New - makes a new empty document in the UTF-8 encoding. Of course you can save it in the charster what you like.
New Kwas - opens a new Kwas window. Please read the chapter What is Kwas?.
Crapbook - Crapbook is a simply text file that stored at $HOME/.config/tea/crapbook.txt. You can call it by Alt-M. TEA saves this file automatically when you close TEA or crapbook.txt itself. I think this is useful for writing some notes, quotes and the similar stuff.
Add to... > Add to Bookmarks - adds a new bookmark record into Bookmarks list. Each record includes fields: filename, charset, position. To edit the bookmarks file (which is a simple text file with a list of items) go to File > Manage config files > Bookmarks file. Edit it and then save. Changes will be applied immediately.
Add to... > Add to the autosaving list - adds the current file to a special list of files. These files will be saved automaticaly when you close it. To edit the file with that list go to File > Manage config files > Autosaving list
This feature is useful if you want to keep some files as collectors for a different info. You can, for example, make a shortcut in KDE to run something like tea ~/my_links.txt, and put my_links.txt into the autosaving files list.
Open - opens a file[s]. There are a charset selector in the File open dialog window. Choose the correct encoding or you will be angry. For details about how TEA deals with charsets please read the chapter How TEA works with different charsets?
By open multiply files, they must be in the same encoding (the charset that selected), or shit can happen. I cannot say about the nature of that hypothetical shit, but now you are warned.
TEA uses File open widget introduced in GTK+ 2.4. It supports some keyboard shortcuts for different actions:
Location popup - Control-L
Directory up - Alt-Up
Directory down - Alt-Down
Goto gome directory - Alt-Home
About RTF files - yes, TEA can OPEN them. Not to save. To open it correctly you must define the default encoding for RTF. It can be done in Preferences > Encoding > Default charset for RTF. If you are an English-speaking user, do not worry, it is not affects you much.
An another question is how TEA opens RTF's. It really sucks, but it works. To just read RTF quickly, use TEA. But if you want to edit them, then use OOo, or KWord, or AbiWord, or whatever else.
By the way, TEA can open OpenDocument, OpenOffice.org Writer, KWord, Microsoft Word and AbiWord files in the read-only mode. So you can use TEA as the viewer of those files, or to convert them into the plain text (using Save as with another filename). I can notice that TEA reads KWord slightly better than OOo and Abiword formats. To open Microsoft Word, you need to have the Antiword program installed. And to open OpenDocument, OpenOffice.org Writer and KWord you need the following programs: gunzip, bzip2 and tar.
About archieved files. Currently TEA supports in the read-only mode files comressed with .gz, bz2, zip, tar.gz, tar.bz2 and tar.zip. There are two limitations for that. In a such mode TEA can open only UTF-8 files (or with a normal English text). And, TEA can handle an archieve if it contains just a single file.
Open different - from this menu you can quickly open snippets, sessions and templates files for editing. Here you may find also the Open movie menu item. It is destined for SRT-subtitles editing. For the further info read the chapter about View menu.
The Open different has also an item called Open from the Famous text entry. How it works? Enter or paste the full file name into the Famous text entry, then use this function and enjoy.
Templates - from this menu user templates are available. All templates are stored by default in $HOME/.config/tea/templates. To save the file as a template, use Save different > Save as template menu item.
Sessions - the stuff like in the Opera browser - you can store lists of files, and then load them as well. There are also the one menu item - Open different > Open session file - to open a session file in TEA like a normal text file, without loading a filelist from it. TEA stores to each session 3 elements per file - the filename, the encoding and the cursor position.
To store the files as a session, use Save different > Save session menu item.
Now playing: Yab Yum - Dead Moon Ritual (Source Mutation Mix)
Save different > Backup - TEA makes copy of the currently editing text as the backup-file.
Save - you know, right? Just a one note - document will be saved in same encoding as you've opened it.
Save as - by the way, in this dialog you can select from the list any of the encodings that available. So if you want to convert your file into another charset, use this feature.
Save different > Save as template - saves a current file as template in a default templates directory $HOME/.config/tea/templates.
Save different > Save version - save a copy of the current file with the name, based on this file name and current date and time.
Manage utility files - from here you can open directly any of TEA configuration files (saved at $HOME/.config/tea/). The changes will be applied after editing and saving. I do not recommend you edit the Main config, because TEA has a fine tool for that - the Preferences window, but do as you wish.
Current music is: Nirvana - Talk To Me
Manage utility files > Autoreplace words file - here you can open the file with words for autoreplacing (which you can turn ON at Preferences > Editor > Autoreplace). This file contains lines in a very simply format: string1=string2. For example:
Linux=GNU/Linux sxe=straight edge FSOL=Future Sound Of London hl=highlighting
After you save this file, the inner list of autoreplacing will be updated. To use it, just turn autoreplacing on, and start to type your text. All words from the list there will be replaced/expanded when you enter their short equivalent and press SPACE or any punctuation key. Autoreplacing is case-sensetive.
Manage utility files > Hotkeys config - using this file you can assign your hotkey/shortcut for any menu item. All hotkeys are stored in the $HOME/.config/tea/tea_hotkeys file. This file MUST contain only UTF-8 data. All changes will be applied after you save this file. If the new hotkey overlaps an older one for the same menu item, then changes will work after the TEA restart. Pre-defined hotkeys are not changeable.
Each line of tea_hotkeys has a simple format: menu item caption=hotkey. For example:
Reverse=Alt Shift R Read this fine manual=F1
Some notes. The menu item's caption is case-sensitive. So you must write it exactly as in the TEA menu. Otherwise, the hotkey is not case-sensitive, so you can write freely something like that: "shift ctrl F5" or so. Available modifiers are: Alt, Ctrl, Shift. You must divide them by spaces.
You can assign a hotkey to any menu item, even for dynamical-created items like bookmarks.