Notes & editing

Notes are the heart of Zettly. They’re where most of your thinking happens, and every other surface in the app reads from them. A note is a real Markdown file in your vault — open it in any text editor and you can read and edit it directly. The app is a window onto your notes, not a replacement for them.

This page covers how notes work, what the editor can do, and the conventions that make notes feel like a connected web rather than a pile of documents.

Markdown as the source of truth

Zettly uses Markdown — the same lightweight markup used everywhere from README files to forum posts. Headings, lists, links, code blocks, blockquotes, tables, and images all work the way you’d expect. If you can write Markdown in a text editor, you already know how to write a Zettly note.

A few things that are specific to Zettly:

• Wikilinks ([[note title]]) connect notes to each other. See the section below.
• Tags (#tag) mark topics inline with your prose. See the section below.
• Task lines (- [ ] something @due(2026-04-30) #tag) are recognized by the app and roll up into the task hub. See Tasks.

The Markdown file is canonical. The app formats it, adds live previews, and overlays interactive niceties, but the file on disk is plain text. If you ever want to leave the app, you take your notes with you.

The hybrid editor

Most note-taking apps force a choice: typing or drawing. Zettly lets you do both on the same page. A single note can have typed text, hand-drawn ink, shapes, and connectors, mixed however you like.

You switch between two modes with a single toggle in the note’s header:

Text mode

A clean, focused Markdown editor. You type on the left, and a live preview renders on the right. The preview updates as you type, and you can hide it for a distraction-free writing mode.

Under the hood it’s a serious editor — proper keyboard shortcuts, multi-cursor editing, smart indentation, and a Markdown syntax that highlights headings, links, and code as you type. The cursor follows your thoughts instead of fighting them.

Live preview is more than a render of your Markdown. It also handles:

• Wikilinks that are clickable in preview and create stubs for new titles
• Tags that are recognized and filterable
• Task checkboxes you can tick in place without leaving the editor
• Tables and code fences rendered inline as you type
• Embedded note titles in the backlinks panel

Draw mode

A canvas surface overlaid on the same page. Switch to draw mode and the cursor becomes a pen. You can sketch, write, draw diagrams, and add structure.

Draw mode includes:

• Pressure-sensitive ink when you’re on a device with a pressure-aware input (a pen tablet, a trackpad with force touch, or a stylus on a touch screen)
• Shapes — rectangles, ellipses, diamonds, arrows, and lines
• Connectors that snap to anchors on shapes so diagrams stay tidy when you move things around
• Sticky notes for free-floating text labels
• A lasso for selecting and moving groups of strokes and shapes
• Layers to separate foreground sketches from background reference
• An eraser that actually understands which stroke you’re touching

Draw mode and text mode coexist on the same page. You can write a paragraph in text mode, drop into draw mode to sketch a diagram, and switch back to text mode to keep writing — the canvas sits underneath your prose and the prose sits on top of the canvas.

Wikilinks: how notes connect

Wikilinks are the most important convention in Zettly. They turn a folder of notes into a connected web.

A wikilink is a note title wrapped in double square brackets:

This is related to [[On the shoreline of complexity]] and also
to [[Why local-first matters]].

When you click a wikilink, Zettly jumps to that note. If the note doesn’t exist yet, clicking creates a stub you can fill in later. This means you can write down ideas that should be connected without having to first write the connecting notes — the links come first, the content follows.

Wikilinks also power Knowledge graph. Every wikilink becomes an edge in the graph. Write more links, watch the graph grow. You don’t have to do anything else to maintain it.

A few conventions:

• Link to titles, not paths. Use [[On the shoreline of complexity]], not [[notes/on-the-shoreline.md]]. Renaming notes is cheap when the links are by title.
• Pipes for custom display text. [[On the shoreline of complexity|the shoreline essay]] shows “the shoreline essay” in the text but links to the full title.

Tags: how notes organize

Tags are inline labels that start with #. They live in the prose, which is unusual for a knowledge app and worth a moment of thought.

I'm circling the same idea in #design, but this version feels
like a #draft, not a #final. Tagging for #to-review tomorrow.

