1. Get started

Install Chop

Download the installer for your platform from the Chop download page.

macOS

1. Open the downloaded .dmg.
2. Drag Chop into Applications.
3. Open Chop from Applications.

Chop is signed and notarized for macOS, so it opens without a security warning and without any right-click workaround.

Windows

1. Open the downloaded installer.
2. Windows SmartScreen shows Windows protected your PC, because Chop is not code-signed for Windows yet. Select More info, then Run anyway.
3. Complete the installation steps.
4. Open Chop from the Start menu.

Chop installs for your user account only, so it does not ask for administrator rights and does not ask you to pick a folder.

Open your Tub

The Tub is the folder where you keep debate files.

1. Select Open Folder at the top of the left sidebar.
2. Choose the folder that contains your research and flows.
3. Expand a folder or file to browse its contents.
4. Select a .docx file to open it in Verbatim.

Chop remembers your Tub on this computer. Change the default folder in Settings › General.

Create your first flow

1. Press Cmd/Ctrl+N, or select New in the left sidebar and choose New Flow.
2. Choose where to save the .flow file.
3. Add your first case or off-case page.
4. Press Cmd/Ctrl+S to save as you work.

2. Set up Chop on first run

The first time you open Chop it asks two things, and you can skip both. Nothing you skip is lost: every answer is also in Settings.

The sign-in prompt

Chop opens on Sign in to continue. Select Sign in with Tabroom to connect an account, or Skip to go straight to the workspace. Cutting, flowing, and saving all work without an account. See Sign in with Tabroom for what an account adds.

The setup wizard

Set up Chop then walks through five steps. Use Next and Back to move between them, and Finish on the last step to save your answers.

1. Tub. The folder Chop opens into. Select Browse… to choose it.
2. Rounds. Where flow exports and downloaded evidence land. Chop suggests a Rounds folder inside your Tub and creates it for you.
3. Cites. Your cite format, and the folder that saved cites go into. The folder has to sit inside your Tub so the Cites tab can find them.
4. Verbatim. Editor font, highlight color, and the size of each heading style.
5. Flow. Paper color, Aff and Neg pen colors, and the analytics checkbox described in Privacy and your data.

Select Skip setup at any point to leave the wizard. Skipping saves nothing, including steps you already filled in, so use Finish if you want to keep your answers.

3. Sign in with Tabroom

Signing in is optional and available in the desktop app. It connects your Tabroom account through debatespn.com.

Sign in

1. Select your account row at the bottom of the left sidebar, or Sign in with Tabroom when you are signed out.
2. Chop opens the sign-in page in your normal web browser and shows Waiting for your browser….
3. Sign in to your Tabroom account on that page.
4. Return to Chop. Your name appears in the sidebar.

If you do not have an account yet, select Create an account on the sign-in screen. Registration asks for your first and last name.

What an account adds

• Inviting people to a room by email, and accepting their invitations.
• Searching Tabroom pairings when you start a round flow.
• Search history in the evidence search.

Everything else works signed out: opening and cutting .docx files, flowing, saving, comments, version history, the research browser, searching your Tub, and joining a collaboration room with a share code.

Select your name in the sidebar and choose Sign out to disconnect the account. Your files are unaffected.

4. Set up your workspace

Work with panels

Chop opens with a Verbatim panel and a Flow panel side by side.

• Select the panel icon at the top left to Hide Tub or Show Tub.
• Select Panels at the top right to add, remove, or reorder panels, and to switch between a single row and a two-by-two grid.
• Open more than one Verbatim panel to compare files.
• Open more than one Flow panel to keep separate views of a round.
• Open more than one Browser panel to separate research tasks.

Each Verbatim panel holds several file tabs. Right-click a .docx file in the Tub and choose Open in New Tab or Open in New Window to control where it opens. With two or more Verbatim panels open, the menu instead lists each panel by name.

Chop remembers the layout on this computer.

Move through open files

Select a file tab to make it active. When you follow a heading from the Tub, Chop opens the document and scrolls to that section. A back arrow appears in the panel header once that tab has somewhere to go back to.

