Panes, tabs and windows

Splitting the note column, what a tab is, several windows over one vault, and the smaller doors: the local graph, the trash, the tour, aliases.

Panes

A pane is one column (or box) of the workspace that holds notes. The note column can be split into several. Ctrl/Cmd \ opens a second pane beside the current one, on the same note; Ctrl/Cmd Shift \ opens one below instead. Panes stand in columns along the reading direction: at most three stacked in a column, four columns, eight panes in all. The ninth is refused with a sentence rather than a shuffle. Ctrl/Cmd Alt \ closes the focused pane, and its tabs are **adopted by a neighbour, never dropped**. Ctrl/Cmd Alt Shift with an arrow moves the focus between panes, physically, in both languages, and Focus next pane in the palette walks them in order. A window with nothing to restore opens the note you were in most recently.

Drag the seam between two panes to resize them. The hairline between two columns, and the one between the two panes of a column, is a grip: drag it and the widths follow your hand, from one tenth to nine tenths; double-click it and the pair is evened out. The arrangement is remembered with the layout.

The graph is a tab. Ctrl/Cmd G, the graph button in the status bar, or Graph view in the palette opens the vault graph as a tab in the focused pane, beside the notes, and the same gesture closes it again. Click a node and the note opens as the tab next to it, so the map and the note flip back and forth the way two notes do. The graph tab can be dragged into a split like any other, and one pane can hold the graph while the one beside it holds the note.

Drag a tab to split. While a tab is being dragged, every pane raises five targets: its four edges, which split it and land the tab on that side, and its centre, which joins its strip. A target the layout would refuse is not drawn at all. The drag works between windows too.

The two side panes, the notes sidebar and the outline, are documented with the editor.

Tabs

Each pane has its own tab strip. A single click in the tree opens a note in a preview tab, which the next preview open replaces, so following forty links does not leave forty tabs behind. Editing the note, or double-clicking, keeps the tab. Ctrl/Cmd Alt PageDown / PageUp walk the strip and Ctrl/Cmd Alt W closes a tab; middle-click closes one too, and a tab with unsaved changes wears a dot. The strip is one tab stop for the keyboard: arrows walk it, Home and End jump, Delete closes the focused tab. Right-click a tab for pin (a ◆ in the row, protected from close others), close others, close the tabs after this one, reveal in the sidebar, and copy the path. When more tabs are open than the strip is wide, it scrolls inside its own box and the active tab is kept in view; the tool cluster at the top never goes under it.

Several windows, one vault

Open a second window on the vault (Open this note in a new window in the palette; on the desktop app also Ctrl/Cmd Shift N). Two windows on the same note are not two editors: one holds the right to edit and saves, and the other becomes a live reader with a strip that says Another window is editing this note and an Edit here button that takes that right over. No referee between the windows and no lock file: the oldest window wins a tie, a window that stops checking in loses its claim, and a window that closes gives its right up. Theme and editor language follow between windows, and signing out in one signs out all. The desktop app adds a reference window that stays on top.

When the file changed under you

A save that would overwrite a version of the note you never saw is refused, not merged: the server compares the file's modification time with the one your editor loaded. Your text stays in the editor, autosave pauses, and a strip above the note offers Keep my version or Use the disk version (undoably). The full story, including the two-server case, is in Backup & sync.

The local graph

The right panel carries a local graph: the open note in the centre with the notes it links to and the notes that link to it, moving as if hung on springs you can grab. Drag and let go and it keeps moving a little, click to open, double-click to open in place. It stays live as you write and link, collapses with the panel's other sections, and remembers whether it was open. The whole-vault graph is the graph view.

The command palette, beyond notes

Ctrl/Cmd P searches notes and commands together. With an empty query it lists the notes you open most, ranked by how often you visit each, a count that fades with time and is kept in this browser (paths only, dropped when the note leaves the tree, never shown to a visitor). The same ledger breaks ties in wikilink autocomplete. Rows worth knowing: Reveal note in sidebar, Copy link to note, Duplicate note (a copy beside it), Open this note in a new window, Focus next pane, Switch to the light or dark twin of your theme, Snapshot now, Open trash, Random note (somewhere you have not looked in a while), Take the tour.

Aliases

An alias is a second name a note answers to. aliases: in a note's frontmatter gives it as many as you like: each alias appears in wikilink autocomplete as alias of Title and in search as matched alias. When you rename a note, the toast offers Keep as alias, so every [[old name]] in the vault and every URL you have shared keeps working without a rewrite. ([[Name|label]] is a display label on one link and is a different thing.)

