The .sw files are created, deleted, moved, and renamed by directly interacting with the file system of the underlying operating system.
The content of the .sw files can be edited with any desired text editor. A possibility is to use the XEmacs in which the Specware Shell is running when Specware is fired up using Specware4 XEmacs. The XEmacs-Specware combo can be thought of as a (rather limited) Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
Note that unit definitions can be managed without running Specware at all. As described in the next chapter, Specware is used to process unit definitions. Future versions of Specware will provide true IDE functionality: unit definitions will be also managed within Specware, and the mapping to the file system could be even made transparent to the user.