The editor

The editor

Mahfouz’s editor is CodeMirror 6 in live-preview source mode — you’re always editing real Markdown text, but certain syntax renders visually (checkboxes, bullets, highlights, tags, wikilinks, media) as you type, rather than showing raw symbols.

There are two independent view modes for how much raw syntax stays visible, switched with the toolbar’s Show source button (persisted per-device, not per-note):

• Source (default): most Markdown punctuation stays visible (# , **, _, [text](url), etc.) so it’s obvious what you’re editing, while checkboxes, bullets, and horizontal rules still render as real widgets.
• Preview: heading marks, emphasis marks, link brackets, == highlight marks, and ~/^ sub/superscript marks are all hidden in favor of the styled result — except on whatever line your cursor is currently on, which always reveals its raw syntax so you can edit it. GFM tables render as fully interactive editable tables in Preview mode regardless of cursor position (see Tables below).

Other editor behavior:

• Tab on a list item (bullet, numbered, or checklist) nests it under the item above, wherever your cursor is on the line, and its sub-items move with it. Shift+Tab moves it back out a level. On the first item of a list Tab does nothing, since there’s nothing above to nest under.
• On any other line, Tab re-indents only when your cursor is in leading whitespace at the start of the line; anywhere else it’s left free for OS-level autocomplete.
• Native macOS spellcheck/autocorrect (including Text Replacements) work normally.
• Cmd/Ctrl+Click on a link, [[wikilink]], or a rendered link-card opens it (external URLs in your system browser; wikilinks by switching to that note).
• Find and replace: Cmd/Ctrl+F (or toolbar) opens CodeMirror’s built-in search/replace panel.
• Undo/redo: standard Cmd/Ctrl+Z / Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Z, also available as toolbar buttons.

The formatting toolbar

The toolbar above the editor, left to right:

• Undo / Redo
• Bold, Italic, Underline, Strikethrough, Inline code, Highlight
• Sub/Superscript dropdown
• Link — opens a field under the selection for the URL; Enter links the selected text ([text](url)), Esc cancels
• Tag — inserts a #tag
• Heading dropdown — Normal text / H1 / H2 / H3
• List dropdown — Bullet / Numbered / Checklist
• Quote (blockquote), with a menu beside it for inserting or changing a callout
• Table — opens the hover-grid size picker
• Embed dropdown — inserts a block for each enabled embed plugin (such as Mermaid). If none are enabled, it links to Preferences instead.
• Insert media or file — opens a native multi-file picker and attaches the chosen files (see Media)
• Find and replace
• Font dropdown — whole-note font override, stored as a note attribute
• Color dropdown — Text / Background / Highlight tabs. Each has a 100-swatch grayscale + hue grid, a native “Custom…” color picker and “Reset to default.” Like Font, these are whole-note settings stored as note attributes, not formatting for the selected text.
• Page orientation — switches between Landscape and Portrait

Right-aligned at the end of the toolbar:

• Save status — shows whether the note has been saved; click it to open the Details section
• Zoom dropdown
• Show source — switches between Source and Preview (see The editor)
• Attributes — shows or hides the document attributes sidebar
• ⋯ (More) — the note’s action menu, the same one you get by right-clicking the note in the Sidebar (minus “Open in new tab”): Present, Export…, New child note, New folder, Bookmark / Remove bookmark, Move…, Rename, Duplicate, Copy name, Copy as wikilink, Copy ID, Reveal in Finder (Reveal in File Explorer on Windows, Open Containing Folder on Linux), Revisions (opens the note’s history in the Details section), and Delete (danger). Each item shows its keyboard shortcut.

A plugin that registers toolbar items (such as draw.io’s New diagram or Mermaid’s Insert diagram) adds its own buttons at the right end of the toolbar, after Attributes and just before ⋯ (More), but only while the plugin is enabled. A toolbar button with a keyboard shortcut can be rebound or turned off in .config/settings.md under ## Shortcuts, the same way as a plugin command (see Presenting notes as slides for an example). Plugin tabs and the Preferences → Plugins list both show each plugin’s icon.

All toggle-style formatting (bold, italic, lists, headings, blockquote, etc.) is a smart toggle: applying it again removes it, and applying a different list type to a line that already has one converts it in place rather than stacking markers.

Table of contents & page preview

Two right/left-hand panels, both driven by the editor’s current scroll position (“whichever section is at the top of the viewport is active”):

• Table of contents (right sidebar) lists every heading (levels 1–6, ignoring anything inside a code fence) in the note, indented by level; click one to jump to it.
• Page preview (collapsible column to the left of the editor) shows thumbnail cards for each “page” — the note split wherever a bare --- line appears (the same rule presenting uses for slide breaks). Click a thumbnail to jump there. Drag cards to reorder pages, or right-click one for Move up / Move down / Delete page.

Fields (!name)

Type ! followed by letters anywhere in a note to trigger autocomplete over your custom fields. Selecting one inserts it in place, once, as fixed text. Comes seeded with !today, !now, !time, !iso, !uuid, !title, !page, !total.

Manage them in Vault Settings → Fields — an editable table of Field / Expansion / Description rows. Expansions support these tokens:

Anything else in the expansion passes through as literal text. This lives in the vault as .config/fields.md, a plain Markdown table you can also hand-edit directly.

Fields also work in a slides template’s header or footer (Vault Settings → Slides), or a note’s header / footer attribute, where — unlike in the editor — they’re evaluated fresh every time the note is presented or exported, so {date:YYYY-MM-DD} and friends stay current. Two extra tokens, {page} and {total}, are available only there (headers and footers).