The sidebar
The sidebar on the left is the map of a workspace: the workspace you’re in, Search, Jump To and Tasks, the pins, and every collection with its pages. ⌘\Alt+B folds it into a strip of icons and opens it again.
What’s in it
From top to bottom:
- The account button, with your picture and the workspace’s name. Click it to switch workspaces with Switch Workspace, open Settings…, reload the workspace or log out.
- Search, Jump To and Tasks. See Search and Tasks.
- Pinned: shortcuts to pages, collections, views, files, lines and blocks. It shows up once something is pinned.
- Collections: every collection in the workspace, each with its pages under it. The Journal is one of them; clicking it opens today’s page.
- Tags: every tag in the workspace. Click one to search for it.
- Trash: switches the sidebar to what’s in the trash, to open or restore it.
Click a heading to fold it. Each device remembers which headings are open. Plugins can add their own rows near the top; see Plugins.
Collections
- Click a collection to open it. Click the arrow in front of it, or double-click the row, to show or hide its pages.
- Hover a collection for two buttons: + makes a new page in it, and … opens its menu. Right-click opens the same menu: Open, Set Title & Icon, Collection Settings…, New Page, Pin, and the Display As choices below. Admins also see Default for new pages.
- Drag collections up and down to change their order. The order is the same for everyone in the workspace. New collections start at the top.
- The + next to the Collections heading makes a new collection. The heading’s … has New Collection and New Dynamic Collection; see Dynamic collections.
How a collection lists its pages
How a collection shows its pages in the sidebar is part of the collection, so it’s the same for everyone in the workspace, and anyone can change it. Pick a choice under Display As in the collection’s menu, or under Display in Sidebar on the Pages tab of Collection Settings…:
| Choice | What the sidebar shows |
|---|---|
| Don’t show pages | Only the collection |
| List | All pages in one list |
| Sub-pages | Pages under the page they belong to, as a tree. Turn on Enable Sub-Pages on the same tab first |
| By date created | Pages under Today, Yesterday, Previous 7 days, Previous 30 days, Earlier this year and Older, by when they were made |
| By date modified | The same, by when they last changed |
| Group by Property… | Pages under a heading for each value of a Choice or a Date & Time property |
| Nest by Property… | Pages in folders by a Choice property, in year and month folders by a Date & Time property, or under the page a Page Link property points to |
| Custom | A layout written in the collection’s code; see Collection plugins |
| Hide completely | Nothing. The collection moves behind Show more… at the end of Collections |
Groups of a Choice property follow the order of its choices, with a group at the end for pages that have none. Groups of a date use the same headings as the date modes, plus Upcoming for dates still to come. Sub-pages show as a tree only in the Sub-pages mode, and as a plain list in the others.
Sort in Sidebar, on the same tab, sets the order of the pages: pick a property and Descending or Ascending. Sort by Modified, descending, to see the page you changed last at the top, or by Title, ascending, for alphabetical order. New collections show their sub-pages, sorted by Modified with the newest first.
To bring back a collection you hid completely, click Show more… at the end of Collections and pick another choice in its menu. Another switch on the Pages tab leaves the collection’s pages out of the command palette.
Pins
- Pin a page, collection, view, file, line or block with Pin in its menu, or with Pin Page, Pin View or Pin Collection in the command palette.
- Pins are shared: everyone in the workspace sees the same pins, in the same order. Drag them to reorder them.
- Unpin in a pin’s menu removes the pin. What it points to stays as it is.
- With more than 50 pins, Show more… shows the rest.
Opening and moving pages
- Click a page to open it in the current panel. ⌘-clickCtrl-click or middle-click opens it in a panel next to the current one. While one panel is open, the row’s menu also has Open Aside.
- Drag a page, collection or pin onto a panel to open it there, or near the left or right edge of a panel to open it in a new panel on that side.
- Hover a page for its … menu: Set Title & Icon, Version History…, Change Banner…, Move…, Move to Trash, Create sub-page and Pin. In a collection with sub-pages, the page’s + makes a sub-page.
- In the Sub-pages mode, drag a page onto another page to put it under that page, or onto the collection to move it back to the top level. To move a page to another collection, use Move….
Folding, resizing and the keyboard
- ⌘\Alt+B, Toggle Sidebar in the command palette, or the round button on the sidebar’s edge folds the sidebar into a strip of icons and opens it again. Once you have pins, right-click the strip to choose whether it shows your collections, your pins or both. Focus Mode hides the sidebar completely; see Panels and Focus Mode.
- Drag the sidebar’s right edge to make it wider or narrower. Dragging it very narrow folds it. Each device remembers the width.
- ⌘0Ctrl+0, or Go to Sidebar in the command palette, moves the keyboard to the sidebar. The arrow keys move up and down and open each page as you reach it. Right and Left show and hide a collection’s pages. ⌘↵Ctrl+Enter opens a row aside, F2 renames it, ⌃OCtrl+O opens its menu, and Esc goes back to the page.
On phones and tablets
- On a phone, the sidebar slides in from the menu button at the top of the page, and closes when you open a page. At the top are Search, Tasks and Today. Long-press the menu button to go straight to today’s Journal page.
- Settings → Mobile Navigation chooses between Top Menu, the default, and Icon Strip, which keeps a strip of icons on screen. See Mobile apps.
- The floating pencil button makes a new page in the default collection.
- On a phone, there’s no dragging, no hover buttons and no Collection Settings. Tablets have the full sidebar, but without dragging to reorder or hover buttons.