Read only what you plan to say

Verbatim has Invisibility and Flow has Read Doc view. Both are the open-book icon in the toolbar, and both hide card body text that is not highlighted, underlined, or boxed.

These views change the display only. The document keeps all of its text. Chop disables saving, exporting, and sending while either view is on, so turn the view off before you export.

5. Organize the Tub

Understand the document hierarchy

Chop follows the Verbatim heading structure.

Expand a .docx file in the Tub to see this structure without opening the file. Select any heading to open the document at that location.

Use the sidebar tabs

• Tub shows the whole folder.
• Rounds shows only your rounds folder, where flow exports and downloaded evidence land.
• Flows shows the .flow files in your Tub.
• Cites shows saved cites.

Change the outline

Right-click a Pocket, Hat, Block, or Tag in the expanded outline to open its actions. Depending on the level you can:

• Promote or Demote the heading.
• Add a New Heading Before, New Heading After, or New Subheading.
• Copy or Delete the section.
• Select Heading and Content in Verbatim.
• Expand All or Collapse All.
• Choose which levels appear under Show Heading Levels.
• Send to Flow from a Hat, Block, or Tag, or Create a Speech from a Pocket.

Drag a heading within the outline to move it. Structural changes apply to the open Verbatim document, so save the document once the structure is right.

Work with cloud folders

Files stored in Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud Drive, or another synced folder have to be downloaded before Chop can read them. An online-only file reports not downloaded yet rather than an error. Most files in a large shared tub are online-only until you ask for them.

6. Cut and edit evidence in Verbatim

Cut a card

The default function keys follow the standard Verbatim workflow.

1. Paste source text with F2 to drop the source page’s formatting.
2. Use F4, F5, F6, and F7 to place the text in the Pocket, Hat, Block, and Tag hierarchy.
3. Apply F8 to the citation.
4. Apply F9 to the words you expect to read.
5. Apply F10 to emphasized text.
6. Apply F11 to highlight the final card.
7. Press F3 to condense and remove empty paragraphs.

Press Option/Alt+F3 to shrink selected text in stages, cycling through 11, 8, 6, and 4 points. Remap any key from F2 to F12 in Settings › Verbatim, which is available in the desktop app.

Use the toolbar

The toolbar gives you the same actions as buttons.

• Undo and redo.
• Pocket, Hat, Block, and Tag styles.
• Bold, Cite, Underline, Emphasis, Highlight, and Clear.
• Paste Text, Condense, Shrink, and a reading mark.
• Move the current section up, down, or to the bottom, and open Document Stats.
• Invisibility, Save, Export, and Versions.
• Zoom, from 50 to 200 percent.

The Doc menu holds document-wide cleanups: Shrink All Cards, Unshrink All Cards, Replace Emphasis › Underline, and Standardize Highlighting.

Find text in the open document

1. Press Cmd/Ctrl+F. There is no toolbar button for this.
2. Enter the text you want to find.
3. Turn case matching on when capitalization matters.
4. Press Enter for the next result or Shift+Enter for the previous one.
5. Press Esc to close the find bar.

Check document length

Open Document Stats, or press Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+I, to see total words, words marked to read, characters, and estimated reading time. The estimate uses the words-per-minute value in . The panel closes itself after a few seconds.

7. Comment on a document

Comments live beside the file on your computer. They work without an account and without a collaboration room.

Add a comment

1. Select the text you want to comment on.
2. Select Add comment in the pill above the selection, or press Cmd/Ctrl+Alt+M.
3. Type the comment and save it.

Select a commented passage to reply, edit, resolve, or delete the thread. Press Cmd/Ctrl+Alt+C, or use the toolbar button, to show the comments pane for the whole file.

Find comments across files

A .docx row in the Tub shows a badge with its unread comment count. Select Messages at the top right and open the Comments tab to see comments from every file this computer has opened. Filter with All, Unresolved, From me, and From Word.

