Revision flags and the revision pass

Revision flags mark the passages you want to come back to, and a revision pass walks you through them.

Only you see your flags. They are separate from track changes, which is for edits somebody else proposes on your piece, and from inline comments.

Marking a passage

Select the words you want to come back to and press Ctrl+Shift+H (Cmd+Shift+H on a Mac). The passage is highlighted as a flag.

The shortcut uses the color you chose last. To change the color, use the highlighter in the formatting toolbar and pick one. The next shortcut uses it.

On the phone, the highlighter button on the toolbar does the same job: it applies the color you last chose, and the Flags sheet is where you change which one that is.

Pressing the shortcut again on a passage that already carries the same color clears it. Pressing it with a different color selected re-flags the passage in the new one.

Six colors, and what they mean

You can name each of the six colors.

Open the Flags tab of the revision panel (the More menu, then Track changes) and each color sits on its own row with a pencil beside it. Name one “Weak verbs”, another “Check this fact”, another “Too long”. The names are saved to your account and show on every device.

Beside each color is a count of how many flags of that kind are in the piece.

Working through the pass

Click any flag in the list to go to it in your prose. Then step to the next one:

• On a wide screen, the list is a keyboard walk. Press the up and down arrows (or j and k) to step from flag to flag, with the page scrolling to each. Press R to mark the one you are on as done. These are the same keys the track changes review uses.
• On a phone, tapping a flag raises a small bar over your prose with previous, next and done on it. It stays up while you work.

Marking one done

Marking one done does not remove it. It grays out and stays in the list with a line through it. The panel shows how many are left, such as “2 left of 3”.

Reopen all puts every flag in the pass back to not-done, if you want to walk it again.

Done is for this sitting: it is not saved with the piece, and closing the piece ends the pass. Marking a flag done does not change your text. To remove a flag, clear it instead.

Doing one kind of pass at a time

Tap a color in the panel to switch it off. Those flags fade in your prose, and the walk skips them. Nothing is deleted and no flag leaves the piece. Tap the color again to bring it back.

Clearing flags

Clearing is different from done: it takes the highlight out of the piece.

• The X on a row clears that one flag.
• The X beside a color clears every flag of that color. It asks first, and one undo brings them back.

Clearing a flag does not change the words it was marking. Only the color goes.

A note on highlights you made another way

If you highlight text in a color that is not one of the six, it still appears in the list, grouped under Other highlights. It can be walked and cleared like any other.