The trash

Deleting a note, an attachment or a folder moves it to .trash/ in the vault. Open trash in the palette lists what is there, what is inside each entry, how big it is and when it went, with Restore per row, a permanent erase per row, and Empty trash. Restore puts an entry back where it came from, which the trash remembers, and says beforehand when that spot is taken (it lands beside it) or gone (it lands at the root). Before a delete, every dialog says what is really inside: a folder of "0 notes" that holds forty images says so, and names the notes that embed them. .trash/ is never pushed by Backup & sync.

The tour

Take the tour in the palette deals a deck of illustrated cards, one feature each, and every card has a Show me that opens the real thing rather than a picture of it: the designer, the themes, publishing, collections, trackers, history, search, templates, LaTeX, the PDF reader, panes, the graph, backup, the phone layout and the keys. It also waits on an empty vault, at the foot of the Ctrl/Cmd / sheet, and in Welcome.md. It never opens by itself.

Bookmarks

Ctrl/Cmd Shift B bookmarks the open note (or takes the bookmark off), and so does Bookmark this note in the palette. The bookmarks are a note, Bookmarks.md at the vault root: a Markdown list of wikilinks, readable in Obsidian, synced with everything else, and editable by hand whenever you like. The sidebar draws it as a starred section above the tree. Drag a row onto another to reorder; the list lines move in the note and nothing else on the page does. It is a different thing from pin to top, a scratch area above the tree that belongs to one browser; a bookmark is in the note and travels with it.

The note's grammar is three kinds of list line, and you can write any of them by hand:

## Reading

- [[Ledger]]
- [[Ledger#April|April's ledger]]
- `tag:physics before:2026` Older physics

## Kitchen

- [[Bread]]

• - [[Note]] is a note (★). An alias after | is the label the row shows.
• - [[Note#Heading]] is a heading inside a note (§): the row opens the note and lands on that heading, exactly as the link would if you clicked it in a note.
• - `query` is a saved search (⌕): an inline code span holding anything the search box takes, operators included. The row runs it in the search box above the tree. Any text after the span is the row's label; without one, the row shows the query itself.

Headings and prose between the lines are yours and are left where they are; the sidebar lists the rows flat, in the note's order. Ctrl/Cmd Shift B keeps or removes the whole-note line only — a heading bookmark into a note is not the note, so it is never taken off by the shortcut.

Named layouts

Save layout as… in the palette keeps the current arrangement (panes, tabs, splits, never content) under a name (Research, Writing), stored in the vault's own .astrolabe/layouts.json so the desktop app and a browser share them (settings travel with the vault). Restore a layout… lists them with Restore and Delete; restoring swaps the whole arrangement and prunes tabs whose notes have gone since.

Tags as a tree

The tag shelf under the tree is a tree of its own: book/fiction and book/history show as book once, with the count of everything under it, and a chevron opens the branch. The small control in the shelf's corner sorts by count or by name; both choices and the open branches are remembered per device. A click still filters the tree, a second click clears the filter, and a right-click renames.

Properties as a shelf

Under the tags sits Properties: every frontmatter key the vault uses, with the count of notes that carry it, most-used first. Click a key and the search box runs prop:key — the notes that have it at all. The chevron beside a key opens its distinct values, up to the twenty most common, each with its own count; click one and the search runs prop:key=value (quoted for you when the value has a space in it). A second click on either clears the search. A list value counts once per item, so authors: [Ibn Khaldun, Al-Jahiz] shows both names under authors, and "Reading" and "reading" are one value, the way the prop: operator matches them. The tags key is not listed here; it has the shelf above. The shelf is the owner's: a visitor's sidebar does not draw it, and its counts are scoped like the tags' — a key seen only on unpublished notes never reaches a visitor session. The collapse is remembered per browser.

On a phone

On a phone, and on a tablet with no mouse, Astrolabe is laid out for the hand rather than for a desk. There are no tabs, no panes and no status bar; there are screens, a bar of five doors at the bottom, and sheets that rise from the bottom edge. Every part of the product has a screen of its own here: nothing on a phone is the desktop's page squeezed.

The five doors. The bar at the bottom holds Today, Notes, Search, Calendar and More, each with its name under its icon. Each keeps its own place: open a folder in Notes, look something up in Search, and going back to Notes finds the folder where you left it, scrolled where you left it. Tapping the door you are already in takes it back to its start.

