reading, that is only a tick: the lines are folded on screen and the file is left alone.

Find and Replace

Plain and rich text have a Find menu on the document's bar:

• Find... (Ctrl+F), Find Next (F3) and Find Previous (Shift+F3).
• Replace... (Ctrl+H), which works in Edit only.
• Highlight All, which washes every match in amber. A highlight is something the reader sees, not something the document has: it is never saved and never part of undo.

The Find box floats over the top right corner of the text and stays there while you work. It starts with the first line of whatever is on the clipboard, and remembers your settings from one document to the next. Beside Find what and Replace with are Match case, Whole word and Search up, and a Read as choice: Plain text; Wildcards, where * is any run of characters on a line and ? is any one; or Regular expression, where $1 works in the replacement. It tells you what it found along its foot: "Not found," "3 matches," "Reached the end; carried on from the beginning," "Replaced 12 occurrences." Find works in plain and rich text. Web pages and Word documents don't have it yet.

Rich Text

An .rtf file gets the same tabs and the same Find, in a proportional font with the lines wrapped. Its formatting—fonts, bold, colors—is shown, and kept when the file is written back.

Web Pages

A web page is shown by the browser engine that comes with Windows 11, which is the one that runs Edge, so its scripts, pictures and style sheets all work, with the pictures and styles found in the page's own folder. Rest the pointer on a link and its address shows along the bottom of the window; click one and it opens in your ordinary web browser, not in the View. Right-click offers Copy and Select All.

Word Documents

A .docx opens as a formatted page, with an Opening... note while it is read. The tab's name is the document's own title if it has one. The Properties panel adds a Document group—created, last modified by, revision, template—and counts pages, words, characters, lines and paragraphs. If the document has Track Changes switched on, a line across the top says that changes you make here are not tracked. An old .doc needs Microsoft Word installed to open; without it you are told so, and the file goes to whatever Windows would have opened it with.

Making a New One

The New Menu

Choose Document > New, on the bar of a folder open in the View or of a launcher pane, or right-click an empty place in a launcher pane and choose New. Besides Folder, the list offers:

The date and time are only there so that the name is never taken; you're meant to rename it. In a launcher pane the new file opens at once, on Edit, and its name is ready to be typed over. In a folder's listing the name is ready to type and the file is left unopened, since you may be making several. Either way, type the name and press Enter; Escape keeps the made-up one.

Other Ways to Get One

• Paste text. Copy some words, from anywhere, and paste them onto a folder or a launcher pane, or drop them there. They become a new .txt file named PastedText- and the moment.
• Edit Selection. Select some words in a plain text document, right-click, and choose Edit Selection: they open in the View as a document of their own, with no file yet. It has a Save As... on its bar, and if you close it after changing it, it asks whether to save it. A document with no file even survives closing the program.
• New Note. The Notes plug-in, once switched on in Settings (it takes effect at the next start), puts a Notes tab on the right-hand strip: a pane of quick notes, each tile showing its first few lines. The first tile, New Note, makes an empty note, named for the minute, and opens it in Edit. Ctrl+V in that pane turns whatever is on the clipboard into a note. A note is a plain text file; the plug-in has no editor of its own.

Editing

There Is No Save Button

A document is a sheet of paper: it's brought up to date when you put the sheet down. That happens when you close it, open something else in its place (Back and Ahead count), switch to another desktop, or close the program. You are never asked, because a page that has been written on has been written on. Nothing is written while you type, and a document you didn't change is never rewritten—not even a web page you only looked at, or a Word document you opened and left. Plain text and web pages are written as UTF-8, without the invisible marker some programs put at the front, because a plain .txt that gains one on its first save is a nasty surprise. If a file can't be written, you're told why, and the document stays open.

Plain Text and Rich Text

Click Edit and type. The right-click menu has Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All, Undo and Redo (Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y work too), and the Find menu gains Replace.... The Tab key types a tab.

In plain text, View > Word Wrap does something different from reading. Editing, it breaks the long lines in the text itself, at the width Read would have folded them, keeping a line's indent on the pieces that follow and leaving short lines and over-long words alone. It is a single step in Undo, and it is never shown ticked, because Edit never folds on screen: what you see is what is in the file.

Rich text shows its formatting and keeps it, and Replace All keeps it too. What it doesn't have yet is any way to add formatting.

Web Pages: One Paragraph at a Time

A web page's Edit tab is a paragraph editor. Only one paragraph is writable at a time: rest the pointer over the page and the paragraph under it is outlined in dashes; click, and that paragraph, and only that, is selected and editable, outlined in blue. Click again on the selection and it narrows to the sentence, then the word or the italic or the link, then back to the whole paragraph. Double-click to put the cursor exactly where you clicked. The keys do what you'd expect, and a few things you might not:

• Enter splits the paragraph; Shift+Enter is a line break. Backspace at the start of a paragraph joins it to the one before.
• Tab and Shift+Tab indent and outdent in a list, and otherwise move to the next or previous paragraph.
• Esc leaves the paragraph. Ctrl+Z undoes, Ctrl+Y or Ctrl+Shift+Z redoes.
• Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I, Ctrl+U and Ctrl+K (a link) are the usual ones. Ctrl+click a link to follow it.
• Ctrl+Shift+V pastes words only. An ordinary paste keeps headings, lists, emphasis, links and tables, but leaves behind the fonts, colors and scripts it came with.