Comments written in Word

Chop reads comments that were added in Microsoft Word and keeps them when it saves, including replies and resolved state. They carry a Word tag in the Comments tab so you can tell them apart from comments made in Chop.

Word comments appear in the list rather than beside the text, and only for documents that are open right now.

8. Collect and reuse cites

Set your cite format

Open Settings › Verbatim to build the cite template from fields such as author, qualifications, date, title, and URL. A preview under the template shows the result at cite size. You can also set:

• Cite - Author Format: last name only, last and first, or first and last.
• Cite - Date Format: year only, month and year, full date, or the numeric Verbatim standard.
• Cite - Brackets: none, parentheses, or brackets.

Save a cite

1. Open a source in the research browser.
2. Select Save this page as a cite in the browser toolbar.
3. Chop writes a .cite file into your cites folder and confirms where it went.

Downloading a PDF in the research browser saves the PDF and a matching cite into the same folder.

In this beta a captured cite records the page title and URL. Fill in the author, publication, and date yourself.

Use a saved cite

Open the Cites tab in the left sidebar and select a .cite file. From there you can edit its Qualifications, then Copy cite to the clipboard or Insert into document at the cursor. Delete removes the file.

An empty Cites tab reads No cites here yet. Set the cites folder in Settings › General. It has to be inside your Tub, or the tab cannot find what you save.

9. Recover earlier work

Restore a version

Chop adds a snapshot every time a document or flow saves, and keeps them 90 days.

1. Select Versions in the Verbatim or Flow toolbar.
2. Select a snapshot by its date. The editor opens it read-only.
3. Read the banner at the top to confirm which snapshot you are looking at.
4. Select Restore this version to make it current, or Back to current to leave it alone.

Chop cannot save while you are previewing a snapshot. Leave the preview first.

Snapshots are a desktop feature.

Restore the original file

Before Chop writes to a document for the first time it copies the untouched original aside. That copy is separate from version history and is the only way back to the file exactly as it was.

1. Open Settings › General and find Document backups.
2. Find the document in the list.
3. Select Restore and confirm.
4. Close and reopen the document to see the original.

Restoring overwrites the file with its original contents. Edits made in Chop since then stay available in version history. On desktop, Show backup folder opens the folder if you would rather copy the backup somewhere yourself.

10. Create and use a flow

Understand flow pages and speeches

Each flow page tracks one argument through the round. Case pages can include every speech. Off-case pages begin with the negative constructive.

• Case: Advantage, Solvency, Inherency, and Plan.
• Off-Case: Disadvantage, Counterplan, Kritik, Topicality, Theory, Framework, and Procedural.

The round uses the standard speech sequence: 1AC, 1NC, 2AC, 2NC, 1NR, 1AR, 2NR, and 2AR. Chop groups 2NC and 1NR material in a Block column while keeping the speaker attached to each item.

Add and organize pages

1. Select + on the page tab strip.
2. Choose Case or Off-Case.
3. Select an argument type.
4. Give the page a name.
5. Select Add.

Double-click a page tab to rename it. Drag tabs to reorder them. Right-click a tab to rename or delete it.

Choose a flow view

• All: the whole active page across the round.
• 2 and 3: two or three adjacent speeches.
• Grid: every page and speech in one overview.
• 1: one speech, scrolling down through every page.

Turn on the view-only lock to read the flow without changing it.

Take notes and move between cells

Select a cell and type.

Double-click a cell to star it. Select a card to mark it read. Type /! for the impact symbol, /S for the solvency symbol, or /card for a card divider. The toolbar also holds alignment, font, paper color, and the Aff and Neg pen colors.

11. Collaborate live

Live collaboration lets several people edit the same flow or Verbatim document at once. It uses a share code, so you do not need an account and neither do the people you share with.

Start a room

1. Open the flow or document you want to share.
2. Select Collaborate in the Flow or Verbatim toolbar.
3. Enter the name you want others to see under Name shown to others.
4. Select Start collaborating.
5. Copy the code and send it to the people you want in the room.