• Today is the home screen: a field at the top that captures a line into today's note (the same capture as quick capture; while it is empty its button is a microphone for a voice note), today's note itself, every Sigil task due today as a row you tick in place, every Orbits deck with cards due as a row that starts the session, and the last notes you were in. On a phone that opens a vault directly (the pocket), the capture field is there too, and the line is committed like any other edit.
• Notes is the vault, two ways, and a switch at the top of the tab — Tree | Folders — chooses between them; the choice is remembered on the device.
  • Folders shows one folder per screen: rows a thumb can hit, each folder with its count and a chevron. The bar at the top is the folder's path — Notes › Mathematics › History — and every part of it but the last is a way up: tap Mathematics and you are there. When the path is too long for the bar its middle folds into …, which opens the folders it hides as a sheet; the folder you are in always keeps its name. The ‹ beside the path goes up — to the folder this one is in, and from a top-level folder to the vault — never to another tab, whatever you did before you got here.
  • Tree shows the whole vault as one list: tap a folder to open it in place, under its chevron, and tap it again to fold it. The folders you open stay open on this device, until you fold them. Hold a row for its menu, as in Folders. In both, a folder's pictures, recordings and films are one row after its notes — Files · 13 — that opens in place, and a file opens in the viewer. A folder with no notes in it says so, with a New note here button. The busiest tags sit in one row of chips at the top of the vault; the last chip, All tags, opens every tag as a sheet. Your pinned rows sit above the rest. The + in the corner is a new note in the folder you are in (hold it for a new folder), and the arrows beside it change the order. Pull the list down from its top to refresh it: the vault is read again, and in the Android app's GitHub vault that is also sync now.
• Search opens with the keyboard already up. Its three segments are Notes (the vault search, and your recent notes while the field is empty), Commands (every command the palette has) and Tags.
• Calendar is the month. Tapping a day raises that day — its note, its sigils, its cards and its reading — as a sheet.
• More is everything else, in groups: Orbits, Sigils, the library, Media, the weekly review and the graph; Trash, Settings, Backup & sync and the theme; the designer and the visitor preview; the tour, About and sign out.

A note fills the screen. Its bar at the top is the way back, the note's name (tap it to return to the top), an icon for the mode the note is in — a pencil while you are editing, a book while you are reading; tap it to switch — and ⋯. The bar slides away as you read down and returns the moment you scroll up. Nothing sits at the bottom, except while you are typing: then a row of keys rides on top of the keyboard with [[, #, a task box, bold, a heading, undo, redo and a key that puts the keyboard away. Tap anywhere in the note's text and the caret lands there and the row comes up; tap a #tag and its page opens instead: every note that carries it.

The note's sheet. ⋯ opens a sheet with four parts: Outline (tap a heading to jump there; the sheet gets out of the way), Backlinks, Properties (tap one to change it, or add one) and Actions — publish, the other face of a bilingual pair, share, move, history and delete. Publishing asks first: it is the one action that reaches other people. The properties of a note show above it as a single line, 3 properties ›, which opens the same sheet. Tags in Properties opens the tag picker: every tag in the vault, the note's own ticked, a field that finds one or adds a new one — a tap writes the note at once.

Holding means "more". Hold a row in Notes to rename it, move it, pin it, publish it or delete it. Hold a heading while editing to fold it, fold what is under it, copy a link to it, select it, focus on it or move it into a note of its own; hold a heading while reading for the rows that make sense without the editor — copy a link, copy its Markdown, move it into a note of its own. Hold the "N properties" line at the top of a note for Hide properties (see the editor). (On a phone the fold arrow and the heading's ⋯ are gone from the margins, so the text has the whole width.)

Orbits, Sigils and Media are lists. Orbits lists your decks with what each has due; a deck opens its own screen — due, new and total, one Study button, and its sections if you want to study just one — and Study starts the session on the whole screen. Leave the session by its own ‹ Orbits or by going back, and you are on the deck again. Sigils lists every sigil with how today stands ("2 of 3 today", a rest day, done, the step a course is on); a sigil opens with today's checklist first, then the week and the twelve-week heat map, then the streak and the month, and a course's units with their projected dates under them. Tick a box and it answers at once. Edit, open the note and delete are under ⋯. Media lists your trackers shelf by shelf, with a status filter above them; a tracker opens as its card, with its − and + and its edit button.

A book has its own bar. A PDF or an EPUB opens on the whole screen with one bar of its own: the way back, the title, a slider that moves through the pages (or the chapters) and jumps when you let go, and ⋯ — the contents (as a sheet), search, go to a page, night mode, quote into a note, your marked passages and the reading session. A PDF opens at the width of the screen; pinch to zoom, or use the − and + at the corner. The library is a list of every book, the ones you have been reading first.

