Navigating

MojoPad navigates like a browser, because a wiki is a web.

• Back / Forward — ⌘[ and ⌘], or the toolbar arrows.
• Home — ⇧⌘H returns to your home page (set it in the Info palette ▸ Document).
• Open Page… — ⇧⌘O opens the quick switcher: your most recent pages are already listed, and typing narrows them with fuzzy matching. It's forgiving on purpose: words can come in any order (list grocery finds GroceryList), spaces don't have to match, a capital inside a joined name counts as a word start, and gcl-style abbreviations work too. If nothing matches, Return creates a page with that name — jump-or-create in one gesture. The fastest way to move in a big document.
• Recent Pages — the Go menu keeps your last ten visits one click away.
• Command palette — ⇧⌘P, or the button just left of the search box — a small window with a ›_ prompt in it — runs any menu command by name and jumps to any page — one box for everything, no shortcut to memorize.
• Today's Note — ⌘T. See Daily Notes.
• The Graph — ⌃⌘G shows the whole document as a living map. See The Graph.
• Outline — the Outline toolbar button (left of Graph, or ⌃⌘O) opens a list of the current page's headings in a sidebar; click any heading to scroll to it. The button lights up while it's open.
• Open Tasks — ⇧⌘T gathers every checkbox across the whole document into one dashboard, grouped by page. Click a task's box to check it off (or back on) in place, or its text to jump to the page it's on. Two dropdowns put your typed properties to work: filter to just the tasks on pages with a given value (every to-do on an Active project, say), and group by a property instead of by page (all your tasks under High / Medium / Low). A Show done switch reveals completed items, struck through, while the count in the title always reflects what's still open.

Read your pages one after another

To read a folder from its first page to its last, go through a wiki you have just imported, or check each page a filter has gathered, press ⌃⇧⌘↓ (Go ▸ Next Page) for the page below the one you are on in the Pages panel, and ⌃⇧⌘↑ (Go ▸ Previous Page) for the page above it. The keys work while you are writing, in the Pages panel and its filter box, and on a board or a map.

• The order is the Pages panel's, from top to bottom: your folders in their order, the pages below them in the sort you chose with the ⇅ button, only what the filter matches while you have typed one, and only the folders the panel is focused on. Under Recently viewed, where the page you open moves to the top, Next follows the order the list had when you started. A folded folder's pages are included too, in the order they would show if it were open, and the folder stays folded.
• Each page once. A pinned page is also listed where it lives, and Next visits it there. If you open a page from the pins at the top, Next continues through the pins in their order and then from the top of the folders, leaving out the pinned pages you have just been through.
• The ends are ends. On the last page, Next stays put and the status line says it is the last page; Previous does the same on the first. If the page in front isn't in the panel (a filter leaves it out, say), Next starts at the top of the list and Previous at the bottom.
• It goes where a click in the Pages panel goes. Back returns to the page you were on, and a page with its own password opens to its lock screen. With several panes open, the keys move the pane you are in (the one wearing the quiet ring), which is the pane a click in the panel would load, and leave the others as they are. A page that is already open in another pane is shown there, as a click would show it, and the next press moves past it in the pane you are in. The Journal's days have their own keys: Go ▸ Previous Daily Note and Next Daily Note.
• You can change both keys in Settings ▸ Shortcuts.

Tabs

Hold ⌘ while clicking any link or page-list row to open it in a new tab; the tab bar appears automatically (and has a ＋ button for more). Right-click a page in the page list and choose Open in New Tab. ⌘W closes the current tab, and closes the window when only one tab remains. Middle-click a tab to close it, right-click one for Close Other Tabs and Close Tabs to the Right, and ⌘1–⌘9 jump straight to a tab by position. In Settings ▸ Links you can flip the default so plain clicks open tabs and ⌘-clicks navigate in place.

Asking for a tab of a page you already have takes you to it. Open a page in a tab — from the list or from a link, with whichever click opens tabs for you — send it back from a small window, or open the page an import tells you it already has, and if a tab already holds it you land on that tab instead of getting a second. If it is the tab you are looking at, nothing happens at all, so your place in it is not disturbed. A click that opens a page in place still does exactly that, as it always has, whether or not another tab holds it too. The exceptions are the commands that exist to make a tab and say so: ⌘T, Open in New Tab, and opening a set of chosen pages as tabs.