Because tags are inline, they appear at the point in your writing where they’re relevant. That’s different from a tag sidebar or a properties panel — you don’t have to scroll to the top of a note to see what it’s about, and you don’t have to maintain a separate tag database.

What tags are good for:

• Topic (#design, #writing, #research)
• Status (#draft, #to-review, #final, #archived)
• Project (#project-atlas, #q2-roadmap)
• Type (#meeting, #idea, #reference)

You can use them however you like. The app doesn’t enforce a taxonomy. If you want strict tag hygiene, the tag panel in the note sidebar shows every tag in your vault and how many notes use each one.

Tags are also nodes in Knowledge graph — every tag becomes a node, and notes that share a tag cluster together visually.

Task lines: tasks inside notes

Tasks aren’t a separate app. They live inside notes, which means you can write tasks alongside the context that produced them.

A task line is a Markdown checkbox with optional metadata:

- [ ] Outline the new essay @due(2026-04-30) #writing
- [x] Read the shoreline draft @due(2026-04-15)
- [-] Review the research notes @due(2026-05-01) #research
- [/] Schedule the launch call #planning

The app recognizes these lines and rolls them up into the Tasks hub. You can also tick them in place from the editor — checking the box in your note checks it everywhere.

Task metadata is parsed in a natural, human-readable way. @due(2026-04-30) sets a due date. #writing adds a tag. The full list of recognized metadata is in Tasks.

Backlinks: see what links here

The backlinks panel lives in the right sidebar of every note. It shows every other note that links to the one you’re reading, in context — each backlink shows the sentence around the link, not just the bare title.

Backlinks are the answer to “where else have I referenced this idea?” They’re the inverse of wikilinks, and they’re how the vault’s connections become visible without you having to maintain them.

The panel updates as you write. Add a wikilink to the current note from anywhere in the vault, and the backlink appears immediately.

Note templates

Some notes follow a pattern. A daily journal, a meeting note, a project status, a reading log. Zettly has templates for these.

To use a template, create a new note and pick a template from the new-note menu. The template’s content is copied into the new note and the cursor lands where you should start writing. Many templates also include a date placeholder that’s filled in automatically.

You can write your own templates and keep them in a templates folder in your vault. The app picks them up automatically.

Rich text inside canvas shapes

Notes can contain draw-mode canvases, and those canvases can contain shapes. Some shapes (sticky notes, callout boxes) have rich text inside them — not just a single line, but formatted text with bold, italic, lists, and even embedded wikilinks.

The rich text inside shapes uses the same editing engine as the board widgets, so if you’ve formatted text on a board, you already know how to format text inside a note canvas. The two surfaces feel like one surface because they are.

A practical workflow

A typical day in the vault:

1. Capture. Open a new note from the sidebar, write a quick thought, link it to two or three existing notes with wikilinks, drop a #inbox tag.
2. Connect. Open Knowledge graph and see the new note appear. Notice a cluster forming around a topic you didn’t know you were thinking about.
3. Move. When the note matures, change the tag from #inbox to something more specific. The graph reshuffles to show the new shape.
4. Act. Find a task line in one of your notes. Schedule it on the Calendar. It shows up in Tasks automatically.
5. Share. Drop a few related notes on a board to sketch out a project layout, then ask AI assistant to draft a deck from the board.

The point is that the work is one continuous flow. The surfaces are lenses, not silos.

Tips and conventions

A few things that aren’t obvious until you’ve used the app for a while:

• The first paragraph of a note is its preview. Whatever you write at the top shows up in the graph tooltip, the search results, and the backlinks panel. Lead with the conclusion or the question.
• Daily notes work well as anchors. A note called 2026-04-30 is a natural place to dump the day’s thoughts and link out to deeper notes. The graph shows the daily note as a hub connecting everything that happened that day.
• Atomic notes beat long ones. A note that holds one idea, expressed clearly and linked well, is more useful than a sprawling document. The graph rewards atomic notes.
• Tags and folders can coexist. Use folders to keep large structural divisions (work/personal/archive) and tags for everything else. The app handles both.

See Boards for what to do with notes once you have a few, and Knowledge graph for the visual side of the same idea.