Crossword words are edited manually right in the crossword grid.
To edit a word, you must select it by clicking with the mouse or navigating with the keyboard. When a word is selected in the grid, you will see it highlighted, and the selected (active) cell will have a different highlighting to show you where you are:
Fig. 3.7.1.1. Selected word and active cell in the grid
When the grid is under focus, you can navigate to a word using the arrow keys on your keyboard (, , , ) or using the left button of your mouse.
If the active cell (highlighted bright yellow in the above picture) is at the crossing of two words (one going across and the other down), you can switch between these words by pressing the key or clicking on that cell with the left mouse button. The crossing words will be thus selected in turn.
To clear the current selection (word and active cell), click outside of the grid (on the surrounding grey field).
To change the letters in the selected word, just type characters with your keyboard. The letter in the active cell with be replaced and the grid will advance to the next letter in the selected word.
Of course, only alphabetical characters are accepted. If you try typing other characters (e.g. numbers or punctuation marks), nothing will happen. The case in which you type doesn't matter, since the application stores all words internally in lower-case and the case of the words in the grid can be configured with
.
Since pycrossword is fully Unicode-enabled, characters from any alphabet are accepted. The figure below shows a crossword with Russian words (Cyrillic characters).
Fig. 3.7.1.2. Example crossword with non-Latin (Cyrillic) characters
To delete a single letter in the active cell, hit the or key. In the former case ( pressed), the active cell will advance to the next one in the selected word; and in the latter case ( pressed), the active cell will move to the previous letter in the selected word.
You can configure the appearance of empty (blank) cells in
.
There are three ways to delete a word in pycrossword:
-
Delete all the letters manually with the or key as described above.
-
Erase the word disregarding its crossing words with
or the

button in the
, or using the hotkey combination.
-
Delete the word clearing only its free letters, i.e. those that don't cross other words in the grid; this is done with
or the

button in the
, or using the hotkey combination.
The effect of the first and second ways is identical: the selected word is erased entirely, and all its letters become blank. If some letters are crossing other words, such words will also contain blanks at the crossings:
Fig. 3.7.1.3. Erasing a word (No. 4 Across) also invalidates three crossing words (No. 1, 2 and 3 Down)
The third way ("clearing" as opposed to "erasing") can be dubbed "smart" deletion. It deletes those letters that appear in the selected word only and not in any crossing ones. The picture below visualizes this difference:
Fig. 3.7.1.4. "Smart" clearing word No. 4 Across leaves the intersecting words intact
Of course, you can clear the entire crossword making all the words in it blank. To do this, select
in the main menu, or press the

button in the
, or use the combination.
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Remember that if you'd like to cancel your modifications to the words (including clearing the grid), you can always reload the crossword by pressing , provided that, of course, you haven't saved your changes already.
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