Page Types
Give your pages a color-coded identity. A page type is a category you define — Person, Project, Idea, Reference, whatever you think in — each with a color and an optional emoji. Assign one to a page and it gets a visual identity that follows it everywhere: a colored dot in the sidebar, and — the real payoff — its node glows in that color in the Graph, so your map reads as clusters of meaning at a glance.
Making and assigning types
Above the editor, in the top-left corner, is a + Type pill. Click it to open the picker:
- Create a type — type a name in the New type… field, click a color swatch, and press Create. The new type is assigned to the current page right away.
- Assign an existing type — just click it in the list.
- Clear it — choose ✕ No type.
You can also right-click a page in the sidebar and choose Set Type… — handy for typing a page you're not currently looking at.
Editing a type
In the picker, hover any type and a ✎ appears. Click it to rename the type, recolor it, or Delete it. Recoloring updates every page of that type at once; deleting a type clears it off every page that had it. Types live in the document, so they travel with it when you share or back it up.
A type's color is checked before it is drawn. Because types travel inside the document, a wiki somebody sends you brings its own. A type whose stored color isn't written the way the type picker writes one is drawn in the palette's gray — in the Pages list, on the + Type pill and in its picker, in the page heading, the peek and database views — and keeps its name, icon and pages. Opening the wiki doesn't change it; the gray is saved the next time that wiki's settings are saved for some other reason. Recolor the type to pick a color of your own.
Seeing types in the Graph
Typed pages light up in their color on the map — instant visual clusters. To spotlight just one type, open the Graph's Lens… menu and pick it under Page type: those pages stay lit while the rest dim, answering “where is all my X?” at a glance. The Graph's corner legend reminds you the colored dots are types. See The Graph.
The mark beside a page’s name
A reader asked why some pages carry a small mark in the sidebar and others do not, and why a page clipped from the web sometimes has one. The mark says what KIND of page it is, and only when there is something to say — an ordinary page you wrote has none, because “a page” is the thing that needs no label.
| 🔒 | locked with a password. This one wins over everything else, including an icon you chose, because it is the one thing you should never have to look for. |
| 📄 | a file that lives in the wiki — a PDF, a Word file, an image. You read it here and search inside it. |
| 📖 | the same, for an ePub book. |
| ✦ ✧ ❖ | written with a model’s help: an index it built, a page it drafted, a synthesis it wove from several of yours. |
| 🗺️ ≣ ◫ ⊨ | a canvas, an outline, a storyboard, a mindmap — the page types you cannot tell from a name alone. |
Why a clipped page sometimes has one and sometimes does not. Clipping can bring a page in two ways. Read as an article, it becomes writing you can edit, and writing has no mark. Saved whole — the page exactly as it stood — it is a FILE, and files carry 📄. Which one you get is set in Settings ▸ Web Clipper, so a mixture in your sidebar is a record of having changed your mind rather than anything going wrong.
An icon you set yourself always wins, apart from the lock. Right-click a page and choose Set Icon… to give it one.