Settings is a list of sections. More → Settings lists the sections, each with the sentence saying what it decides, and a search above them that finds any setting by name. A section is a screen of its own. As soon as you change something a bar rises from the bottom with Discard and Save; if you go back, switch door or open something else with changes unsaved, Astrolabe asks before throwing them away. A row marked This device saves itself as you choose, as it does on the desktop, and never raises the bar.

Sheets and the back gesture. Every sheet rises from the bottom, can be dragged down to close, dragged up to see more, or dismissed by tapping the page behind it. The phone's back gesture — the Android back button, the edge swipe — closes the sheet first, then goes back one screen, and back from the first screen of a link you followed comes home to Today rather than leaving the app. The theme picker, the designer, What's new, the tour, a picture in the viewer and a book's search or contents answer the back gesture the same way.

Back means up, and your place is kept. Each door keeps its own way back: come to Notes from Today and the back gesture walks up the folders you had open before it ever goes to Today. The ‹ on a folder always goes to the folder above it. And your place survives the page being reloaded, the app being brought back from the background, or a sync: the same screen, the same folders behind it, the list scrolled where it was. (A sheet that was open is not brought back — you land on the screen under it.)

On a foldable opened, and on a tablet. A note takes the page. Below 1000 pixels wide — a Galaxy Z Fold opened either way up, an iPad or any tablet held upright, a phone on its side — the layout is the phone's: a list opens the note across the whole screen, and ‹ comes back to the list. Where the screen is a page rather than a palm (600 pixels wide and up: the Fold opened, every tablet), the note keeps tabs: open a note, go back to the list, open another, and the first is still there — a row of tabs under the note's bar, the one you are reading underlined. Tap a tab to go to it, tap its × to close it (the next one shows); going back to the list closes nothing, and the tabs are there when you open a note again, after a reload, and when the app comes back. Up to eight stay open; past that the one you looked at longest ago gives way.

From 1000 pixels wide — a tablet in landscape — there are two columns: the same doors in a rail down the side, the list you are browsing in a column a list's width, and the note filling the rest; here Notes starts on the Tree, which reads like a book's contents beside its page. Picking another note opens it beside the list (and adds its tab), and the list keeps its place — its scroll, its open folders, the note you are reading lit. Drag the grip between the two columns to give the list a little more or less room (double-tap it to put it back). Hide list at the foot of the rail puts the list away so the note takes the page, and Show list brings it back; the choice is kept on the device. The list's own ‹ goes up a folder while a note is open. The note's sheet slides in from the side over the note's column, never over the list. A study session and a book take the whole screen. Turn the tablet or open the Fold with a note open and the note stays open; the list comes or goes beside it. A tablet with a keyboard and a trackpad gets the desktop layout instead.

With a keyboard. A bluetooth keyboard is noticed the first time you type on it, and from then on the usual shortcuts work — Ctrl/Cmd+K opens Search, Ctrl/Cmd+P the palette — and More gains a Keyboard group with vim's keybindings, zen and the shortcut sheet.

Every target is a finger's width. Nothing you can tap is smaller than 44 by 44 pixels, and every field you type into is set at 16px, below which iOS Safari zooms into the field and leaves it there. The notch and the home indicator are kept clear. npm run check-phone drives all of this — taps, back gestures, sheets, a study session, a tick, a book's slider, a setting saved and a tag written, in both languages, on a phone held in the hand, a Galaxy Z Fold's cover screen and its inner screen opened, a window with a pen and a tablet both ways up (Development).

What counts as a phone. A window narrower than 700px, or any device whose own pointer is a finger that cannot hover — which includes a tablet held in the hands, at any width. A laptop with a touchscreen and a mouse keeps the desktop's panes, and so does a desktop window wider than 700px. Turn a tablet, open a foldable or narrow a window past the line and the layout follows at once, with the same note open. A Galaxy Z Fold is a phone either way: its cover screen (about 344 by 882) and its inner screen opened (about 690 by 829) both have one column, and the inner screen keeps tabs. The phone never changes the tabs and panes your desktop keeps: it does not save its one open note over them.

Pages that are tabs

Besides notes, books and drawings, a pane can hold pages that name no file: the graph, the Sigils page, Orbits, the Media page, the Calendar, Today and the Timeline. Each opens as a tab in the pane you are in, has an address of its own (/today, /timeline, …) and sits beside whatever else is open.