This is the large area on the right below the Ribbon. When you select items in the Project Explorer you edit their contents in the Editor. This will usually be the content of your topics but the editor pane also displays project settings in the Configuration section of the Project Explorer.
This is the main editor where you will spend most of your time. It shows an approximately WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) view of your topic pages. You can edit multiple topics at the same time in multiple tabs.
To load a topic into the page editor just select it in the Project Explorer, either in the Table of Contents or in the Topic Files section. Then you can start editing as you would in a normal text editor.
To load a topic into a new tab right-click on the topic in the Project Explorer and select Open topic in a New Tab.
To move a tab to a new position just drag the tab left or right. You cannot move the leftmost tab, which is the main browsing tab.
To undock a tab to an external window drag it away from the editor or double-click on its tab. To redock an undocked tab double-click on its header bar.
You can select topics both in the Table of Contents section and the Topic Files section of the Project Explorer. The Topic Files section lists all the topic files in your project, the Table of Contents section only shows those topic files that have entries in the Table of Contents (TOC).
This tab displays the editable settings of the current topic. Among other things you can enter index keywords for the topic here. These keywords will then be included in the index when you publish your project. See this topic for details on the settings here.
Tip: You can display Topic Options next to the editor window by selecting Show Topic Options side by side in the settings menu (gear button in the top left corner).
Apart from adding index keywords it is better not to change any of the settings displayed here until you become more familiar with working with Help+Manual.
This tab is for experts and is only displayed in the Professional and Floating license versions of Help+Manual. It displays the XML source code of your topics and allows you to edit it.
If you don' t understand what you see here don't worry about it. You don't need to know anything about XML to use Help+Manual efficiently.
Warning: Anything you enter here is automatically checked against the Help+Manual XML schema file. Anything not compatible with the schema is silently deleted when you return to the normal editor pane.