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Organizing your work

A vault can hold a few notes or a few thousand. φ gives you light structure — spaces, folders, tags, and search — so you can find anything without ever imposing more order than you want. Nothing here changes how a document is written; it only changes how you reach it.

The left rail: three spaces​

Down the left edge sits a thin vertical rail. The top three icons are spaces — different lenses over the one vault, grouped by what you're doing:

  • Notes (folder icon) — your documents and folders. The folder tree is home.
  • Write (book icon) — collections: manuscripts, poetry, essays.
  • Journal (notebook icon) — your dated journal entries.

Below them, a sun opens today's morning pages, and a separator leads to the feature views — calendar, graph, characters, author profiles, research — with the trash pinned at the bottom. Clicking a space switches what the sidebar shows; it doesn't change the document you have open.

The sidebar​

The sidebar is the panel next to the rail. What it contains depends on the space you're in: the folder tree in Notes, your books in Write, your entries in Journal.

Toggle the sidebar with ⌘[ (View → Toggle Sidebar). Hide it when you want the page to itself; bring it back when you need to navigate. Drag its right edge to resize it.

The folder tree​

In the Notes space, your documents live in a nested folder tree. Folders are optional — a document with no folder sits at the root.

Create and rename folders​

  • New folder — click the folder-plus button in the sidebar toolbar (creates one at the root), or open a folder's ⋯ menu and choose New subfolder.
  • Rename — open a folder's ⋯ menu and choose Rename, then type the new name and press Enter. (Press Escape to cancel.)
  • Delete — the ⋯ menu's Delete. Documents inside move up to the root; they are never deleted with the folder.

Color a folder​

In a folder's ⋯ menu, pick a swatch to color-label it — gray, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, or pink — or the first swatch for no color. Colors are purely for your own at-a-glance sorting.

Move documents​

Drag a document onto a folder to file it there. Drop it on empty space in the tree to move it back to the root.

Collapse and expand​

Click a folder's twisty (the caret) to open or close it. The collapse/expand button in the sidebar toolbar folds or unfolds the whole tree at once.

Recent and Starred​

Above the folder tree, two sections give you fast paths to the documents you reach for most:

  • Starred — documents you've marked with the star. Star a document from its header (the star button) or its right-click menu. Unstar from the same place.
  • Recent — the documents you opened most recently. (You can turn this section off in Settings → Sidebar → Show recent documents.)

Both sections collapse with their carets.

Tags​

Tags cut across folders: a document can carry any number of them, and you can group documents by tag regardless of where they're filed.

  • Add a tag — in a document's header, type into the add tag… field and press Enter.
  • Remove a tag — click the × on the tag.
  • Filter by tag — when you have tags, a row of tag pills appears at the top of the Notes sidebar. Click one to show only documents with that tag; click it again to clear the filter.

Every document in the vault is full-text searchable, and search runs entirely on your Mac.

  • Find (⌘F) — opens the sidebar's search box. Type to see ranked matches with a snippet of the surrounding text. Results update as you type, and prefix matches are included, so a partial word finds whole ones.
  • Quick switch (⌘K) — opens the quick switcher, a fast jump-to box that searches documents and collections by title. Good for hopping somewhere you already know the name of.
  • Command palette (⌘P) — runs commands and can jump to documents too.

Morning pages, journal entries, and research pages are kept out of the folder view and out of search by design — they have their own spaces.

Sort order​

In the Notes sidebar, the sort button (the up/down arrows) sets how the folder tree orders documents:

  • Last modified — most recently edited first.
  • Date created — newest first.
  • Title — alphabetical.
  • Manual — your own order.

Document status​

A document can carry a status to mark where it is in your process:

  • draft
  • published
  • archived

Set it from the status control in the document header. On a standalone note the status is optional — click the milestone button to reveal it, then choose one. Documents that belong to a collection always show their status. Journal entries don't use status.