Skip to main content

Annotations

Annotations let you mark a passage and say something about it — a highlight to flag it, a margin comment to remember why. They live with the document, so your notes to yourself travel with the draft.

Highlighting a passage​

Select some text. The bubble toolbar appears; click the highlighter icon (Highlight & comment) to open its menu, then pick a color. The selected text gets a soft highlight in that color.

There are five preset colors — Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, and Orange. They're translucent, so they read well in both light and dark themes.

A custom color​

Next to the presets is a custom color swatch. Click it to open the system color picker and choose any color you like for the highlight.

A comment without a highlight​

Sometimes you want to note something without coloring the text. In the highlighter menu, choose Comment (no highlight). φ attaches a comment to the selection without tinting it — you write the note itself in the Annotations panel. Every highlight can carry a comment too; the two work together.

To remove a highlight, select the highlighted text and choose Remove highlight from the same menu.

The Annotations panel​

Open the right panel (⌘] toggles it) and choose the Annotations tab to see every annotation in the current document. Each card shows the quoted text, its color, and a box for your comment.

From the panel you can:

  • Jump to the text — click a card's quote to scroll to and select that passage in the editor. (Clicking a highlight in the editor works the other way: it opens that annotation in the panel.)
  • Write or edit a comment — type in the card's note box.
  • Recolor — pick a different preset, a custom color, or No highlight (comment).
  • Resolve — click the check to mark an annotation done; resolved ones are dimmed but kept.
  • Remove — click the trash icon to delete the annotation.

Finding annotations​

When a document has several annotations, use the search box to filter by the quoted text or your comment, and the filter menu to show only Highlights, Comments, Open, or Resolved annotations.

Detached annotations​

If the text an annotation pointed to is edited away, the annotation becomes detached — it's kept in the panel and marked, with a Reattach to selection action so you can re-anchor it to a new passage.

How annotations are stored​

Annotations are part of the document. The colored highlight is a mark in the document's content (a small annotationId tag on the text), and the comment, color, and resolved state are saved in the document's metadata inside the same .poiesis file. Nothing is stored separately and nothing leaves your Mac — copy or back up the file and its annotations come with it.