A Tour of memrynote
A 60-second lap through the parts of the app you'll use most.
The Sidebar
The left edge holds two columns: a narrow icon rail and the sidebar panel beside it.
The rail carries the top-level pages — Home, Inbox, Journal, Calendar, Tasks and Graph — as icons. Hover one to see its name and shortcut (⌘+1 through ⌘+9, in rail order); hold ⌘ and each icon shows its number. Inbox and Tasks carry a small count of waiting items and tasks due today. Right-click an icon to open that page to the side. The rail stays on screen when you hide the panel with ⌘+B, so every page is still one click away. Sync status, feedback and Settings sit at the foot of the rail.
At the top of the panel sit the open vault's name, the New button and a search field. Click the vault name to open the list of vaults. The pen button creates a note in one click. Click the chevron on its right to open the create menu — New Note, Journal, Calendar, Inbox, Tasks, or Tags — the same menu as the + on the tab bar. Some create-menu entries open ready to act: Calendar pops the new-event popover, Inbox focuses the capture field, and Tasks opens your default project with the quick-add input focused. Tags opens the tag hub, where your tag categories live.
The search field opens global search, the same as ⌘+K.
Opening the same views from the rail focuses the input too (Inbox capture, Tasks quick-add), but the rail's Calendar just opens the calendar without the new-event popover — the popover is reserved for the create menu and the tab-bar +.
Sections from top to bottom:
- Collections — your notes and folders
- Projects — task projects with their incomplete-task counts
- Bookmarks — notes you've marked
- Canvases — your canvases
- Tags — your tag vocabulary
Drag any section item to reorder, or right-click for a context menu.
Inside the Notes tree, drag a note or folder to move it. Where you drop on a row decides what happens: the top and bottom edges reorder around that row, while the middle of a folder row drops the item into that folder. An empty folder takes a drop the same as a full one, so a folder you just created is ready to receive notes immediately. Notes hold no children, so dropping on a note always reorders. Reordering applies while the section is in Manual sort — see below; dropping into a folder works whatever the sort. A moved folder takes everything inside it along, subfolders included. If a folder cannot be moved, for example because a folder with the same name is already there, a message says so and the folder stays where it was.
Sorting a section
Each section header carries a sort control. Open it to choose how that section is ordered:
- Manual — the order you arranged by dragging
- Name A → Z / Z → A
- Modified: newest / oldest first
- Created: newest / oldest first
- Most used / Least used — Tags only, by how often each tag is applied
The options differ per section, because the underlying items differ: projects and bookmarks carry no modification date, tags have a usage count but no dates, and canvases have no manual order.
Two things follow from picking a mode:
- Drag-to-reorder only applies in Manual. In any other mode the list is derived from the items themselves, so a position you dragged would be re-sorted straight over. Dragging an item into a folder or project still works in every mode — that is a move, not a reorder.
- Your manual order is kept. Switching to Name or Modified and back to Manual restores the arrangement you made; it is stored, not recomputed.
In Manual sort, a note or folder you create appears at the top of the folder you created it in, above everything you have arranged there — not at the bottom of the list. Naming it does not move it again, and neither does renaming a folder: the whole folder keeps its arrangement, and so does everything inside it. A folder you have never dragged is not affected; it keeps ordering itself (notes newest first, folders A → Z) until you arrange it yourself.
Sort modes are saved per vault and sync, so another device that opens the same vault shows the same order. Each section syncs independently — changing Collections on one device and Tags on another keeps both changes.
Collections view options
The Collections sort control has two more switches below the sort modes:
- Notes before folders — each folder lists its own notes first and its subfolders after them, at every level of the tree. Useful when a folder holds an overview note you want right under the folder name instead of below every subfolder. Off by default: folders come first, as they always have. The sort mode still orders notes among notes and folders among folders.
- Show files — turn it off to hide PDFs, images, audio and video from the tree so it lists only folders and notes. The files are still in the vault: folder views, search, the graph and links show them as before, and a folder stays in the tree even when it only holds files. Files you drop into the sidebar while this is off are imported as usual, and the import message says they are hidden in the tree. On by default.
Both switches are saved per vault and sync, like sort modes.
Expanding a whole folder
Clicking a folder's arrow opens one level. To open a folder and every folder inside it, right-click it and choose Expand all subfolders; Collapse all subfolders closes them again. ⌥+click on a folder does the same in one step: on a closed folder it opens everything below it, on an open one it closes everything below it. The rest of the tree is left as it was. The button in the Collections header still expands or collapses the whole tree.
Section headers stay pinned to the top of the sidebar while you scroll a long section, so its sort control, the expand/collapse button and New note / New folder are always within reach.
Reordering the sections themselves
The sections come in a fixed order, but you can change it. Hover a section header and a grip appears at its left edge. Drag it and the section's name comes with the pointer while the section itself stays put and dims; a line marks the place it will land. The header's own click still expands and collapses the section, and keyboard users can pick the grip up with Space and move it with the arrow keys.
