Navigation and the tree

Getting around Notarium rests on two pillars: a narrow rail on the left (modeled on the Activity Bar in VS Code) and a file tree in the wide panel next to it. The rail moves you between major surfaces; the tree moves you within a space, through folders and notes.

The left rail

Top to bottom: Home (the brain logo) · Files · ★ Favorites · Agents · Graph · Search · Trash · Settings.

• Home — the space dashboard: activity, projects, knowledge-base hygiene (see Dashboard).
• Files — the unified content section. The Feed, the folder page, and the open note are three faces of one section, so the Files icon stays highlighted on all three. Clicking it opens the default view — the Feed.
• ★ Favorites — not a separate route but a tree lens: it filters the tree down to favorited notes, folders, and projects. It is mutually exclusive with Files on the rail — only one is highlighted at a time.
• Agents, Graph, Trash, Settings — utility surfaces (agent memory, the knowledge graph, the trash, settings).
• Search sits deliberately near the end: the icon duplicates Spotlight, which you already reach with ⌘P and through the search box in the top bar (see Search and Spotlight).

Almost every item is a real link, so a middle-click or Ctrl-click opens it in a new tab. The narrow rail strip is always visible; the collapse button hides only the wide panel with the tree.

The file tree

The tree is built for tens of thousands of notes: it is virtualized, and folder contents load as you expand them. From the tree you:

• create, rename, and delete folders — including leaving them empty (a folder does not vanish when its last note is removed);
• drag notes and whole folders with the mouse;
• rename in place and work through context menus.

You can create a note from the panel header (the Collapse · Refresh · New buttons), from the "New…" context-menu item, or with a keyboard shortcut.

The folder page

Any folder can have a body — an overview page for the section, like a parent page in Notion or a folder-note in Obsidian. Technically it is an ordinary index.md note inside the folder itself: it lands in the graph, search, and links for free, and is edited and versioned like any other note.

• A folder without a page still opens as a virtual overview page: the folder title and a summary of its direct children.
• The Edit button opens a draft of the page; the index.md file itself is created only on the first save, once a body exists. Notarium does not spawn empty index.md files.
• The cover page is hidden from the folder's list of children but remains visible in the graph and in search.

A link to a folder is stable — it resolves by a stable identifier and does not break on rename or relocation.