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Your first note

Writing in Nodes starts the way it should: with a blank page and nothing in your way.

Create a note

Press ⌘N, or use File ▸ New Node. A fresh note opens in the tab you're on (from Home, in a new tab), ready for a title and your first words. Give it a name that you'd actually search for later - the name is how you'll link to it and find it again. Until you do, it's named with the date and time you made it. Click that title at the top of the note to rename it, and press Return to drop into the text.

As you type, your work is saved automatically to a real file on disk. There's no save button to remember and nothing to lose.

Find your way around

  • The sidebar holds quick actions - Home, Search, New Node, Flow, Graph, Timeline, and Settings. Home (also ⌘1) takes you to the home page, an overview of your whole library. Toggle the sidebar with ⌘S, and add more to it with customise - see The sidebar. Your open nodes and tag pages appear as tabs in the toolbar at the top, not in the sidebar.
  • Tabs keep what you're working on within reach. The toolbar is a tab strip: Home is always the leftmost tab, opening a node fills the current tab (from Home it opens a new one), and the strip holds up to six tabs beside Home (see tabs for what happens at six). Press ⌘T (or File ▸ New Tab) for a fresh empty tab, and jump to a tab by position with ⌘2-⌘7.
  • Search is always a keystroke away - press ⌘O to jump to anything by name or content.

Delete a node

A first note is often a test note, so it's worth knowing the way back out. There are four, and each one asks before anything goes:

  • ⌘D with the node open.
  • File ▸ Delete Node in the menu bar.
  • Delete this node, at the foot of the Node Inspector (⌘I).
  • Delete in the right-click menu of the node's row in Home's Node Explorer.

Deleting removes the node and its file for good, so if you only want it out of the way, close the tab with ⌘W instead - the node stays in your library. The FAQ covers how to get a deleted node back.

Keep going

From here, a note can become much more than text. You can:

Write a few notes, link a couple together, and the rest of Nodes will start to make sense quickly.