Small things that make Jotnow faster.

Keyboard first

Single keys do the common things whenever you are not typing in a note. They are all rebindable in Settings → Notes, and several of them are also in the command palette if you’d rather read a list than remember.

• n — new note
• v — paste the clipboard as a new note
• c — copy the note
• t — add a tag
• Delete (Backspace on a Mac) — trash the note
• r — open Recall
• m — minimise Recall
• Ctrl (tap) — multi-select
• [ — cycle the folder pane
• ] — cycle the note list
• a — reading preferences
• f — focus mode
• d — back to the default layout
• arrow keys — move between panes and rows

Ctrl-K (⌘K on a Mac) is the one to learn first. It searches the full text of every note, and the same box runs the commands — so it is both “find that thing” and “what can this app do”.

Getting things in

The fastest capture is v. Copy an error, a diff, a chunk of terminal output, press v, and it is a note. Pasted code is fenced automatically with the language detected, and Jotnow will suggest a title from the first line — accept it with Tab or type your own.

Notes are Markdown. Fenced code blocks get syntax highlighting, links work, and everything survives export unchanged, because export is just the file.

Open the importer from Settings → Notes → Import notes…, then drop a folder of .md files in. Re-importing a file you have not changed will not duplicate it; an edited file arrives as a new note, because a plain Markdown file carries nothing that says which note it used to be. A Jotnow export round-trips exactly — real created dates, folders and tags intact.

Folders, tags and pins

A note lives in exactly one folder and can carry any number of tags. Use folders for where something belongs and tags for what it is about — ‘clients/acme’ is a folder, ‘#postgres’ is a tag. Click a tag in the sidebar to filter to it.

Pin the three or four notes you keep coming back to; they stay at the top of every list. Ctrl-click to pick out several notes, or tap Ctrl to enter multi-select — then tag, move or trash them in one go.

Nothing is destroyed until you empty the Trash, and a trashed note stays out of search until then.

Reading and writing modes

Markdown markers hide themselves until your cursor reaches the construct, so a note reads like a document while you edit it. If you’d rather see the raw characters, turn off live preview in the reading panel (a) or in Settings → Reading.

f is focus mode — both side panes shrink to narrow rails, leaving the note the width. [ and ] step the panes through full, narrow and hidden independently, and d puts everything back. Drag the divider between two panes to set the widths you want; they are remembered.

The reading panel also carries measure, text size, line height and typeface, and the light/dark/paper themes. These are reading settings, not document settings — they never touch the file.

Asking better questions

Recall is a question box, not a search box. ‘What did I decide about auth?’ works better than ‘auth’. It reads across your notes and answers in a sentence or two, with the notes it used listed underneath so you can check it.

Ask about decisions, reasons and trade-offs — the things you wrote down precisely because you would not remember them. Keyword search is still better for exact strings like an error code or a function name; that is what Ctrl-K is for.

Every answer is saved. The Recall row in the sidebar has all of them, so a question you asked last month is free to read again.

Without Pro, Recall in the browser’s local mode finds and ranks the relevant notes but does not write an answer. You can also bring your own OpenAI or Anthropic key on any plan — it is used only for Recall, only for the session you paste it in, and it is never stored.

Letting Tidy do the filing

Tidy proposes organisation and never touches content. It can create a folder, create a tag, move a note, change a note’s tags and merge two tags — that is the whole list. It cannot edit a note, delete a note, or delete a folder, in any mode, ever.

Run it with an instruction if you have one in mind — ‘put everything about deploys together’, ‘merge the tags that mean the same thing’. Anything that changes your taxonomy — a new folder, a new tag, a merge — pauses and shows you the proposal before it happens. Pure filing into folders and tags you already have applies straight away. Either way the run lands in the change log, and every run can be undone.

Working with Claude Code and Codex

Jotnow is an explicit notebook. Your agent saves what you ask it to save and nothing else, so say what you want kept: ‘Jot that down in Jotnow as “Worker env fix”, with the explanation and the commands.’

Ask for the full answer if that is what you want — an agent left to summarise will summarise, and the detail you wanted is usually the detail it drops.

Later sessions can find it: ‘Find my Jotnow notes about worker environment’, then ‘read the Worker env fix jot in full’. On Pro your agent can also search by meaning, which is what you want when you cannot remember the title.

Setup is one command and one key — see the Claude Code or Codex guide, and the MCP tool reference for exactly what each tool does.

Backups, history and where your notes live

Local mode keeps your notes in that one browser. Clearing site data deletes them, so export a backup from the LOCAL badge if you are keeping anything you’d miss. Signing in is the other answer: the same notebook, synced, and your local notes come with you.

Signed in, writes are local-first. You can keep typing offline and the queue drains when you reconnect; the dot on a note tells you which state it is in.

Version history is off until you turn it on in Settings → Account. Once on, every edit is kept and you can read or restore an older draft.

Export gives you a folder of Markdown files — no lock-in, no proprietary format. Do it whenever you like; it is the same content the app reads.

Still stuck? The FAQ answers the awkward questions, and the docs cover setup end to end.