Like sort modes, the arrangement is saved per vault and syncs. A section you have never had — one added by a later version, or one whose feature you switch back on — appears in its usual place rather than at the bottom, and a section this version does not know about is ignored.
Sections start in the order they have always used, so an existing vault looks unchanged until you pick something else.
The Notes tree loads 10,000 notes at a time, most recently modified first. If your vault holds more than that, a footer row under the tree says how many older notes it is not showing and offers Load more to pull in the next batch. Notes past the ceiling are never hidden silently — and they stay reachable through search either way.
At the foot of the rail:
- Sync status — shows whether sync is connected; click it to open account settings (or to sign in when you're signed out).
- Feedback — report a bug or suggest a feature.
- Settings (gear) — opens the settings modal, the same as ⌘+,.
Switching vaults
With more than one vault, the sidebar panel pages between them. Swipe sideways with two fingers on the trackpad over the panel and the neighbouring vault's page follows your fingers in, its name at the top; let go past the middle to switch, or short of it to spring back. ⌘+⌃+→ / ← (Ctrl+Alt+arrow on Windows and Linux) play the same move.
Under the panel, one icon per vault shows where you are, in each vault's accent color, the open vault's icon solid and the rest dimmed. The icons stay put while the pages move and blend toward the incoming vault as you swipe; clicking another vault's icon switches to it. With more vaults than fit, the row scrolls sideways and keeps the open vault in view. The rail never moves.
Every vault starts with the same library icon. To give it its own, click the icon beside the vault's name at the top of the panel, or right-click any vault's icon under the panel and choose Change icon…; pick an emoji or an icon. Reset icon brings the library icon back. A synced vault's icon follows it to your other devices, end-to-end encrypted like its name. With the panel hidden, switch vaults with the shortcuts above or ⌘+⇧+O.
Vaults you visited recently come back the way you left them, with the same tabs, scroll position, open note and sidebar lists, so going back and forth is instant. The first visit to a vault in a session loads it from disk; while it does, the sidebar keeps showing that vault's last page, with its own sort order and section order, instead of a loading state. Each vault also remembers which Collections folders you had open. If a switch takes more than a moment, the content area says which vault it is switching to, so the previous vault's notes are never mistaken for the new one's. Each vault stays fully separate: notes, journals, tasks and sync never cross between them, even when two vaults have an entry for the same day.
Tabs
Across the top of the workspace. Every note, search, project view, journal entry, or settings panel opens in a tab.
- ⌘+T — new tab
- ⌘+W — close tab
- Ctrl+Tab — next tab
Pin a tab to keep it always at the front. Drag a tab to a pane edge to split the workspace.
The Editor
The main writing surface uses BlockNote — a block-based rich text editor.
- Type
/to open the block menu - Type
[[to link to another note (autocomplete suggests existing ones) - Markdown shortcuts work inline:
#,-,**bold**,`code`
Saves are automatic and debounced. Find-in-page is ⌘+F.
The Day Panel
A right-side panel with:
- A monthly calendar picker (heatmap of activity)
- Today's tasks (or whichever date you've focused)
- Schedule (events, journal preview)
Drag the left edge to resize; double-click to reset.
Inbox & Triage
A capture surface for links, files, voice memos, and other ephemera. The Triage view shows one item at a time as a card so you can process them quickly.
Tasks & Projects
Tasks live alongside notes. Two views — list and kanban. Group tasks under projects with custom statuses.
- Quick-add at the top of any task list
- Natural-language dates ("tomorrow", "next Friday") parse inline
- Bulk-select, drag, recurring tasks, subtasks — all there
Search
⌘+F opens the command palette. Type to search across notes, journal entries, tasks, and inbox items at once.
- 1 through 4 scope to a single source
#tagnamefilters by tag- If AI embeddings are enabled, results rank by meaning too
Settings
⌘+, opens the settings modal. The full reference lives at Settings Reference; the categories are:
- Workspace — Account, General, Templates, Editor, Journal, Tasks, Calendar
- Preferences — Appearance, Keyboard Shortcuts
- Services — AI
- Data — Vault, Tags, Properties
Keyboard-First
memrynote is keyboard-friendly. The full shortcut list is at Keyboard Shortcuts. Highlights:
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| ⌘+N | New note |
| ⌘+F | Search / command palette |
| ⌘+, | Settings |
| ⌘+B | Toggle sidebar |
| ⌘+\ | Split right |
| F | Hint mode (letter badges on every clickable thing) |
Open the in-app shortcuts dialog with ⌘+/ for the live list.
What Next?
- Just want to use it? Open Notes and start writing.
- Want to know what's there? Browse the User Guide — every feature has its own page.
- Curious how it works? Read Architecture.