You land where you left off

Switching to a page you've been editing puts the caret back at your last edit — the page opens scrolled to where you were working, cursor blinking mid-thought, instead of dumping you at the top. It remembers for every page you've touched this session, so hopping between two drafts feels like flipping between two typewriters, each holding your place.

The page list

The left-hand list shows every page. The filter box at the bottom narrows it as you type — and it stays while you open what it found, so a filter that gathered three pages is still holding them when you come back for the second one (Esc in the box clears it, as does the ✕ it shows while it holds anything). It filters fuzzily, same as the quick switcher: ⌘J focuses it, you type a few words in any order, and the best match rises to the top. The ⇅ button beside it, or View ▸ Sort Pages with a check beside the one in use, picks how the list is arranged: Folders (tree), the default, with the pages below in alphabetical order; Date modified (newest first — handy when you touched a page yesterday but can't remember its name); Date created; Recently viewed (your reading order); Manual, where you drag a row onto another to arrange the list yourself (the order is saved in the document, so it travels with it, and new pages join at the end until you place them); or Flat, every page in one run. Date modified, Date created and Recently viewed keep your folders and arrange the pages below them. Manual and Flat set the folders aside: you are asking for one ordered list, so folders stop grouping the rows while either is on. Your folders are not gone and nothing has moved — choose Folders (tree) and they come back exactly as they were. (This is the most common reason folders seem to vanish.) Rest the pointer on a row for a moment and a preview card shows the page's first lines. Right-click any row for Pin to Top — pinned pages gather at the top of the list, and ⌥⌘1–⌥⌘9 jump straight to them in pin order, the keyboard twin of ⌘1–⌘9 for tabs. The chord is yours to change: in Settings ▸ Shortcuts, Jump to Pinned Page 1–9 records one combination and the digit stands for all nine — record ⌃1 and ⌃1–⌃9 become your pin keys. Also on the right-click menu: Set Icon (give the page an emoji shown in the list, on its tab, and in its title), Set Cover (a banner image across the top of the page — once it's there, right-click the banner to resize it (Short/Medium/Tall/Full) or change/remove it; right-click ▸ Reposition to drag the image up or down to the spot you want, then click Save position), Open in New Tab, Rename, Duplicate, New Page from Clipboard, and Delete. Pinned pages gather in a Pinned section at the top of the list (the rest fall under All Pages); right-click ▸ Unpin to release one.

Folders in the sidebar

The Pages panel is one unified tree: folders and pages live together in a single list, the way a file browser shows them. Each folder wears a small amber folder icon and folds or expands — click the row, or →/← from the keyboard. Pages nest beneath their folder, and a group at the bottom holds the pages themselves.

One list, or two areas. The tree scrolls as one list: folders, then the pages beneath them. If you would rather keep the two apart, turn on Settings ▸ Links & Pages ▸ Folders ▸ Show folders and pages as two areas in the Pages panel. Folders then scroll in an upper area and pages in a lower one, and the line between them is draggable — put it where your work wants it and MojoPad remembers. Double-click the line to put it back. The upper area only reaches half the sidebar before it starts scrolling.

With two areas, the line and both halves always stay on screen. A long Pinned section is drawn in full when the sidebar has room for it. When it does not, the pinned pages scroll on their own and the folder area gives up height, so the line and the page list stay in view.

Unfiled, or every page. The heading at the foot of the tree is a switch. Unfiled — how it has always been — lists the pages in no folder. Click it for All pages and the list keeps every page in view however many folders you have gathered them into, which is what you want when that list is the drawer you fish things out of while you write.

A few folders at a time. When you are writing one paper, you want the folders for that paper in front of you and the rest out of the way — a clear desk for the work at hand. Right-click a folder and choose ◎ Focus this folder, and the tree shows only that one. To bring in another, right-click the row at the top of the tree — the one that names what you are focused on — and choose it from the list, or use View ▸ Focus Folders, which lists your folders with a check beside the ones showing. Choose as many as the work needs; choose a checked one again to put it away. In a wiki with a great many folders, both lists end with an item that counts the rest, such as 40 More Folders…: it opens the command palette on every folder, so you can type part of a name to find the one you want.

