Using the Floating Toolbar

The floating toolbar appears when you select text in the editor. It gives you quick access to the actions that make sense for a selected passage, without keeping a large formatting toolbar visible all the time.

When the toolbar appears

On desktop, select a word, sentence, or passage and the toolbar appears near the selection. Click elsewhere or clear the selection and the toolbar disappears again.

On touch devices, the floating toolbar stays hidden so it does not interfere with the device’s own controls for selecting text. Spleen provides a formatting bar at the bottom of the screen instead.

Formatting selected text

Use the toolbar for common inline formatting such as bold, italic, highlight, and inline code. Alignment lets you align the selected paragraphs or headings left, centre, right, or justified.

The toolbar is intentionally small. Spleen is not trying to expose every possible design choice while you write.

When text is selected, the normal toolbar order is Bold, Italic, Highlight, Inline code, Alignment, and Annotate. At the end of the toolbar, Spleen shows the selected word count, such as 3 words.

Formatting on a touch device

On a phone or tablet, the formatting bar stays along the bottom edge and moves above the on-screen keyboard. Its formatting and alignment controls work with either selected text or the paragraph where the cursor sits. Select text first when you want to create an annotation.

Choose Alignment to replace the formatting buttons with Align left, Align center, Align right, and Justify. Use Back to return to the normal formatting buttons.

Creating an annotation

If the toolbar includes the annotation button, you can attach a private remark to the selected passage. The passage receives a quiet highlight, and the remark appears in the Annotations tab of the context panel.

Selected word count

The toolbar shows the word count of the current selection. This is useful when you want to check the length of a paragraph, passage, or excerpt without opening a separate statistics view.

Why the toolbar disappears

The toolbar disappears when nothing is selected because its actions only apply to selected text. This keeps the editor clean while you are simply typing or reading.