NotariumDocumentation
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Your First Note

You made it through setup and landed in the editor. Now let's create your first note and see what happens on disk: in Notarium a note isn't a row in someone else's database — it's an ordinary .md file in your own folder. Everything you write sits there as plain Markdown text that opens in any editor and outlives Notarium itself.

The file tree on the left

On the left is the tree of folders and notes in your space. It mirrors the file structure under /data/spaces one-to-one: a folder in the tree is a folder on disk, a note is a file inside it. The tree is built for tens of thousands of entries and loads a folder's contents as you expand it.

This is also where the core operations live: create a note or folder, rename in place, drag it into another folder. One important detail: changing the folder or the title of an existing note moves the file itself rather than spawning a duplicate.

Empty folders are first-class

A folder doesn't disappear when you remove its last note. You can lay out your structure ahead of time.

The title is the first line

Notarium has no separate "Title" field. A note's title is its leading # H1 — that is, the first line of the document. You edit it right there in the text, just like everything else. A new note opens already on a # line with the cursor sitting at the title — just start typing.

If there's no leading # H1, the title becomes the first non-empty prose line — a quick jot doesn't turn into a database full of "Untitled." But if the document opens with a structural block (code, list, quote, table, an H2-or-lower heading) and no title ever gets set, the note won't save without a title: that way the first line of code doesn't silently leak into the title.

The title ties together the file name, search, the graph, and history — which is why there's a single editing surface instead of a "field + body" that drifts apart.

Writing modes

Notarium always edits raw Markdown — the single source of truth. How that text looks while you edit it is set by the writing mode (a personal preference in Settings → Appearance):

  • Source (default) — raw Markdown as-is: monospaced font, syntax highlighting. Markers like #, **, []() show up as plain text. For those who work with the source directly.
  • WYSIWYM — "what you see is what you mean": the text is styled (headings larger, bold rendered bold, quotes with a background), but the Markdown markers stay on screen, dimmed. Line length doesn't change, so the caret doesn't "jump."

Both modes edit the very same line and save it byte-for-byte the same — switching the mode doesn't change the file's contents.

Separate from the modes is the Preview button in the top bar: at any moment it shows the final HTML render of the note, without saving. For longer texts there are the writing helpers Focus (dims everything except the active sentence/line/paragraph) and Typewriter (keeps the line with the caret centered).

Wiki-links work inside the text: [[note title]] or [[title|label]]. A click takes you to that note within the app. If no note with that title exists, Notarium offers to create it — and until then it hangs in the link graph as a hollow "ghost" node.

Saving and what lands on disk

Saving is Ctrl/Cmd+Enter. What goes to disk is clean Markdown with no re-escaping or re-normalization: exactly what you typed. Notarium derives the file name from the title (kebab-case, transliterating Cyrillic), so the file reads well outside the app too.

A small frontmatter block goes at the top of the file, and in it is the notarium-id key: a stable 12-character identifier for the note. It — not the path or the file name — is the note's true identity: renaming and moving between folders don't break links or lose version history, because the log is keyed to notarium-id.

Editing from outside is a normal mode

Edited the .md file in another editor, or pulled it from git? Notarium picks up the changes on its next scan. The files stay the source of truth; the index simply rebuilds to match them.

Every save goes into the revision history: a full snapshot of the note's state with provenance — who edited it and how (you, an external editor, or an agent). Any version can be viewed, compared, and rolled back.

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