Collections and libraries
A collection is one folder of notes. You can have several open at once — work, personal, a project — each with a row of its own in the sidebar, and the set of open collections is a library you can save and reopen from File ▸ Open… (⌘O). Recently opened collections are listed there too.
Collections are opened, created and closed from the sidebar: the + in its header has New Folder…, New Collection, Open Collection, Open Recent… and Open Default Collection, and a collection’s own … menu has Close Collection. Closing one removes it from the sidebar and deletes nothing.
Each collection keeps its own folder tree, tags and bookmarks. Search spans all of them.
Search
Search Notes, under the magnifying glass in the bar over the note — or ⌥⌘F — opens a search field in the bar. It searches titles first (instantly, from the index) and then, from the third character you type, note contents, showing a snippet of the matching text. The results take the tree’s place in the sidebar, grouped by collection, and matching attachments such as PDFs appear alongside notes. Clear the field and the tree comes back.
On iPhone, the Search tab searches the collection you are in. To find and replace inside one note — with regular expressions if you like — see The editor.
Open Quickly
⇧⌘O — or Open Quickly… under the same magnifying glass — opens a fuzzy finder over note titles, aliases and headings. Type a few letters, press ↩. It is the fastest way to move around a large collection without touching the mouse.
Tags
Write #tag anywhere in a note. Typing # offers autocomplete from tags already in the collection, which keeps them consistent.
A note can also declare its tags as a property, the way Obsidian does:
---
tags:
- research
- ai
---Both count. A tag written either way appears in the tag list, filters the note list, and nests the same. Front-matter tags used to be ignored entirely — if your vault declares tags this way, they are visible now where they were not before.
Tags nest with slashes — #project/website, #project/app. They live in the panel’s Tags view, which opens on this note’s tags as chips, because the usual reason to look at a tag is to find what else shares it. Below that are the collection’s tags with how many notes carry each, most-used first — a count of 1 means following it leads back here. The forty most-used are listed; type in the field above to find any of the rest. Selecting a tag filters the notes in the sidebar. On iPhone the Tags tab lists every tag in the collection by name, and choosing one shows its notes in Search.
What accepted suggestions write
Suggest Tags, Suggest Links and Summarise Note all write to the note’s properties, never into your text:
- a tag is added to
tags: - a link is added to
related:as"[[Note]]"— still a real link, so it appears in backlinks and the graph - a summary is saved to
summary:
Each is visible in the panel’s Properties view and can be removed there. Earlier versions appended tags after your last paragraph, added links under a ## Related heading the app created, and pushed summaries in above your first line — edits to your prose that you then had to undo by hand.
Bookmarks
⇧⌘D — Note ▸ Add Bookmark — bookmarks the current note. Bookmarks are pinned at the top of the sidebar, under Bookmarks, beside Recents. They are stored per collection, so each project keeps its own shortlist, and the sidebar shows them across every open collection at once.
Daily notes
Today’s Note — under the + in the bar over the note, or ⇧⌘T — opens (or creates) a note for today. Configure it in Settings ▸ General, under Daily notes:
- Folder — where daily notes live; blank means the collection root.
- Date format — date tokens such as
yyyy-MM-dd. The settings pane shows a worked example of today’s filename as you type.
Quick Capture… (⌃⌘K, and under the same +) appends a thought to today’s note, and Dictate to Daily Note (⌃⌘D) does the same by voice. On the Mac, the HelloNotes item in the menu bar captures into today’s note without switching apps.
Templates
Put Markdown files in your templates folder (Settings ▸ General, default Templates) and add one to the open note with Note ▸ Insert Template, or from the command palette (⇧⌘P). The template is appended to the end of the note, and its date and title tokens are expanded as it goes in:
| Token | Becomes |
|---|---|
{{date}} | Today’s date |
{{time}} | The current time |
{{title}} | The note’s title |
Folders, moving and attachments
- Create a folder with New Folder…, under the + at the top of the sidebar, or New Folder Here… in a folder’s own … menu, and drag notes between folders — the files really move on disk.
- Renaming a note rewrites links to it across the collection.
- Move to Trash (⌘⌫) puts the file in the Trash on the Mac, where you can get it back. On iPhone and iPad a folder may have no Trash to move it to, and the note is then deleted.
- Non-Markdown files show in the tree when View ▸ Show Non-Note Files is on, and open in a native viewer (PDFKit / Quick Look), so a collection can hold its own reference material.