The Astrolabe manual
Your notes, charted.
The manual. The app's own tour (Ctrl/Cmd P → Take the tour) shows most of it live.
Getting started
ConfigurationEvery .env key, the Settings panel inside the app, and which of the two wins when both say something.Publishing & accessWho can read, who can edit, the publish: flag, previewing your site as a visitor, putting it on the internet, and reader comments.Backup & syncSaving your vault to a private git repository you own — by hand or on a timer — and the note history that comes with it.Offline readingThe notes you have already opened stay readable when the network is gone.CaptureGetting things into the vault without opening a note: a line from anywhere, a thought said aloud, a page from the browser, a share from the phone.FeedsOther people's writing, read here: a list of feeds kept in a note, fetched only when you say so, and the articles worth keeping written into the vault.ImportBringing a Notion workspace, an Evernote notebook or an Obsidian vault in: previewed before anything is written, and undoable after.ExportA ZIP of your notes and the files they use — one note, a folder, a tag, or the whole vault — and any note as a standalone HTML page.The desktop appAstrolabe as a native application: the menu bar, vaults, windows, the reference window, find in page, updates and deep links.The Android appTwo doors from a phone — your own server, or a private repository on GitHub — the share sheet that captures into the vault, updates, and what it deliberately does not do.
Writing
The editor & reading viewWhat the live-preview editor does, what markdown Astrolabe renders, and how you get around the vault.Templates, banners & notesNote banners, Obsidian-compatible templates, heading sections, attachments and the trash.LaTeX notes.tex and .latex files are notes, not imports — edited, published, searched and linked exactly as markdown is.TrackersA fenced block that turns a note into a living progress card — and a board that shelves all of them.SigilsThe things you come back to every day — a plan for each day, a record of what you did, and a page that asks you every morning.TodayOne page for what the day asks of you: a line to capture, today's note, the sigils due, the cards due, the tasks whose date has come, what you wrote on this day in earlier years — and, in the evening, one question.The CalendarThe month as a page of its own: every day's note, the sigils you kept, the cards you graded and the pages you read, laid out where you can see a month at a glance.The TimelineThe vault by date, newest first: every note on the day it was written, every daily note, sigil tick, reading sitting, voice note, captured line and publication — and, once a year, a note that adds the year up.OrbitsDecks of cards that are notes in your vault, studied on a schedule the note itself keeps.DrawingsAn Excalidraw canvas in the vault: a drawing is a note that opens as a whiteboard, embeds as a picture, and keeps working in Obsidian.The book readerEvery PDF and every EPUB in the vault, read in a viewer that answers to the keyboard, remembers your place, and turns a highlight into a note.Ask the vaultSearch by what a note means rather than the words it uses, see which notes are about the same thing, and ask a question your notes answer, with the passages they answered it from. On your own machine by default.Panes, tabs & windowsSplitting the note column, what a tab is, several windows over one vault, and the smaller doors: the local graph, the trash, the tour, aliases.Printing & PDFA note, on paper — and the same thing your reader gets from an article on your site.KeymapEvery keyboard binding, and why the awkward ones are where they are.
Your site
Blog modeThe ready-made blog: a masthead and a row of topics, article pages, a magazine-style home page, an RSS feed and search-engine tags.Designed modeThe third way to show your site to visitors: a home page you build out of sections, plus your own navigation, header, footer, typography and static pages.The libraryBooks, courses and lecture series on the public site, as paths a reader walks in order.Webmentions & the fediverseOther sites telling yours they linked to a post, your posts telling the sites they link to, and the blog as one account that Mastodon and its neighbours can follow. Three switches, all off until you turn them on.
Look & language
ThemingThe forty-six built-in themes, the ambient masthead, the custom-theme builder, the CSS variables the app is painted with, and custom.css.TypographyA catalog of fonts served from your own server, the four font slots, your own uploaded fonts, and how Arabic and Latin letters share one paragraph.Arabic & RTLAstrolabe in Arabic: a mirrored interface, a language switch for visitors, a language filter with four settings, Hijri dates, note direction and Arabic names for your tags.Japanese & furiganaSmall readings over kanji: the {漢字|かんじ} syntax, a right-click that suggests the reading, an automatic mode, and a Japanese typeface that only Japanese lines get.Read aloudSelect a word or a paragraph in French, Japanese, Arabic or English and hear it, spoken by voices that run on your own machine's processor — no cloud, no graphics card.