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.

To keep a tab around, right-click it and choose Pin tab. Pinned tabs move to the start of the strip and show a pin where the close button was. They stay open when you press ⌘W, middle-click them or choose Close others, and clicking a note while a pinned tab is showing opens the note in a new tab instead of replacing it. Pinned tabs are still pinned the next time you open the vault. Click the pin, or choose Unpin tab, to make it an ordinary tab again.

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, grayed 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, what it links out to, and an outline of its headings you can click to jump to one. 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.

It’s yours to arrange. Right-click the rail and choose Customize sidebar…: drag the buttons into the order you want, click a button to switch it off, and click Done at the bottom when you’re finished. Once the rail is changed, the same menu offers Reset to the default to put it back. Which buttons you keep travels with your settings to your other devices.

If you’d rather not have the rail at all, choose Hide the sidebar rail from that menu. Everything it held moves into the Library button in the title bar; right-click that button and choose Show the sidebar rail to bring it back. Whether the rail is shown is set per device.

When you want none of it

⇧⌘M (CtrlShiftM on Windows and Linux) is the minimal layout: it hides the rail and closes the Library, the right panel and the Tasks panel, while the title bar, the tabs and the status bar stay. Press it again and everything that was open comes back as it was.

For less than that, there’s focus mode. ⇧⌘F 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 centered — 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-centers.

A terminal in a tab

The Terminal button on the rail, or the terminal button in the status bar, opens a terminal in a tab of its own. It runs your usual login shell (PowerShell on Windows), started in your vault’s folder. Every click opens a new one, so you can have several side by side.

Switch to another tab and back and the terminal is as you left it — the shell, everything it printed, and whatever is still running in it. Closing the tab ends its shell. If you exit the shell yourself, press any key in the tab to start a fresh one.

Its colors come from your theme, color scheme and accent, and change when they do. Desktop only.

Finding a setting

Settings (⌘,) has a Search settings field at the top of its list of sections, and ⌘F (CtrlF on Windows and Linux) jumps to it. As you type, the matching settings replace the section list, each with the section (and group) it lives in. It knows some of the words people use for things, too — “dark mode” finds Theme.

Click a result, or move to it with the arrow keys and press Enter, and Settings opens that section, opens any closed group the setting sits in, scrolls to it and highlights it for a moment. The search stays, so you can go back to the results and pick another. Esc in the field clears it.

A few settings only appear once something above them is set up. Pick one of those and Settings tells you it isn’t showing right now, rather than jumping to nothing.