• Getting back. Click the row at the top of the tree, or choose View ▸ Focus Folders ▸ Show All Folders. If you had several folders showing, the message that appears offers Undo, so a stray click does not cost you the set you built — and so does ◎ Focus only this folder, which narrows that set to one.
• Folders inside folders. A folder you focus brings everything inside it. In View ▸ Focus Folders, the folders inside a checked one have a dimmed check, because they are already showing; the list on the row at the top of the tree leaves them out. To narrow to just one of them, right-click it in the tree and choose ◎ Focus only this folder. Right-clicking one of several focused folders also offers Remove from focus.
• Your pages below. Pinned pages and the list at the foot of the tree stay as they are. Unfiled still means pages in no folder, so a page filed in a folder you are not focused on is not in it: click Unfiled to switch to All pages when you need one of those.
• New folders stay in view. A new folder made while you are focused joins the folders showing, however it was made — with ＋ New folder, by an import, by a clip filed under a new name, by your assistant, or moved in from another wiki — and so does a folder you drag out beside one of them or open from a link. A new folder inside one that is not showing stays with that folder, the way a page filed there does.
• Searching. The Filter box searches the folders showing and the page list, and says so; search all folders shows every folder again.

None of this moves or deletes anything. It is only the view that narrows, MojoPad remembers it with the wiki, and the row at the top of the tree always says what is showing.

A page lives in one folder. Filing a page moves it — out of Unfiled, and out of any folder it was in before — which is why the menu says Move to new folder…. If you want one page to belong to several things at once, give it a tag or a property and make a smart folder from that: a saved search gathers pages without moving any of them, and a page can be gathered by as many as you like.

Prefer a plain list? The ⇅ button beside the Filter box, or View ▸ Sort Pages, offers Flat — ignore folders, which shows every page in one run, by name, and hides the folder structure without changing it. Switch back to Folders (tree) any time.

Several pages at once

Most of what you do to one page you eventually want to do to twenty: tag a run of them, give them all a type, get rid of a batch. Press the ☑ button beside the Filter box — Choose several pages at once — and each row gains a checkbox. Click to choose, shift-click to take the whole run between this row and the last one you touched — or shift-click back across a run you have already chosen to clear it — or All for everything the list is currently showing, which is the useful part, because a filter is already a question and this acts on its answer.

⌘-click is not the way in, here or anywhere in MojoPad: it opens a page in a new tab, and it goes on doing that while you are choosing. The check is the gesture.

A bar appears at the foot of the list with the count in it, and three things to do: Type…, Tag… and Delete. Deleting asks first, names the number, and warns you separately if any of them is a kind other pages depend on. Nothing here skips Recently Deleted. Done puts the list back to normal.

The same is on the right in the Pages palette, which can also move pages into a folder, add them to the Table of Contents, and set what they ARE.

If your folders have vanished

They have not been deleted — the sidebar is showing a view that leaves them out. Look for one of these:

• The sort. Manual — drag rows to arrange (hides folders) and Flat — ignore folders, chosen from the ⇅ button beside the Filter box or from View ▸ Sort Pages, set the folders aside. Choose Folders (tree) and everything comes back exactly as it was.
• A property filter shows a flat list for as long as it is on; turn it off and the tree returns. A word typed in the Filter box is different: it keeps the tree and hides only the folders with nothing that matches.
• A focus. The row at the top of the tree names the folders showing. Click it, or choose View ▸ Focus Folders ▸ Show All Folders.

Filing, reordering, and nesting — all by drag

Organizing happens by dragging, and where on a folder you let go decides what happens:

• Drag a page onto a folder → the page files into it. (Drag a file straight from the Finder onto a folder and it imports and files in one motion.)
• Drag a folder onto the middle of another folder → it nests inside as a sub-folder. While you hover the body of the row, a filled highlight box wraps the target — that's your cue it will go in.
• Drag a folder onto the top or bottom edge of another folder → it reorders to sit just before or just after that folder, as a sibling. A bright bar appears along that edge, showing exactly where it will land.

So the one gesture does two jobs: aim for the body of a folder to tuck one inside another, aim for an edge to rearrange the running order. The two look deliberately unalike, so you can tell which you will get before you let go: a bar is a gap you are dropping into, an outlined box is a destination you are dropping onto. Filing is only filing: nothing is copied and no page moves on disk — folders hold titles and references, so a drag rearranges the outline while your pages stay in their own files. (MojoPad also refuses to drop a folder into itself or into one of its own sub-folders, which would strand the branch.)

