What's in the Help menu of Jotter by Zaweba

Help menus in small programs are often an afterthought. In Jotter by Zaweba it is short and does exactly two jobs: it gets you to help, and it tells you what you are running. Knowing which is which saves a little head scratching the first time you press F1.

Jotter help and zaweba.com

Help > Jotter help, or the F1 key, opens the Zaweba website in your web browser. So does the zaweba.com item just below it. Jotter does not have a manual built into the program. That is a deliberate choice for an app this small: Jotter is one program of roughly 175 KB on Windows, mostly its icon, and a built-in help file would make it bigger than the notepad itself.

It does mean help needs a browser and a connection. Everything else in Jotter works offline, and your notes never go anywhere; it is only the help pages that live on the web.

The About box

The About box shows Jotter's version number, the licence terms and a link to the open-source notices. The version is the thing to look at if you want to know whether you have the latest release, or if you are describing a problem to someone and want to be precise about which Jotter you are using.

The licence terms are the EULA under which Jotter is free software. There is no account, no sign-in and no price.

Open-source notices that say there are none

Programs that include components written by other people are expected to list them and their licences. Jotter's notices are unusual: they say there aren't any. Jotter has no third-party components at all. It is built on the .NET Framework 4.8 that already comes with Windows, and the rest is its own code. That is part of why it is so small and starts in a moment, and why there is nothing to install beyond the one program.

Help you may not need

Much of what people look for in a help file is visible in Jotter itself. The status bar shows the line and column, the selection, the character and line counts, the zoom, the line endings and the encoding. Tabs show their own state, with a dot for unsaved changes and an unsaved jot named after its first line.

A handful of keys cover most of the day. Ctrl+N opens a new tab and Ctrl+W closes one. Ctrl+Tab moves between tabs, and Ctrl+1 to 8 jump to a tab, with Ctrl+9 for the last. Ctrl+F opens the find bar, F3 finds the next match. F5 types the time and date. Ctrl and the mouse wheel zoom, and Ctrl+0 resets. Learn those and the Help menu is something you visit for the version number.

Questions people often have

The common ones are about where unsaved notes go and what happens when you close the window. The short answer is that Jotter keeps every tab, saved or not, in your own user profile, writes changes to disk a few seconds after you make them, and brings everything back when you open it again. Closing the program never asks you to save. Closing a single tab with unsaved changes does ask, because that is the one way to lose a note on purpose.

Another is whether Jotter can do formatting or spell checking. It can't, by design; Write by Zaweba is the app for formatted documents. Jotter by Zaweba stays plain, small and quick, and its Help menu is in keeping with that.