The Toolbar

Across the top of the page, only in Edit, left to right: Undo and Redo; the Paragraph style box (Paragraph, Heading 1 to 6, Quote, Aside, Code); the Font box and the Size, in points box, either of which you can type into; Bold, Italic, Underline, Strikethrough, Subscript and Superscript; Text color and Highlight color, each a button with a menu of colors beside it; Align left, Center, Align right and Justify; Left with flow around and Right with flow around, which push a paragraph or a picture to one side so the words run round it; Bulleted list, Numbered list, Decrease indent and Increase indent; Link to a web address, which asks where the link should go (leave it empty to take the link off); and Clear formatting.

Give a whole paragraph a font, size, color or alignment and the page asks, Change every Quote paragraph in this page, or only this one?—or whatever style it is. Answer Every... and the style itself changes; answer Just This One and only that paragraph does. Tick Don't ask again on this page if you'd rather it stopped asking.

The Styles Pull-Out

On the right edge of the View, while you're editing a web page, is a tab called Styles. It starts shut, and stays open or shut as you left it. Open it and it lists the page's styles, grouped under headings: the page itself ((General)), Heading 1 to Heading 6, Paragraph, Quote, Aside, Code, Link, Bold, Italic, Picture, Divider, the list styles, and Flow Left and Flow Right. Styles the page uses are in black and the rest in gray, and a tick box, Only styles on this page, hides the gray ones. Click in a paragraph and the list jumps to its style; pick one by hand and it stays.

Below the list are the settings that make sense for that style—font, size, bold, italic, underline, color, background, alignment, line spacing, the space before and after, a border with its thickness and color, padding, rounded corners, a shadow, the bullet or number marker of a list, where a picture sits and how wide it is. Change one and the style's rule on the page changes at once, so every paragraph in that style follows. The foot of the panel says whether they all do—"Every paragraph follows its style," or "2 paragraphs differ from their style"—and Reset to Style sends the strays back. Each change is one step in Undo.

Themes

At the top of the Styles pull-out is a Theme box. Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter come with the program, each a complete set of looks for every style. Pick one and the page takes it; choose (none) and the page keeps the look it has as its own. Type a name instead and the button beside the box says Save: your page's styles become a theme of your own, for other pages to use. A page carries its own copy of its theme, so it still looks right when it's sent to someone who has never heard of the theme; when the theme has since changed, the button says Update, which brings the page up to date and keeps any changes of its own.

Pictures on a Page

Drag a picture, or several, onto the page in Edit and a line shows where they will land; or paste a picture. The picture is kept inside the page, so the page stays one file: it's shrunk to no more than 1600 pixels wide, stored as a JPEG or a PNG whichever is smaller, with the camera's and location's details left out. GIFs and SVG drawings are kept exactly as they are. Your original is never touched. Drag a picture that's already on the page to move it.

Source

The Source tab shows the page's HTML in Monaco, the editor that is the heart of Visual Studio Code, with the markup in color and real completion, checking and formatting for HTML, CSS and JSON. It works without a network. What you type there is carried to Read and Edit when you switch tabs. A page that you only looked at is never rewritten; one that you edited is written back in the editor's tidy markup, a block to a line, with its style sheet and settings kept.

Word Documents

A Word document's Edit tab is the same paragraph editor, with the toolbar's style box listing the document's own paragraph styles, and a highlight menu of Word's fifteen colors. Two menus sit on its bar:

• Insert, in Edit only, offers Footnote, Endnote and Comment, which are also on the right-click menu. Click where the note belongs, choose it, and the cursor lands in the new note, ready to type. A footnote goes at the foot of the chapter and an endnote with the endnotes. A comment goes round the selected words, or the word at the cursor, and is signed with your Windows name and the moment. Word numbers them when the document is saved.
• Document offers Save As Word Document..., which makes a .docx copy (a .doc is converted, and left alone), and Restore Previous Version.

Before the first save of a .docx in a sitting, and before every save of a .doc, the original is copied away, and the page says Original kept as... afterward. Restore Previous Version lists the copies, newest first; pick one and it asks, then puts it back, keeping the one it replaced. Anything the page can't express—headers, footers, fields, equations, text boxes—and every paragraph you didn't touch goes back exactly as Word wrote it.

Not Yet

• Bold, fonts and lists for rich text, and web addresses in rich text that can be clicked.
• Find in web pages and Word documents.
• A table button, an insert-picture button and a horizontal-rule button in the toolbar. (Pictures can be dropped, and tables pasted.)
• Markdown shown as a page, and program code in color. Monaco knows some eighty languages, but so far only web pages use it.
• A choice of encoding: everything is written as UTF-8, whatever it was read as.
• Printing, and a count of words while you type.
• Dropping one document onto another: nothing can be dropped on a text document except a picture on a web page. Text goes onto a folder easily enough, but not into a document yet.