Quick notes

Sometimes a thought arrives and there is nowhere fast to put it. Today's journal is a tap away, but it asks you to find the end of the entry and decide where the thought belongs. Quick notes asks nothing. Open the tab, type, press Enter, and get back to what you were doing. When you are ready, one press moves everything you captured into your journal.

Where it is

Quick notes is the second tab of the left sidebar, beside the Graph tab. On a phone it is the second tab of the left drawer. It is always there: you never open or close it, you just switch to it.

The shortcut Alt+N switches to it from anywhere and puts the cursor in the box, so Alt+N, type, Enter captures a thought without touching the mouse. Alt+G goes back to the Graph tab beside it.

Adding a note

Type into the box and press Enter, or tap Add. Shift+Enter starts a new line inside the same note. Clear empties the box.

Each note shows when it was written, newest at the top. The cross on a note deletes it, which is how you drop a mis-typed one before it reaches your journal.

If you type something and switch tabs without adding it, it is still in the box when you come back. It is not saved anywhere until you press Enter, so a reload will lose it.

Moving notes to your journal

Move all to today's journal takes every note in the list and appends them to today's journal entry, creating the entry if today has none yet. The entry opens so you can see what landed. Then the list is empty.

The notes go in as outliner blocks, grouped under the day each one was written and oldest first, so the journal reads in the order things happened:

- [[2026-09-16]]
  - Idea: dark mode toggle
  - Ring the dentist
- [[2026-09-17]]
  - Fix the bike lock

A note written today still sits under today's date inside today's entry. A note with more than one line becomes one block with the extra lines under it. If the entry already has content, the new group goes after a blank line at the end. Moving twice in one day makes two groups rather than merging into the first.

If the move cannot write to the journal (a folder that has gone read-only, say) nothing is deleted. The notes stay in the list and a message says what went wrong.

Where the notes live

Quick notes are stored with your graph, not with your browser. On a synced graph they reach every device you open it on, and everyone who shares the graph sees the same list, as with favourites. In a local folder they are in etherpk/quick-notes.json, which EtherPK manages; leave that file alone. They travel in an export and in a local copy of a synced graph, so an export made before you moved them does not lose them.

Quick notes are not pages. They have no name, nothing links to them, and quick find and search do not look inside them. They exist only until you move them.