WordSmith

A word processor inspired by classic Notepad and pre-ribbon Office — DOCX documents, real menus, no ribbon.

Why it exists — what it solves

Modern editors bury everything in ribbons, floating toolbars, and touch gestures. (The ribbon: three clicks to find the thing that used to be one menu away. Progress.) WordSmith goes the other way: a keyboard-first word processor inspired by the desktop editors people already know. It opens and saves real DOCX and TXT files, so documents move between your tablet and a PC without conversion drama.

• Protected view on open: documents open read-only, so a stray keystroke can't mangle a file. Press Ctrl+E when you're ready to edit. And protected view isn't just a lock — it's a reading mode: you browse the document the way you'd browse a web page, jumping from heading to heading, list to list, link to link, instead of wading through every line (keys below).
• Real document structure: heading styles are actual heading styles, so a document you write here navigates properly everywhere — and documents written elsewhere keep their structure when you read them here.
• Find & Replace that works like desktop Find & Replace — because it is.
• Undo — the safety net every writer leans on.
• Offline spell check: dictionaries are bundled in the app — English plus nine more languages — and you can run any two of them together as a primary and secondary pair. No connection needed, nothing you write leaves the device to be checked.
• Optional AI help: if you want it, you can plug in your own Gemini key. It's stored only on your device, and the AI is only contacted when you invoke it.

About the name

A smith works raw material with tools — iron at a forge, silver at a bench. A wordsmith works words the same way: shaping, hammering, and finishing them into something that holds. The name is the job.

New in 1.16: Markdown (preliminary) and the family doors

Markdown support — PRELIMINARY. WordSmith works with Markdown (.md) files now, and the label is honest: it is new, shipped for real use, with its limits stated and feedback invited. A .md file opens as plain text, exactly as written — and saving it writes the same text back, which closes a real trap: before this release a .md fell into the Word-document path, and a plain save quietly rewrote it as a Word file under its .md name. Converting is always your choice, in Save As: a document saved as Markdown turns its headings, bold, italic, links and bullet lists into markup; a Markdown file saved as a Word document turns the markup into real Word structure. In the reading view, a Markdown file's headings answer the H key and the Document Outline, read from the # marks in the text — looking never writes anything into the file. The subset is stated in the app: headings past Heading 3 clamp on conversion, nested lists flatten, numbered lists and finer formatting don't convert.

And WordSmith now uses the same doors as the rest of the family: one Browse door and one Save door. When File Explorer is installed, browsing opens its picker and the file you pick opens here — the old "Browse in File Explorer" only launched the app, and no file ever came back. Saving walks through File Explorer's folder picker the same way. When File Explorer isn't installed, the system picker serves both, and nothing breaks.

Verify your download

After downloading, check the file's checksum against the one published here. If they match, your file is exactly the file that was released — unaltered in transit.

Permissions, explained

That's the whole list. A word processor has no business asking for more.

Documentation

Menus across the bottom — File, Edit, Tools, Help — down where thumbs actually live on a touchscreen. With a keyboard they behave exactly like the classic menu bar you've always used; the only thing that moved is where your thumb finds them. The Help menu carries Documentation and What's new. The essentials:

• Ctrl+E toggles the protected read-only view off and on.
• In protected view, browse like a web page: H next heading, L next list, K next link — add Shift to go back the other way. The Document Outline (View menu) lists every heading in order; pick one and you're there.
• Make headings while you write: Ctrl+Alt+1, 2, or 3 for Heading 1, 2, or 3; Ctrl+Alt+0 back to Normal. The same styles live in the Format menu — nothing is keyboard-only.
• Ctrl+H opens Find & Replace.
• The spell check dialog gives you Fix / Fix All / Ignore / Ignore All — plain choices, in plain words.
• Spell check languages are picked in Tools: choose a primary and a secondary language — English and Spanish, French and German, any pair of the ten bundled languages — and a word counts as right if either of your two languages knows it. (Auto mode still exists too: it sniffs out which languages a document is in on its own.)

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