MojoPad believes in options. Settings (⌘,, or the ⚙ toolbar button) keeps them in
panes you pick from the sidebar — Appearance, Editing, Links & Pages,
Journal, Reading Aloud, Dates & Time, Web Clipper,
Sources, AI, AI Agents, Mail Drop, Sharing,
Exporting, Files & Backups, Security, Shortcuts,
Updates and License. Here is what you'll find in them, by subject:
Can't remember which pane it was in? Don't go hunting — there's a search box at the top of the sidebar. Type what you're after and the panes stop being one-at-a-time: every pane holding a match is shown at once, each labeled with its own name so you learn where things live while you look for them, and the setting that matched is marked down its edge. Its neighbors come with it on purpose — a control arriving on its own, without the sentence that explains it, tells you less than you came for.
Near enough is enough. You don't have to spell it, and you don't have to know the exact
wording: typewrter finds "Typewriter line sits at", spellng finds "Check spelling
while typing", and wordcompletion — no space, not what it's called — finds "Suggest word
completions as I type". Typing what the setting actually says works too, and searches the
explanations as well as the names, so a word you half-remember from reading a description will
still get you there. Esc clears the box and puts you back where you were.
And Settings takes the interface size with it. If you have set Interface to Roomy because the app was too small to read comfortably, this window grows too — every label, every explanation, the sidebar and the search box, all in the same proportion. Compact shrinks it the same way. It used to be the one window that ignored you.
[[ opens the picker or lets you
type the name; where a wiki link, a result or a page picked from a list opens — in the
same view, in a new tab, or beside the page you are in, which adds a pane instead of
replacing what you are reading (⌘-click does the opposite, whichever you choose);
the preview bubble over links, page lists and everything Ask shows you; Threads — whether a colored line is drawn from your
page to each column beside it, and which of the four ways it is drawn, with a picture of each
(see Writing a Long Paper); the page new pages start from; whether WikiWords highlight on new documents;
whether filing a page into a folder reveals that folder; and whether the Pages panel shows
folders and pages as two areas.Settings apply live — no restarts, no Apply buttons. (The Settings window wears your theme too, and switches the moment you pick a new one.)
Out of the box, MojoPad's tools live in a left icon rail — a slim column down the left edge, the top bar reduced to navigation: clean lines. The toolbar is yours to arrange though: in Settings ▸ Appearance ▸ Toolbar, drag any tool between the rail and the top bar, and drag within a zone to set the order — "Everything on top" restores the classic single-bar look with one click.
A few pieces stay put on purpose: the document switcher, the back/forward arrows, and the search-and-command pair keep their places in the top bar — they're the steering wheel. Rail icons show their names in a tooltip beside the rail, and when the Pages panel is folded away, its reopen tab hangs off the rail's right edge.
With more than one pane open, a click in the page list loads the pane you were last working
in — so if you have been reading in the pane on the right, that is the one that changes, and the
page you are writing stays put. The pane you are in wears a quiet ring and a tinted bar, so the answer
is on screen before you click. Click into another pane, or press ⌥⌘O, and it moves. A page that
is already open in a pane is shown where it is rather than opened twice. With one pane there is only one
place, and the list behaves exactly as it always has.
⌘-click still opens a page in a new tab, in the pane you are in.
The trash holds your deleted pages — click it to open them. Everything you have deleted in the last thirty days is in there, newest first, each with Restore to put it back where it was and Delete Forever for when you mean it. A dot appears on the trash whenever there is something in it, which is the app's way of saying — before you ever need it — that deleting is not final.
To delete the page you are reading: ⇧⌘D, or Edit ▸ Delete Page, or
right-click it in the page list. The trash used to do this as well, which read the wrong way
around: everywhere else on this machine the Trash is a place you open, not a button that throws away
whatever you are looking at. It is a place here too now.
View ▸ Focus Mode (⇧⌘F) hides everything — toolbar, page list,
palettes, status bar — leaving just your page, centered and quiet. Press Esc,
⇧⌘F again, or the small ✕ focus pill in the top-right corner, and the
workshop reappears exactly as you left it. (The pill is there so nobody reaches for the
window's close button to leave focus — that one quits the app.)
