Getting started

Open a collection, create your first note, and learn the layout.

Opening your first collection

HelloNotes works on a collection: an ordinary folder of Markdown files. There is no import, no library format and no database — you simply point the app at a folder.

  1. Launch HelloNotes. On a first run you are offered a welcome sheet.
  2. Choose Open a Collection (or ⌘O at any time).
  3. Pick any folder containing .md files — or an empty folder to start something new.

An existing Obsidian vault works as-is: choose the vault folder and it opens directly, wiki-links, tags, aliases and front matter intact.

The layout

The window is one sidebar, the editor, and an inspector you can call up beside it:

  • Sidebar — everything you can navigate to, in a single tree. Recents and Bookmarks are pinned at the top (each spans every open collection, which is why neither is a folder), and below them sits one row per open collection. Expand a collection and its folders hang beneath it, exactly as they do on disk. It is the only part of the window that hides, which is why everything navigational lives here.
  • Editor — the note itself, with a status bar along the bottom.
  • Inspector — the note’s outline, tags, references, properties and history. Each has its own button at the right-hand end of the toolbar: click one to open that panel, and click it again to close the inspector.

Several collections can be open at once, and a place that is empty is left out rather than shown empty. Searching is deliberately library-wide: the field at the left of the toolbar sits next to the sidebar it searches, looks across every open collection, and groups results by collection.

On a narrower window the sidebar collapses behind its toggle, and on an iPhone the editor takes the whole screen with a bottom tab bar. The layout follows the space available, not the device.

Creating your first note

  1. Press ⌘N, or click New Note in the toolbar.
  2. A file is created in the collection selected in the sidebar, and opened for editing.
  3. Type as you would in any Markdown editor. Formatting appears as you type — see The editor.

A note’s title is its filename. It is shown above the body as a heading you can edit in place: click it, type, and press Return to go back to the text. Renaming there renames the file and rewrites every link to that note elsewhere in the collection — as does Note ▸ Rename… (⇧⌘R).

Saving

There is no save command, because there is nothing to remember to do. Edits are written to disk automatically a moment after you stop typing, and always when you switch notes, close a window or quit. The status bar shows Saved when the file on disk matches what you see.

If a note changes on disk while you are editing it — a sync client, another app, another device — HelloNotes tells you rather than silently picking a winner, and lets you reload or keep your version.

Where to go next