Filing the page you are reading. File ▸ Move This Page to a Folder… — or type move in the command palette — lists every folder in the wiki, so you can file a page without finding it in the tree first. That matters when the tree is not showing it: when the list is filtered, when you are focused on other folders, or when you arrived by a link or a search. The folder the page is in already is marked this page is here. The first choice, Out of its folder — at the top of Folders, takes the page out of whatever folder it is in without putting it in another. A page lives in one folder, so this moves it rather than leaving a copy behind. The folder path above the page does the same from a click — see Where a page lives, below.

Taking a move back. Move a page with right-click ▸ Move to, File ▸ Move This Page to a Folder…, a folder's Add Page Here…, the folder path's card, the Pages palette, or by dragging its row onto a folder or next to a page in another folder, and the message that says where it went offers Undo, which puts it back in the folder it came from, in the same place in the list. (⌘Z is for your words, so it does not undo a move. A page saved as a file in a folder you follow is the one move Undo does not take back — see below.)

A folder you are following asks what you mean. Two moments this is for:

• You want the page on your Mac. You follow your Drafts folder so other apps can open what is in it, and a page you wrote here belongs there as a file.
• You only want it filed with its neighbors. A page of notes you would rather keep inside the wiki goes in the same folder as the files, but should not become one.

So however you move a page into a folder that mirrors one on your Mac — or into a folder inside one — MojoPad asks the same question: the folder path's card, File ▸ Move This Page to a Folder…, dragging a row onto the folder or next to a page in it, dragging a page from the list under the folders, a folder's Add Page Here…, right-click ▸ Move to, the Pages palette's Move to… for several pages, and File it… in the Journal's inbox triage. Two answers, and Cancel:

• Save It as a File There — the page becomes a file in that folder on your Mac and lives there from then on: edit it here or in any other app and both stay in step. A page of writing is simplified to Markdown, so anything Markdown cannot show is left out or made plain; a page of plain text is saved as plain text, just as it is. Its name, tags, properties and backlinks stay here in the wiki, and its history keeps the page as it was just before. A file of that name already in the folder is never written over — yours gets a number, Recipes 2, and the message says so. A page name your Mac can't use for a file is made one it can: .plan is saved as plan.md, since a name starting with a period would be hidden. This writes to your Mac, so it is not undone by the move's Undo; when every page you moved became a file, the message offers Show in Finder instead, to see it there.
• Just File It Here — it stays a MojoPad page, filed in the folder, nothing is written to your Mac, and the message offers Undo as for any move.

Cancel moves nothing. Moving several pages at once asks once, and says how many can become files. Protected pages, boards, maps and papers cannot become a file, and a page that already has a file of its own elsewhere on your Mac keeps that one, so they are filed here whichever you choose — and a page like that moved on its own is not asked about: it is filed, with Undo, and the message says why. When some pages were saved and others only filed, Undo puts back the ones filed and leaves the files alone.

Some folders are only ever filed into, with the reason in the message: in a wiki with a password, which never writes its pages out; in a folder that is only here in MojoPad — one you made with New Sub-folder… that is not on your Mac; and in a folder your Mac won't let MojoPad write in. While the bar saying the wiki was changed on another device is up, a move into a folder you follow waits like any other change to how the wiki is arranged — see On a shared or synced drive. If the bar comes up while a page is being saved as a file there, the file just made for it is taken back — never a file anyone else put there since — and when it can't be, the message names the file left in the folder. A script or a connected assistant cannot answer a question, so it is never asked one: the page is filed in MojoPad, and the answer says the folder mirrors your Mac and the page did not become a file. In a second window, or a page opened in a small window, nothing is filed at all, as for any move. See Linked Files and Folders.

