Find your way around

Pellet opens with three columns. From left to right:

The sidebar

Two panes stacked side by side.

Folders shows your vault as a tree. Click a folder to see what’s in it. The icons down the far-left rail switch this pane between folders, search, tags, and the other views.

Notes lists what’s in whatever you selected, with a preview of each. Click one to open it.

Press ⌘\ to hide the whole sidebar when you want to concentrate.

Tip

If two panes feels like a lot, turn on single-pane mode — the button in the header of whichever navigation pane you’re in (Folders, Tags, Properties or Search; it’s the same button in each). You get one pane that drills in when you click a folder, with a back button to climb out. Easier on a small screen.

The main area

Whatever you have open — a note, a task table, a calendar, a canvas.

It works like a browser: tabs across the top, ⌘T for a new one, ⌘W to close. Each tab keeps its own back and forward history, so ⌘[ goes back to where that tab was, not wherever you last clicked.

You can split the view with ⇧⌘D, or drag a tab out of the window entirely to get a second window.

The buttons at the end of the tab strip

Every document view puts its buttons at the right-hand end of its own tab strip, rather than in a second row underneath. The order is the same whatever the tab holds — a note, a PDF, a canvas, a whiteboard, a Paper page:

1. Back (⌘[) and Forward (⌘]), always first and always there, greyed out when there’s nowhere to go.
2. Whatever that view uses constantly — editing and reading for a note, the drawing tools for a Paper page.
3. ⋯, always last, holding the occasional things: export, rename, archive, move to trash.

So the two arrows are in the same place in every kind of document, and anything you only reach for now and then is behind the same one button.

The right panel

Shows what links to the note you’re reading, and what it links out to. More on that in Link notes together.

The rail

Down the left edge. Switches between Notes, the task views, Calendar, Graph, and the Vault Map. The + button makes something new.

When you want none of it

⇧⌘F is focus mode, and it goes in two stages. The first press takes away Pellet’s own furniture — rail, sidebar, tab strip — leaving the words. Press it again and the window goes full screen, so the rest of the desktop goes too. A third press brings everything back, and Esc gets you out from either stage.

While you’re in focus mode, a typewriter button in the top-right corner keeps the line you’re writing vertically centred — like a typewriter’s carriage, the page moves and the line stays put. It works at the very top and end of a note too, and clicking somewhere doesn’t yank the view: reading stays still, and the next keystroke re-centres.