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 Note. A fresh note opens 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.
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 Note, 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. Your open notes 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 note fills the current tab (from Home it opens a new one), and the strip holds up to six tabs beside Home - open a seventh and the oldest one closes on its own. 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.
Keep going
From here, a note can become much more than text. You can:
- Format it in plain markdown - see The editor.
- Connect it to other notes with
[[links]]- see Linking notes. - Sort it with tags the app can suggest for you - see Tags & tag pages.
Write a few notes, link a couple together, and the rest of Nodes will start to make sense quickly.