Making, importing and moving whole folders into it ask too. Three more moments, each with the same two answers and Cancel:

• A new page. A folder's New Page Here… asks before the page is made: Save It as a File There makes it a new file in that folder on your Mac, where it lives from then on; Just File It Here makes a MojoPad page filed there; Cancel makes nothing. A name you already have is not a new page — that page is moved there, and asked about as any move is.
• Files you bring in. Import Files Here…, files dropped on the folder from the Finder, and File ▸ Import… with the folder picked ask once for everything you chose, saying how many can be saved there. A Markdown or text file is already a file, so saving it there makes an exact copy of it in a new file in that folder — its frontmatter and links just as they were — and its page reads that copy from then on. The file you picked stays where it is, untouched, and a file of that name already there is never written over. A text file comes over as Markdown, as every import reads it, so its copy is a Markdown file, and the question says so. A web page is simplified to Markdown on the way. A note with pictures of its own, PDFs and other papers, pictures, books and other files are imported and filed there whichever you choose, and the message names each one's reason — a book is named once, however many chapters it has — and they never hold up the rest. A file that is already in that folder, picked again, is named as one you already have instead of being copied beside itself. Cancel imports nothing at all.
• A folder of folders. Pick a folder with folders inside it for Import Files Here…, drop one on the folder, or send parts of an export to a folder you follow in File ▸ Import…'s panel, and nothing is asked: its notes are filed in the folders they came in, as MojoPad pages, nothing is written to your Mac, and the message says so.
• A whole folder dragged in. Drag one of your folders into a folder you follow and you are asked once, for every page inside it. Make It a Folder There makes that folder — and every folder inside it — on your Mac, inside the one you follow, and saves its pages of writing as files in the same folders they are in here, so what the Pages panel shows and what your Mac has are the same tree. MojoPad never mixes into a folder that is already there: if your Mac already has a folder of that name in that place, nothing is written, the folder is filed as a MojoPad folder, and the message says why. Protected pages, boards and papers inside it come along as MojoPad pages. Just File It Here moves the folder as a MojoPad folder, writing nothing, and Cancel moves nothing. A few folders are moved without the question, and the message says why: one whose own name your Mac can't use for a folder (rename it and drag it in again), one that already mirrors a folder on your Mac (MojoPad doesn't move folders on your Mac, so its pages stay where they are), and one with no pages in it yet, which is a folder only here in MojoPad.

A script that makes a page or keeps a file in a folder you follow is not asked either: the page or file is filed and nothing is written to your Mac, and the script's log in the Scripts palette says so.

Or skip the aiming entirely. The reordering bands are the top and bottom thirds of the row, so there is more to hit than it looks — but the middle is the biggest part of the target and it nests, which is easy to do by accident when the neighbor is closed and nothing seems to happen. So there is a way that needs no aim at all: right-click a folder ▸ Move Up / Move Down. It shifts the folder one place among its siblings, and the two items only appear when there is somewhere to go, so a folder already at the top has no Move Up. A pinned folder counts as somewhere else — an unpinned folder cannot be moved above one, because the pin would put it back.

Where a page lives: the folder path above it

Three moments this is for:

• You arrived by a link or a search and want to know where the page sits — which project, which part of it — without opening the Pages panel and hunting for the highlighted row.
• You want the page's neighbors. Reading one trial report, you want the others filed beside it: one click on its folder lists them, and one more opens the one you want.
• It is in the wrong place. A note filed under Trials that belongs one level up is moved from the page itself, with no dragging through a long tree.

Reading the path. The line above every page's title starts with its folders, outermost first — 📁 Research › Sleep › Trials — and the folder that holds the page is a shade darker. A page loose at the top of the tree says Folders. A page in no folder at all says Unfiled. A long folder name is shortened with …, and a page more than three folders deep shows the first folder, …, and the last two; point at the path for all of it. In a narrow window the path folds to the 📁 alone, which opens the page's own folder.

Clicking a folder. A small card opens under the name:

• Folders — the folders inside it, with how many pages each holds, and the one holding this page marked this page is here. Click one to go into it; ‹, or a name above the card's title, takes you back up. From Folders or Unfiled you start at the top of the tree, so every folder in the wiki is a few clicks away.
• Pages — its own pages (not its sub-folders'), by the names the Pages panel shows: a paper by its title, a locked page by its name alone. Click one to open it, ⌘-click for a new tab, right-click for the usual menu. A folder of more than twelve pages offers See all … as a gallery, with the count.
• Move “…” here moves the page into the folder the card is showing. The path and the Pages panel follow at once, and the message offers Undo. At the top of the tree the button reads Move “…” out of its folder; for a page in no folder it reads File “…” here. It is not offered in the folder the page is already in. Into a folder that follows one on your Mac it asks first whether to save the page as a file there or just file it; see Folders in the sidebar.
• Show in Pages panel opens the folder in the tree, and ◎ Focus this folder narrows the tree to it, exactly as the folder's own right-click menu does.