The status changes from Local-only to Live once Chop connects, and shows how many people are present. In Verbatim you also see each person’s caret with their name and color. Flow shows who is present without showing where their cursor is.

Join a room

1. Open a flow or document in the matching editor.
2. Save your current work.
3. Select Collaborate.
4. Paste the code into Paste a code to join… and select Join.
5. Wait for Live before you start editing.

Joining replaces what is on your screen with the room’s content. Chop saves your local work first, but joining is not a way to merge two different files.

Know what a code gives away

A share code is an access key. Anyone who has it can read and edit the room. There is no way to revoke a code or remove someone from a room, and Stop collaborating disconnects you without closing the room for anyone else. Share a code only with people you trust.

A code lasts about 30 days. Chop warns you in the week before it expires. When a code expires everyone keeps the copy on their own computer, and you start a new room to carry on together.

Work through a bad connection

If Chop cannot reach the collaboration server the status reads Server unreachable. Keep working. Your edits are saved on your computer and sync when the connection returns.

Empty room after joining usually means the code was mistyped or belongs to a room nobody has opened yet. Check it with whoever sent it.

Undo is personal. Cmd/Ctrl+Z reverses your own last change, not someone else’s.

12. Use the Messages drawer

Select Messages at the top right to open a drawer beside your panels. Drag its left edge to resize it, and press Esc or the same button to close it. It has three tabs.

Live Chat

A room here holds several documents at once, which is the difference between this and the share code on a single file.

1. Select Create a room, or paste a code and select Join.
2. Give the room a name, then share its code. Room codes last about 30 days.
3. Add a document by dragging it from the Tub into the room, or by opening it and selecting the Add button.

A document someone else added opens read-only until you select Save a copy to keep it on your computer. Rooms you leave stay under Recent, and a room that has ended gives you about a week to select Save my copies before it goes.

People at the bottom of the tab needs an account. Sign in to invite someone by email and to accept invitations.

Chain

The Chain tab signs you in to your own email provider inside Chop so you can work the evidence chain without leaving the app. Its purpose is the download: an attachment you open here is filed straight into your round folder, and the tab shows which folder that is.

Chop does not read, index, or send your mail. It only intercepts the downloads. Select Open in your browser for anything the embedded view will not do. The Chain tab is a desktop feature, because mail providers refuse to load their sign-in pages inside another website.

Comments

Every comment from the files this computer has opened, described in Comment on a document.

13. Move evidence from the Tub to a flow

Send one item to a flow

Use whichever of these fits what you are doing:

• Drag a Hat, Block, or Tag from the Tub outline onto the flow page.
• Put the cursor in a heading in Verbatim and press ~.
• Right-click the heading in the Tub outline and choose Send to Flow.

Chop asks which flow, page, and speech to use. Sending a Hat can also create a new flow page.

Build a speech from a Pocket

Use this when a Pocket already holds the structure of a prepared speech.

1. Press ~ in the Pocket heading, or right-click the Pocket in the Tub.
2. Select Create a Speech.
3. Choose which Hats and Blocks to include.
4. Review the proposed pages and create the speech.

Each selected Hat becomes a flow page in the chosen speech. Chop recognizes plan text and puts it on a Plan page when the structure allows. Rename or reclassify any page afterwards.

Bundle extras for the other team

1. Right-click a card or block and choose Send as extra…. This works on a card in the flow and on a card in the Tub outline.
2. Choose which flow page it belongs to and select Add to bundle.
3. Select the Send extras button in the flow toolbar to review the bundle. It carries a count.
4. Select Add more to keep going, or Finalize to write the extras .docx.

Sending from the Tub needs a flow open with a speech focused, since that is where the extra is filed. Chop says so if there is none.

14. Prepare and export a speech

Focus a speech

Select the speech in the flow navigation, then use the one-column view for one continuous speech document across every page. Check speaker attribution before you export 2NC or 1NR material.

Export a speech

1. Focus the speech you want to export.
2. Select Export Speech in the toolbar, or Export Speech to round folder to skip the save dialog.
3. Choose an export mode.

