Quick Tools
Quick Tools
Sudowrite has a pair of features we call the Quick Tools: Quick Edit and Quick Chat. These tools are the fastest way to make light edits or chat with your documents, and they open within your document itself.
Find them in the Selection Menu (where they appear as Quick Edit), or open them with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + K (PC) or ⌘ + K (Mac). You can use Tab to toggle between Quick Edit and Quick Chat.
Both Quick Edit and Quick Chat are included with your Sudowrite plan, making them free to use by default. You do have the option of toggling on a High Quality mode that will use credits. While High Quiality mode is capable of more complex tasks, we’ve found it’s rarely necessary.
Quick Edit
When you already know that something needs to change, and you just need a little help doing it, Quick Edit takes your instructions and makes those changes for you. Just highlight a sentence, paragraph, or entire scene, and tell Quick Edit what you’d like changed or rewritten.
Quick Edit takes your instruction and goes to work, leaving a struck-through version of your original copy in place for comparison. Accept the changes, reject them, or further refine it—all inline.
Both Quick Edit and Quick Chat are available now—find them in the hover menu that opens when you highlight something in your document, or just press Ctrl/Command+K.
Quick Chat
We know that working with a chat tool is essential to many people’s process. Quick Chat is a chat that you can open instantly, anywhere in your document for help with your work.
You never have to brief Quick Chat, or bring it up to speed, because it can see all of your Documents and Story Bible. You can ask it basically anything about your characters or story—just highlight a particular section of text if you want it to focus on that.
It’s also still a chat, which means you can use it for feedback, brainstorming, and other questions—sort of like ChatGPT, only better because it’s (mostly) unfiltered too.
What do the Quick Tools know about my story?
One of the biggest benefits of Quick Edit and Quick Chat is that they are story aware. That means they can see your existing work in order to stay on track.
Quick Edit will focus on the highlighted text you’d like transformed, but it will also take into account your Genre, Style, Synopsis, Worldbuilding elements, and other context-dependent things like matching Characters or a Chapter Outline.
Meanwhile, Quick Chat looks at your Genre, Characters, Worldbuilding elements, relevant Documents, and any text you may have highlighted—which is actually not a requirement to use chat.
While the visuals in the video above are sort of essential, a partial transcript specific to Quick Tools is available by expanding this toggle.
Now, returning to our Quick Tools, whether you’ve highlighted a full passage or a single word, clicking Quick Edit will open This window. Quick Edit is designed to take your natural language instructions on how you’d like your selection to change, and apply those changes for you. For example, if I take this passage we just created with Expand, I can use Quick Edit to say, “change this to first person.” Quick Edit will generate a fresh edit in green, while leaving a struck through version of my original prose in red.
Meanwhile, I can use this toggle to switch over to Quick Chat. Quick Chat is a story-aware chat. That means it can look at all your documents, but it also has everything in your Story Bible in its brain. So you could say, remind me what genre this is supposed to be? Or you could ask, who’s narrating this right now? You can also use it to brainstorm, ask its opinion on a selection, and much more.
By default both Quick Edit and Quick Chat are free—that is, they’re includedn with your Sudowrite subscription, and do not use up credits like most AI features. There is a High Quality mode which does use credits that you can toggle on, available for more complex tasks, but that should rarely ever be necessary.
That about covers it for the Selection Menu and our Quick Tools. Let us know what questions you have in the comments, and be sure to join us in our community Discord and free weekly classes if you want to continue your Sudowrite education.