Category: uFocus Help

uFocus supports plain text documents as well as folders. This allows you to organize your documents in a structured way, such as when you’re writing a book and want to keep separate files for each chapter. In order to open a folder, drag it to the application dock icon or select it from the Open panel, just as you would do with a regular file.

Folders can be permanently linked as libraries to the sidebar. The sidebar can be opened either with a two-finger swipe to the right in any document window or from the View menu. Folders can be linked by dragging them to the popup button at the top of the sidebar or by opening them as described earlier and selecting “Link [folder]” from the same popup menu. If you later decide that you no longer want a specific folder linked to the sidebar, you can unlink it by selecting “Unlink [folder]”. Linked folders will appear with their plain name in the popup button, while open folders which are currently unlinked will appear with a “–” (dash) prepended to their name.

The sidebar displays all plain text documents contained in the selected library’s folder hierarchy. Documents can be opened by selecting them, while other actions are available from the context menu, such as opening a document in the Finder or printing it. Some actions are available for folders as well, so for example a print action executed on a folder will print all contained documents as a single file.

Markdown is a special syntax that allows you to add a little bit of formatting to your text. The advantage of the markdown syntax is that you can use it even (or especially) in a plain text document format, so any plain text reader can understand your text. This doesn’t mean any plain text reader can show you how the final result will be: it still needs to support the markdown language.

To enable live markdown formatting, select in the main menu Modus > Markdown.

When printing a document, you can apply the markdown formatting by enabling the option Apply Markdown in the print panel. If you leave this option unchecked, the document will be printed as you see it in the editor.

You can see the supported Markdown features by opening the uFocus Introduction from the Help menu.

You can customize your writing atmosphere by enabling one or more of the supplied modi from the Modus menu. A modus actively stands by as you type your text.

Some modi, such as Markdown and Highlights, change the appearance of the text within the editor, but don’t influence how the text is persisted on disk (it will always be plain text).

• Markdown formatting: allows markdown control characters to change how the text is rendered. Regardless of this setting, a document is always saved as plain text.
• Keep active line fixed: the text automatically scrolls as you type to keep the cursor at the same height, like on a typewriter.
• Typewriter sounds: different sounds are played back when you delete text, enter a space, a newline and any other character.
• Highlighting: the current sentence or paragraph is highlighted.
• Disable text deletions: you cannot delete or replace any typed text. Please note that you cannot undo/redo changes applied while this modus is enabled but you can after disabling it.