Setting up
Settings → Setup decides what φ says back about your writing (your streak, a weekly pace, readability) and which places each mode lists in its sidebar. Each vault has its own setup, so a novel and a journal can each show only what they need.
Set up a vault
- Open Settings (
⌘,, or the sliders beside the vault's name) and choose Setup. - Under Signals, choose what φ tells you about your writing.
- Under Modes, click Write, Notes or Journal to choose the places that mode offers.
- To use the same setup in another vault, press Save as… under Saved setups.
What you change applies to the vault you're in. A new vault starts with the defaults below.
Choose what φ tells you
| Signal | What it does | Starts as |
|---|---|---|
| Start sessions automatically | Starts timing a writing session at your first keystroke. Turn it off and a session starts only when you ask: ⌘P → Start writing session (and End writing session). | On |
| Readability statistics | Adds reading grade and sentence length to a document's Document stats. Click the word count in the page's corner, then click it again. | Off |
| Streak | How your writing streak shows on Home and in the calendar: Flame and count, Plain days, or Off. | Flame and count |
| Week starts on | The first day of the week, for the calendar and the week your pace is counted in. This one applies to every vault. | Monday |
| Weekly pace | A gentle target of writing days a week: None, or 1/week to 7/week. It's a rolling seven days, so a missed day never resets it. | None |
How many words make a day count toward your streak is set in Settings → Editor → Writing streak → Minimum words / day (50 or more).
Choose each mode's places
Under Modes, each mode the vault uses has a row. It says Follows the vault until you change something in it, and then Differs. Click a row to open it:
- The places this mode's sidebar offers, each with a switch.
- The signal switches, for this mode only.
- Checklists: whether a new checklist can be started here. A document that already has one keeps it, and its boxes still tick.
Follow the vault again puts a mode that differs back to the vault's own settings.
| Place | Write | Notes | Journal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Characters | ✓ | ||
| Authors | ✓ | ||
| Research | ✓ | never | |
| Boards | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Graph | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Calendar | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Start today's morning pages | ✓ |
In Write and Notes you can turn on any of the other places except the morning pages, such as Characters in Notes. Research belongs to Write alone. Journal is kept bare on purpose: it offers the calendar and the morning pages. Turn off Start today's morning pages and Morning pages and Sealed leave Journal's sidebar.
Checklists are on in Notes and off in Write and Journal, because a checklist is a note's business. If you keep checklists in a manuscript, turn them on for Write here.
Use a setup in another vault
Saved setups keeps copies of a setup under a name.
- Save as… names the current setup and keeps a copy. Changing this vault afterwards leaves the copy as it was.
- Use in this vault replaces this vault's setup with the saved one.
- Use in another vault… gives it to another vault.
- Rename and Delete tidy the list. Deleting a saved setup doesn't change the vaults you put it on.
Turning something off only tidies it away. Turn off the morning pages and your pages are still in the vault, untouched; turn them back on and they reappear.
What Setup doesn't change
- Which modes a vault has. That's Settings → Vault → Spaces. See Vaults.
- Editor tools. Citations, the table of contents and templates aren't switches; they're there wherever the kind of document you're writing offers them.
- Your work. Nothing on this page moves or deletes a document.