9. Text Vault

The Text Vault is a place to write, style and store text. It is for anything you send often and do not want to retype — a server advert, a rules message, a coloured shop sign, an announcement.

It has three panels: your files on the left, an editor in the middle, and file information plus categories on the right.

9.1 Managing files

Files are saved as .redtext in <Redwire folder>/TextVault/. They are plain UTF-8 text — you can write one in Notepad, drop it into the folder, and it appears in the list.

The editor saves itself a moment after you stop typing, so there is nothing to remember to press.

9.2 The editor

Type into the large box in the middle. All the usual editing keys work — see Using the Interface.

Above the box are the styling controls: Font, Format, Color, the style toggles, Prefix and the gradient rows.

Copy Text puts everything in the box — prefix, colour codes and all — onto your clipboard, ready to paste into chat. The button says Copied! for a second to confirm. Undo and Redo step through your edits, and they undo a settings change as well as a typing change: switching the Font back with Undo puts the text back too.

9.3 Fonts

The Font dropdown converts your text into a look-alike character set.

These are not real fonts. Minecraft chat has no font selector. What these do is swap each letter for a different Unicode character that looks like it. A becomes Ⓐ or 𝔄 or Ａ. Because the result is ordinary text, it survives being sent through chat, pasted into a sign, or put on an item name — anywhere text goes.

Fifteen options:

Switching fonts converts in place. Changing from Circled to Fraktur converts your existing text rather than adding to it — the old font is un-mapped back to plain letters and the new one applied. You can switch as many times as you like without your text degrading, and picking Default puts it back to ordinary letters.

Only A–Z, a–z and 0–9 have look-alikes. Punctuation, spaces and accented characters pass through unchanged.

Some fonts will not display everywhere. These characters depend on the font a program has available. Minecraft’s own font covers many of them but not all, and a character it cannot draw shows as a box. Test in-game before relying on one.

9.4 Colours and formats

Minecraft servers do not all agree on how colour is written into text. The Format dropdown picks the syntax, and Color picks the colour.

Choosing a colour

Click the colour swatch to open the picker: drag in the square for shade, drag the bar for hue, or type a hex code into the box underneath it. You can also type a code such as FF0000 straight into the box beside the swatch — clicking that box opens the picker as well.

The style toggles

Five switches, applied on top of the colour:

Obfuscated text scrambles constantly in-game — the “hidden” effect.

The codes are written in whichever syntax the current Format uses, so you never have to remember which server wants which.

Formatting is added around your whole text, not to a selection. The Text Vault is for composing a message in one style, not for mixing several styles in a paragraph. For that, write the codes by hand.

9.5 Prefix

The Prefix box holds a run of text that is put at the very front and then left completely alone — no font conversion, no colour, no style codes.

It is there for the part of a message that is not really part of the message: a command, a channel tag, a target name. /msg Steve as a prefix means everything you type is styled as a whisper and the command in front of it stays typeable text rather than being turned into fancy Unicode letters the server cannot parse.

Changing the prefix rewrites the front of the text; the body keeps its styling. Clearing the box removes it.

9.6 Gradients

Switch Gradient on and the text is coloured character by character, fading through a list of colours instead of being one flat colour.

The first stop is the colour the text starts on and the last is where it ends; anything in between is a waypoint the fade passes through evenly. A new gradient starts as a dark-to-bright ramp of your current Theme colour, so it matches the rest of the interface out of the box.

Typing a colour code: the picker has a hex box under the square. It edits whichever colour the picker is on — the main one or any gradient stop — so a code can be typed or pasted straight in.

Spaces are not coloured, and do not count. A space shows no colour, so a code spent on one is wasted; worse, it would consume a step and make the letters either side jump further apart in hue than letters that sit together. Skipping whitespace makes the fade run evenly across the letters you can actually see. Underline and strikethrough still carry across a space unbroken.

Chars per Color exists because of chat length limits. A per-character gradient over a sixty-character message is sixty colour codes, and most servers count those against the limit — the message gets cut off long before the text does. Raising it to 3 or 4 cuts the codes to a third or a quarter and the fade still reads smoothly.

Two things to know:

• A gradient needs a Format. “No Formatting” has no syntax for colour at all, so a gradient in it is just the plain text. The row says so when that Format is picked.
• The colour code is repeated on every run, together with the style codes. That is not redundancy — in these formats a colour code resets bold and italic, so without repeating them only the first few characters would come out bold.

MiniMessage is different

MiniMessage has a gradient of its own, so Redwire uses it rather than writing colour codes:

<gradient:#ff0000:#00ff00:#0000ff>Hello World</gradient>

One tag, any number of stops, and the server does the interpolation. That means it is far shorter than the equivalent in the other formats, and it is not affected by anything Redwire does per character — so Chars per Color does not apply and its box is greyed out with (n/a) on the label while MiniMessage is the chosen Format. Spacing is up to the server’s own implementation there too.

9.7 Categories

Categories keep a long file list manageable — Adverts, Rules, Signs, whatever suits you.

• Create Category in the right-hand panel makes one.
• Assign a file to a category with the Category dropdown in the File Info panel, while that file is open.
• The All Categories dropdown above the file list filters by category.
• A category’s own ⋮ menu offers Rename, Copy (every file in it, to your clipboard) and Delete. Double-clicking a category also starts renaming it.

Categories are stored separately from the text files themselves (in a small vault.meta file alongside them), so a .redtext file you drop in by hand is never modified and never corrupted by Redwire’s own bookkeeping.

9.8 File Info

The right-hand panel shows the open file’s Name, Category, Size, Created and Modified dates.

9.9 Getting text out

Four ways:

1. Copy Text above the editor puts the whole thing on your clipboard. Paste it into chat with Ctrl+V.
2. The ⋮ menu → Copy on a file in the list does the same without opening it.
3. Select in the editor and Ctrl+C copies just the part you selected.
4. Open Folder and open the .redtext file in any text editor.