Notes
The Notes app is three things in one window, and each one appears only when it applies:
- a text editor to change any file on the NAS without downloading it to your computer;
- a notebook of linked notes, Obsidian-style, to write down and connect ideas;
- a code editor with syntax highlighting, which switches on when you open a programming file.
It opens from the panel desktop, and text files opened from the Files app also land here.
Opening, saving and tabs
- Open browses your shared folders, just like Files. Each file opens in its own tab; the same file never opens twice (two tabs of the same file would overwrite each other on save).
- The amber dot on a tab means "unsaved". Ctrl+S saves; Save as picks another place or name.
- If someone changed the file while you had it open (from another browser, or over the network from a computer), Notes never writes over it silently: it tells you and you decide.
- Line endings are kept exactly as they were: a
.bator an Excel.csvsaved from here keeps behaving the same. - Closing the window with unsaved tabs asks first; nothing is lost silently.
- The server only opens text (UTF-8) up to 2 MiB: a photo or a video is not a notepad's business, and when something cannot be opened, the reason is stated.
The notebook: notes that link to each other
The notebook turns one of your folders into a book of related notes. You switch it on once, choosing the folder in the side panel (the leftmost button of the toolbar shows and hides it); with no notebook chosen, Notes is the plain editor of always and stays out of the way.
- Notes are ordinary Markdown files (
.md): yours, in your folder, readable from anywhere. An.mdnote opens rendered (for reading); editing is one click away, in the Edit/View switch. [[Internal links]]: type[[and the list of your notes appears to autocomplete. In the view, the link is clickable and opens the note; if it points to a note that does not exist yet, Notes offers to create it on the spot.- The graph draws the whole notebook: every note is a dot and every link a line. It shows at a glance what is connected to what, and any note opens from it.
- #tags written in the text are clickable in the view and filter the note list in the side panel.
- Tasks (
- [ ] buy salt) render as checkboxes in the view and are ticked with a click. Ticking one edits the exact line of the text and becomes "unsaved", like any other change: you decide when it hits the disk. - The Insert menu drops in the most-typed things in one piece: a heading, a task, a table, an internal link, today's date or a divider.
- With a rendered note in front, the right side shows its outline of headings (click to jump) and its relations with the other notes.
The code editor
When you open a programming file — .html, .css, .php, .js, .ts, .py, .java, .c, .cpp, .go, .rs, .sql, .xml, .json, .yaml, shell scripts and dozens more — Notes switches by itself to a real code editor:
- Syntax highlighting for the file's language, with real line numbers and the current line marked.
- Block folding from the margin: a function or a section folds away with the little arrow next to the line number.
- Matching brackets and braces: putting the cursor on one lights up the other.
- Its own find & replace (Ctrl+F inside the editor): case sensitivity if you want it, regular expression search, replace one by one or all at once.
- Column selection: drag while holding Alt to edit several lines at once. Selecting a word highlights its repetitions across the whole file.
- Tab indents the line (Shift+Tab un-indents). To leave the editor with the keyboard: Escape, then Tab.
- The status bar shows the detected language and the cursor's line and column — the first thing you look for when an error comes with a line number.
None of this weighs anything until needed: the code editor and each language download the first time you open a file of that kind. Writing a note stays as light as ever, also over VPN from your phone.
Settings that are remembered
- Font size (the two A buttons) and line wrapping persist between sessions.
- In the light editor, with wrapping off you get line numbers; with it on they hide, because a line broken into three rows would make them lie.
- The light editor's finder (the magnifier) searches the text as-is — case-insensitive — and replaces one or all; the code editor brings its own, more powerful one.
Limits, said out loud
- 2 MiB cap per file and UTF-8 text only: it is a notepad, not a binary manager. For moving big files there is the Files app.
- The rendered view switches off on huge files (from ~256 KiB): a note that size is not read rendered, it is searched, and that is what the editor is for.
- The notebook reads the notes of ONE chosen folder (not its subfolders: notebook notes live at its root). You can change folders any time from the side panel.