Writing and Editing Text

This section covers the everyday writing experience: typing, selecting text, using the floating toolbar, formatting text, relying on autosave, and using focus controls or Zen Mode.

The editor is the place for the actual writing. It is designed to feel closer to a calm writing surface than a complex word processor: you type, revise, select, format, and move through the document without needing to manage the document manually.

Opening a document

Open a document from the project sidebar or through project search. The selected document appears in the main editor area and becomes the active piece of writing.

Typing and editing text

Click into the editor and begin typing. You can write normally, edit existing paragraphs, cut and paste text, and use standard keyboard shortcuts such as copy, paste, undo, and redo.

Spleen saves changes automatically while you work, so there is no traditional save button to press after every edit.

Paragraphs and line breaks

Press Enter to create a new paragraph. Use a line break only when you need text to continue on the next line without starting a new paragraph.

Use Shift + Enter for a line break. Ctrl + Enter on Windows and Linux, or ⌘ + Enter on macOS, also inserts a line break.

If Indent paragraphs is enabled for the project, the first line of each consecutive paragraph is indented. The first paragraph in a document and the first paragraph after a heading or anything other than a paragraph remain aligned with the left edge. Change this setting from the project overview. It applies to every document in that project.

Selecting text

Select text when you want to format it, copy it, replace it, or attach an annotation. On desktop, selecting text can open the floating toolbar. On touch devices, selection may rely more on the device’s own controls.

Copying and pasting

You can copy and paste text into the editor as you would in other writing tools. Spleen keeps the editor focused on clean writing, so pasted content may be simplified when needed.

When you paste from Word, Google Docs, websites, or another formatted source, Spleen keeps content it supports, such as paragraphs, headings, lists, bold, and italic. It removes unsupported styling such as custom fonts, colours, spacing, and page layout. Markdown pasted as plain text is not treated as a full Markdown import. Use Markdown import when you want Spleen to build a project structure from files.

Working in longer documents

Longer documents can be written and revised inside the same editor, but Spleen works best when a large project is divided into meaningful documents. That makes navigation, search, snapshots, and export easier to manage.