Nodes is a minimal, fast writing app for macOS - a quiet place to write, think, and connect your ideas. This guide walks you through everything it can do, one short page at a time.
What Nodes is
At heart, Nodes is a markdown editor. But your notes don't sit in isolation: you link them together with [[wiki-links]], organize them with tags, and watch the connections take shape in a living graph. PDFs and images live right alongside your writing, so a single library can hold everything a thought is made of.
Everything runs on your Mac. Your notes are plain files on disk that you own outright, and the intelligence that suggests tags and writes descriptions works entirely on-device - nothing is uploaded, and no account is required.
Alongside your notes, Nodes keeps a permanent Home page - the leftmost tab, always a press of ⌘1 away. It shows today's date, lets you browse your whole library, gathers reminders from your notes, lists your tags, and grows a small garden as you write.
How this guide is organized
- Getting started - write your first note, learn your way around, and see what Nodes costs.
- Home - the Home page, reminders from your notes, and your garden.
- Writing - the editor, Flow, linking notes, and working with PDFs and images.
- Organizing - tags, tag pages, and the on-device AI that helps you sort.
- Finding & seeing - search, the graph, and the timeline.
- Windows & shortcuts - tabs, Light Windows for loose files, and the keys worth knowing.
- Settings - appearance, fonts, editing helpers, and the background agent.
- Your data - where your files live, and how to move them in and out.
The first time you open Nodes, a short guided tour walks through the basics - markdown, tags, images, the timeline and graph, on-device intelligence, and import & export. After that, this guide is here whenever you want to go deeper.
If you're brand new, start with Your first note. Otherwise, jump to whatever you need - each page stands on its own.