Typing, selecting and pasting in Write by Zaweba

Most of the time you spend in a word processor goes on plain typing and moving text about. Headings, tables and page layout matter, but they come later. If selecting, undoing and pasting feel clumsy, every other part of the job feels clumsy too.

Write by Zaweba treats these basics with care. Selection works with the mouse and the keyboard, double and triple clicks pick out words and more, text can be dragged to a new place, and undo has no limit. The clipboard understands several kinds of content, and there is a plain text paste for when you want the words without their baggage.

Selecting text without fuss

A single click puts the cursor where you want it. Double click a word to select it, which is the quickest way to fix a misspelling or make one word bold. A triple click selects a bigger stretch, which is handy when you want to restyle or move a whole block at once. For longer passages, click at the start and drag to the end, or hold Shift and use the arrow keys so you can select precisely, letter by letter or line by line.

Once text is selected you can drag it. Press on the highlighted text, move it to its new spot and let go. This is the fastest way to swap two sentences or move a paragraph up the page without touching the clipboard at all.

Typing also works through IME input, the system Windows uses for languages such as Chinese and Japanese, where characters are composed before they appear. If you write in one of those languages, you type in Write just as you would anywhere else on your PC.

Undo that remembers everything

Undo and redo are unlimited, so you can step back through the whole session if you change your mind about a rewrite. Typing is grouped sensibly: a run of letters counts as one step rather than one step per key, so undo takes back what you just wrote instead of nibbling at it a character at a time.

That makes it safe to experiment. Try a different opening line, move a section, change a heading. If the old version was better, undo until it returns, and redo if you overshoot.

What the clipboard carries

When you copy inside the app, the clipboard holds Write's own format, which keeps everything about the text intact when you paste it elsewhere in the same document or another Write document. It also carries RTF, so text you copy can go into other programs with its formatting, along with pictures and plain text.

Coming the other way, RTF from other programs and pictures paste in with their content. That is usually what you want when copying between documents. It is less welcome when you copy a paragraph out of an email or a web page and it arrives in a strange font, a different size or a colour that clashes with the rest of your letter.

### Paste as plain text

For those moments, the Edit menu has Paste as plain text. It drops in the words alone, and they take on the formatting of the place where you paste them. Quotes from a website, an address copied from an email signature or a few lines from a PDF all slot in looking as if you typed them yourself.

It is a good habit for anything copied from outside your own documents. A letter assembled from several sources stays tidy, and you avoid hunting down a stray font that only shows up when you print.

Small habits that save time

Select before you format. Formatting commands act on the selection, so pick out the words first and then apply bold, a style or a colour.

Use drag for short moves and cut and paste for long ones. Dragging text across several pages is fiddly, while cutting it, scrolling to the new place and pasting is calm and exact.

When something goes wrong, reach for undo before trying to repair it by hand. One undo after a bad paste is quicker than deleting the pasted text and retyping what it replaced.

These basics are the part of Write you will touch hundreds of times a day. Getting comfortable with selection, plain text pasting and undo makes everything else in the app quicker, from tidying a CV to shaping a long report.