From the keyboard. Tab reaches the folder names like any other button; Return opens the card; ↓ and ↑ move through it, → goes into a folder and ← back out; Esc closes it and returns you to the name you opened it from.

Where it is not shown. The path is part of the page's title area, so it goes when you hide the title (View ▸ Hide/Show Page Title), and it is not drawn in Focus Mode, in a page opened with Open in Small Window, in the Journal or a Longform document, which have heads of their own, or over the graph, the gallery and a database view. It is never written into the page: an export or a share of the page is exactly what it was.

In a second window the path is there and the card lists everything, but pages are filed from the window you opened the wiki in. Pressing Move there says so in the card, every time, and moves nothing; opening a folder or showing it in the Pages panel works as usual.

Pin the folders you live in

Right-click a top-level folder ▸ 📌 Pin folder to top and it rises above the rest, marked with a pin; the unpinned folders keep their own order below. Unpin folder sends it back. Pinning changes display order only — it never touches what's inside.

Move a folder to another document

Right-click a folder ▸ Move to Another Document… to send the whole branch — its sub-folders, every page inside, and any attachments (PDFs, images, and the like) — into another MojoPad document. Choose the destination document (or make a fresh one), then pick where it should land inside it: at the top level, or tucked into one of that document's own folders. Copy to Another Document… does the same but leaves the original where it is.

Kinds travel with the pages. If the folder holds a kind, or the pages in it are of one, the kind goes too — along with the names and types of the properties it uses, since those live in the document rather than on the page. Where the destination already has a property of the same name, the arriving pages are pointed at its one, so you do not end up with two fields called Year. Pages arrive still knowing what kind they are.

The pages travel with new identities so nothing collides, and if the destination already has a folder of the same name you simply get a second one — MojoPad never merges two folders silently. A move sends this document's originals to Recently Deleted (recoverable for 30 days), since the pages now live in the other document. Keep the destination document closed while you transfer, so its own saving can't clobber the newly-arrived folder.

Jump to a pinned page

Pages can be pinned too (right-click a page ▸ Pin), and you can leap to them from the keyboard. ⌥⌘1–⌥⌘9 open the first nine pinned pages in pin order; for a longer shelf, ⌥⌘P (Go ▸ Jump to Pinned Page…) opens a fuzzy list of every pinned page — type a few letters and press Return. It's the equivalent of Emacs bookmarks, and unlike the number keys it scales past nine.

The rest of the tree

• Folder menu — right-click a folder to Rename (or double-click it), New Sub-folder (folders nest as deep as you like — a Books folder with a shelf per book, say), Add Page Here, New Page Here (a fresh page filed straight in — in a folder you follow it first asks whether to save it as a file there), pin/unpin, or Remove. A controls row at the top holds ＋ New folder and Collapse all / Expand all.
• File / unfile a page — a page's menu offers Add to (a folder, or a brand-new one); once filed, it gains Remove from folder.
• Filter works inside the tree — folders with a match open automatically, the rest hide.

Folders still drive the order of your PDF and ePub exports — your table of contents. New wikis no longer open with an empty Table of Contents folder (export order comes from the whole tree, so it was never doing the job its name implied); any wiki that still has one can remove it from the folder menu.

From the keyboard. Press ⌘J (View ▸ Go to Page) to jump into the list with the current page selected, then ↑/↓ to move, Home/End to jump to the ends, Return to open, and Esc to return to the editor. Start typing and it hands off to the filter box. To open the pages one after another in the list's order without coming back to it each time, press ⌃⇧⌘↓ and ⌃⇧⌘↑ instead (Go ▸ Next Page and Previous Page, described above under Read your pages one after another).

History is per-tab

Each tab keeps its own back/forward history, so two tabs can walk two different trails through the same document.

Switch documents

The chip at the far left of the toolbar shows the open document's name and a color dot. Click it to hop to a recent document (the window switches in place), or to Open… or start a New document. Each recent entry also has an Open in a new window button, so you can keep one wiki open while you jump to another. Every document gets its own accent color on the chip, so you always know which one you're in.