• Cards only: the Verbatim cards, grouped by speech.
• Cards + analytics: cards with the surrounding flow text.
• Everything: cards, analytics, and headers.
• Flow only: your spoken analytics without the cards.

4. Choose the pages to include, then select Export.

The export keeps each card’s tag, citation, body, and reading marks. Select Exports in the toolbar to open a recent file or reveal it on disk.

Turn off Read Doc view first. Chop disables export while it is on.

Save a portable flow

Select Save Flow As… to write a .flow file holding the pages, speeches, formatting, and marks needed to reopen the round in Chop.

A flow that is in a collaboration room keeps its room code when you export it, so anyone who opens that file joins the same live room.

15. Search your work

Search the Tub

1. Press Cmd/Ctrl+K, or select the search icon at the top left.
2. Enter a file name, heading, argument, citation, or phrase.
3. Filter with All, Pockets, Hats, Blocks, Cards, Files, or Flows.
4. Use the arrow keys to choose a result.
5. Press Enter to open it.

Search covers folders, file names, saved flows, open flow pages and cells, saved cites, and expanded Tub outlines. In the desktop app a background index also searches inside downloaded .docx files without opening them.

Narrow a search

• type:card methane searches cards for “methane”.
• type:block federalism searches blocks for “federalism”.
• in:current solvency searches the current context for “solvency”.

The Logos tab

Search has a second tab, Logos, for searching shared open-source evidence rather than your own files. Press Ctrl+Tab to move between the two tabs.

It is not connected in this beta. Searching there reports an error rather than returning cards. Use the Tub tab for now.

Rebuild the index

Select Rebuild index after you add many files outside Chop, download online-only files, or when results look out of date. The status line reports how much of the Tub the index can read, and how many files are still online-only.

The browser build searches visible outlines and open work. The background document index is a desktop feature.

16. Research in the built-in browser

The research browser is available in the desktop app.

Open a research page

1. Select New in the left sidebar and choose New Browser, or add a Browser panel from Panels.
2. Enter a web address or a search phrase in the address bar and press Enter.

Back, forward, reload, and History work as you would expect, and you can remove a single visit from history without clearing the rest. Right-click a tab to rename or close it. A Browser panel holds up to eight tabs, and the + button stops responding once you reach that number.

Opening a PDF from the Tub or from search opens it here too. Some sites limit what an embedded browser can show, so open the page in your normal browser when a site needs a separate sign-in.

Select Save this page as a cite to file the source. See Collect and reuse cites.

17. Adjust settings

Select your account row at the bottom of the left sidebar and choose Settings. Settings has three tabs, and every tab has Reset to Defaults and Done at the bottom.

General

• Set the global, file viewer, flow, and card themes independently, each light or dark.
• Set the reading speed used for speech-time estimates.
• Turn autosave on or off and set its idle delay.
• Choose whether clicking a .docx in the Tub opens Verbatim or expands its outline.
• Set the rounds folder, the cites folder, and the default Tub.
• Review Document backups.
• Turn anonymous usage sharing on or off.
• Check your version and select Check for updates under About.

Verbatim

• Choose the editor font and the default highlight color.
• Set the point size of Normal, Card, Pocket, Hat, Block, Tag, Cite, Underline, and Emphasis text.
• Choose whether cites are bold, underlined, or both.
• Choose whether emphasis is bold, italic, or boxed, and set the box width.
• Build the cite template and choose the author, date, and bracket formats.
• Remap F2 through F12, or set a key to None. This grid is a desktop feature, because browsers keep several function keys for themselves.

Flows

• Choose the flow font.
• Set the default paper color, or use Auto to color each page by its type.
• Set the default Aff and Neg pen colors.

18. Use keyboard shortcuts

On macOS use Cmd. On Windows use Ctrl, unless the shortcut names Alt.

