Text is nearly done. A text document in Desktop Minder does what every document here is meant to do—it can be read, and it can be edited—and it keeps the two apart: a file opens to be read, and is edited on purpose, by clicking Edit. It has a proper Find and Replace, and it saves itself, without asking, when you put it down. There are three kinds: plain text, rich text, and web pages, which get a real browser to be read in, an editor to be written in, and Visual Studio Code's own editor for their source.

Where It Stands

Reading

Plain Text

Text files of every ordinary sort open as plain text: .txt and .log, settings files like .ini and .dmini (though the program's own preferences, and a desktop's own settings, open as sheets of their own), .md, .json and .xml, program source in VB and C#, and scripts. A text document opens on its Read tab, looking exactly as it will when you edit it, but read-only: editing is a deliberate act, not something you fall into by clicking a file. (An empty file is the exception. There's nothing to read, so it opens ready to write in.) The tab says Read, not View, because "View" is the word the launcher panes use for how a listing is drawn, and means something else where the thing is words.

Scripts—.bat, .cmd, .ps1—open as text too, with Run on their menu, because a double-click should not silently execute anything. A .reg file is shown rather than merged into the registry, because a double-click should not silently rewrite your machine. The Properties panel counts the words, lines and characters, and the Viewer panel shows the text of a file you've only selected.

Find and Replace

Every plain or rich text document has a Find menu: Find... (Ctrl+F), Find Next (F3), Find Previous (Shift+F3), Replace... (Ctrl+H, in Edit) and Highlight All. The find box stays open while you work, over the top right corner of the text. It matches case and whole words if you ask, searches up or down, and reads what you type as plain text, as wildcards, or as a regular expression. It starts with the first line of whatever is on the clipboard, and it remembers your last search from one document to the next. Replace All keeps a rich text file's formatting, and your undo history with it. Highlights are a yellow wash over every match, and they're never saved: a highlight is something the reader sees, not something the document has.

Rich Text

A .rtf file gets the same tabs, the same Find and the same saving, in a proportional font with the lines wrapped. Its formatting is shown and kept. What isn't there yet is any way to add formatting: there are no bold, font or list buttons for rich text, and its web addresses are drawn as links but don't yet do anything when clicked.

Web Pages

An HTML file has three tabs. Read shows the page in a real browser, the one built into Windows 11, with its scripts, pictures and stylesheets; the address of a link under the pointer shows along the bottom of the window, and a click sends it to your web browser. Edit and Source are below. The last few pages you put down, four on each desktop, aren't thrown away: they're kept out of sight, and come back as they were when you open them again.

Editing

The Edit Tab

Click Edit and the same page becomes writable, with Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All, Undo and Redo on the right-click menu. There is no Save button. A document is a sheet of paper, brought up to date when the sheet is put down: when you close it, open something else in its place, switch to another desktop, or close the program. You're never asked; a page that has been written on has been written on, and there's nothing to ask. A file you didn't change is never rewritten. Text is saved as UTF-8, and without the invisible marker some programs put at the front, because a plain .txt that gains one on its first save is a nasty surprise.

New Text

File > New > Text offers Plain, Rich and Full: a .txt, an .rtf, or a web page. In a launcher pane the new document opens ready to write in, with its name ready to type over; in a folder listing, the name is put up for typing.

Web Pages

A web page's Edit tab is a paragraph editor: click a paragraph and it, and only it, becomes editable, with a toolbar for styles, emphasis and lists, and the browser's spelling suggestions on the right-click menu. The page is kept free of scripts while you write, and a page you only looked at is never rewritten in the editor's own markup. This editor is new; the one before it merged paragraphs and put lists inside them. It also writes email, where a message can be plain or formatted.

Source is Monaco, the editor inside Visual Studio Code, with colors for the markup and real completion, checking and formatting. It works without a network, from files that come with the program.

Notes

The Notes plug-in, once it's switched on, puts a Notes tab on the right-hand strip: a pane of quick notes, each tile showing the first few lines of its note, with New Note at the top. A note is just a text file, and it's opened and edited by the same text document as any other; the plug-in has no editor of its own.

Not Yet

• Formatting tools for rich text, and links in it that can be clicked.
• Find in web pages.
• Markdown shown as a page, and program code in color. Monaco knows some eighty languages, but so far only web pages use it.
• A choice of encoding: everything is written as UTF-8, whatever it was read as.
• Word wrap you can switch, printing, and spell checking outside a web page's Edit tab.
• Word and WordPerfect documents, which are on the list.

Putting Things Together

Text already travels well. Copy some, from a document here or from Word or a browser, and paste it onto a folder or drop it there, and it becomes a new text file, named for the moment it arrived. Paste works inside any text document you're editing. A selection can be copied out, though not yet dragged.

What doesn't exist yet is the other direction: nothing can be dropped onto a text document. When I designed the program's dragging and dropping, the point was that it "sets us up for being able to drop…a text file into a text document," and the machinery is ready for it; it's the text editor's half that hasn't been written. Beyond that, text should go wherever it makes sense: onto a picture, as a layer of words, or onto a video, as a title.

Progress

• By 26 September 2026—A folder's New menu makes text files, and the design of the video editor records the idea that text, too, is a collection: of paragraphs, of words, of characters.
• By 1 October, when the project's detailed history begins—Plain and rich text with Read and Edit tabs; Find, Replace and Highlight All; web pages with Read, an earlier Edit, and Source.
• 1 October—Pasting and dropping move onto one shared set of rules, under which text from anywhere becomes a new text file in the folder it lands in.
• 3 October—A web page's Edit tab becomes the new paragraph editor, and the same editor writes mail. File > New > Text > Plain / Rich / Full. The Notes plug-in, and the launcher layout that shows the first lines of each file.
• 4 October—Hovering over a link shows where it goes. Folder settings files, now .dmini, open as text.