Calmly Writer
The toolbar and the shortcuts reminder
The small toolbar that appears over selected text, and the reminder of shortcuts that shows when you hold Ctrl or Cmd.
The toolbar
Select some text and a toolbar appears above it with the formatting you are most likely to want: bold, italic, a link, a quote, the two kinds of list, a comment, and under … the rest (headings 1 to 6, underline, code, checklist). It goes away when you click elsewhere or start typing.
Everything on the toolbar has a keyboard shortcut too; the Keyboard shortcuts chapter lists them. If you only ever use the keyboard and would rather not see the toolbar, turn off .
On a touch screen the toolbar is a bar at the bottom of the screen instead, above the keyboard. See Android and Chromebook.
The shortcuts reminder
Hold Ctrl⌘ on its own for a moment, without pressing another key, and a strip appears at the bottom of the window with the most common formatting shortcuts: headings, bold, italic, link, underline, strikethrough and search. Let go and it disappears. It is there for the first weeks, until the shortcuts are in your fingers.
More in Writing
The Markdown shortcuts that turn into headings, lists and emphasis while you type, and the ones you can turn off.
Six levels of heading, the panel that lists them, and the keys that move through it without touching the mouse.
Bulleted, numbered and checklist items, nesting them with Tab, and turning one kind of list into another.
Links to web pages, to other documents on your disk and to headings in the same document, and how to follow them.
Four ways to put a picture in a document, the difference between embedding and linking one, and what the editor does not do with images.
The slash menu that inserts blocks, the toolbar that edits tables, and the rules that keep them compatible with Markdown.
Notes attached to a passage, in three colours, which travel with the document and never print.
Curly quotes, dashes, ellipses and arrows written for you as you type, the quotation marks of your language, and how to turn each one off.
The spell checker and its languages on each system, adding words to the dictionary, and the language of the app itself.
Right-to-left writing for Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and other scripts, per document or for every new document.
Searching the document or every open tab, and a replace that keeps the capitals of what it finds.
What happens to formatting when text comes in from elsewhere or goes out, and the two ways to copy a document as code.