Anywhere in Chop

Verbatim function keys

19. Understand files, saving, and compatibility

File types

• .docx is the Verbatim document format. Files stay usable in Microsoft Word and other editors.
• .flow is Chop’s portable flow format. Double-click one to open it in Chop.
• .cite holds a saved source.
• Speech and extras exports are written as .docx.

What a save keeps

Saving rewrites the whole .docx. Chop keeps your text, debate headings, card formatting, tables, images at the size the document gave them, comments from both Chop and Word, headers, and footers.

Footnotes and endnotes are the main thing Chop cannot write back yet. It tells you when a document contains them rather than dropping them quietly. See When Chop pauses autosave below.

When Chop pauses autosave

Some Word features cannot be written back yet. When Chop finds them it pauses autosave for that document and shows a notice at the top of the panel naming what it found. You can keep editing.

Your options, in the order most people want them:

1. Select Export to write a separate copy and leave the original alone.
2. Press Cmd/Ctrl+S to save anyway, after reading the notice. If the notice says saving will remove something, it will.
3. Leave the document as it is and edit it in Word.

A different notice says Chop has not finished reading the document. Do not save past that one. Close and reopen the file, and if it lives in a cloud folder make sure it is downloaded first.

Desktop and browser

The desktop app is the full workspace. The browser build is smaller, because browser security rules limit what any web page may do with local files.

20. Privacy and your data

What stays on your computer

Your Tub, documents, flows, cites, comments, settings, search index, backups, version history, and round logs are stored on your computer. Chop does not upload them.

What leaves your computer

• A document or flow you put in a collaboration room, sent to the collaboration server so other people in the room can see it.
• The words you type into the shared evidence search.
• Pages you visit in the research browser, which go to those sites directly.
• Update checks.
• Anything you type into the feedback form.

Anonymous usage

If you leave Share anonymous usage to help improve Chop checked, Chop sends its version, your platform, and which features you use. It never sends file contents, file names, folder paths, or room codes. Change this any time in Settings › General.

Share codes

Treat a room code like a password. Anyone who has it can read and edit everything in that room, and it cannot be revoked.

21. Fix a problem

Windows blocks the installer

SmartScreen shows Windows protected your PC because Chop is not code-signed for Windows yet. Select More info, then Run anyway.

Search returns an error

Check which tab you are on. The Logos tab is not connected in this beta and reports an error. The Tub tab searches your own files and works offline.

A file says it is not downloaded yet

The file is online-only in Dropbox, OneDrive, or iCloud Drive, and has no contents on this computer. Use your cloud provider’s command to make it available offline, then rebuild the search index.

Chop will not save a document

Read the notice at the top of the panel. If it names Word features Chop cannot write back, see When Chop pauses autosave. If it says a previous version is open, leave the version preview first. If it says the document has not finished loading, close and reopen it.

Export is greyed out

Turn off Invisibility in Verbatim or Read Doc view in Flow.

A collaboration room says Empty room

Check the code with the person who sent it. A code lasts about 30 days, and an expired one cannot be rejoined. Everyone keeps their own copy, so start a new room to carry on.

The function keys do the wrong thing

Your keyboard is using them for system controls. Hold Fn, or change the function-key behavior in your operating system settings. In the browser build the function keys are not available at all.

Recover a document you overwrote

Open Versions for a recent snapshot, or Settings › General › Document backups for the file as it was before Chop ever wrote to it.

22. Update Chop and get help

Install an update

Chop checks for updates when it opens and every few hours after that, and downloads them in the background. It never restarts on its own.

1. A Relaunch to update button appears in the left sidebar when an update is ready.
2. Finish the edit you are making and save.
3. Select Relaunch to update.

To check by hand, open Settings › General › About and select Check for updates. Automatic updates are a desktop feature; the browser build is always current.

Report a problem

Select the feedback button beside your account row in the left sidebar, or use the form on the Chop download page. Include:

• What you were trying to do.
• The steps that led to the problem.
• What you expected, and what happened.
• Your Chop version and operating system.
• A screenshot or sample file, when you can share one safely.

Reports go to the people building Chop.