With the status bar hidden, what MojoPad would have said there — a zoom level, a page saved somewhere, a command that could not run — appears as a short notice at the bottom of the window instead, and goes after a few seconds. The same happens in a page's own small window, which has no status bar either. Work nobody asked for, like a model loading in the background, stays out of it.
Every side panel can be put away without visiting a menu, and all three do it the same way. Hover the divider beside the Pages panel, the palettes or the AI drawer and a small chevron appears — click it, or double-click the divider itself, and the panel slides away with its width remembered for next time.
Getting one back depends on which. The Pages panel and the palettes each leave a small
button on the window edge — the same shape as the chevron that sent them away —
and clicking it brings the panel back exactly as it was. The AI drawer has no edge button,
because the two panels on the right would be fighting for the same strip of window;
bring it back with ✦ AI (⇧⌘A) instead. View ▸ Hide/Show Side Panels
(⇧⌘\) puts the two side panels away and back in one stroke.
On the outline's divider, double-click keeps its older meaning: reset the width to the default. On the line between two panes, double-click shares the room between them equally again.
Writing and researching want different windows. Writing wants the page and nothing else. Researching wants two sources open, the backlinks up and the tree showing. Monday morning wants your tasks and this week's notes. Getting from one to the other is a dozen small moves, and you make them again every time.
A desk is that arrangement, saved under a name. View ▶ Desks ▶ Save This Setup as a Desk… remembers every pane, in the order they stand: its tabs and the one in front, its color (and whether you had hidden its thread), the width you dragged it to and whether you had folded it — along with which pane you were in, which one the threads start from, and which panels were up. Go to Desk… puts it all back.
The panes are the reason to reach for this. Four or five sources fanned out around the page you are arguing from is a minute of work to build. The panes you leave open come back by themselves when you reopen the wiki, but that is one arrangement; a desk gives each one a name, so you can keep several and move between them. A desk saved by an earlier version comes back as panes. One saved before columns were remembered says nothing about them, so going to it puts its pages back in the tabs of the pane you are in and leaves your other panes alone.
Set up the window the way you want it first, then save — a desk records what is on screen at the moment you name it, so there is nothing to configure.
It holds no writing. A desk is only a way of looking: which pages, which panels. Going to one can never change a page, and deleting one throws away the arrangement and nothing else — every page it opened stays exactly where it is.
It survives your wiki moving on. A desk saved six months ago that names a page you have since deleted still opens; it simply opens without it, and says how many it could not find. A saved setup that refused to work because one page went away would be worse than not having it, because you would only find out at the moment you reached for it.
Desks belong to the document, so each wiki has its own — and they travel inside it, like everything else you make.
Manage Desks… renames one, or removes it: choose the desk, and clear its name to delete it. Saving over a name you already used replaces that desk, after asking.
Want the documentation searchable next to your own notes? Help ▸ Add the Manual to This Wiki… drops every chapter into a single page called MojoPad Manual, with a table of contents at the top. From then on it turns up in search results beside your writing, you can link to it, and you can scribble in it. Delete that one page whenever you're done with it — nothing else is touched.
Prefer a file? The manual is itself a MojoPad document: Help ▸ MojoPad Manual opens it, and File ▸ Export Document writes it out as PDF or ePub.
Working on a laptop and a desktop? MojoPad ▸ Settings File ▸ Export Settings… writes your preferences to a small file — put it in whatever folder you already sync between machines. On the other Mac, Import Settings… and everything takes effect immediately: theme, fonts, layout, spacing, shortcuts, and the rest.
What deliberately stays put: your license, your open documents, each machine's window positions, any key you've pasted in — a key is a credential, and it is not in this file to begin with: the keys MojoPad holds for you — your model, your searches, your mailbox, the catalogs — are encrypted in files of their own, so an exported settings file could not carry one if it tried. (A key you give to a connected tool is the exception: those are part of that tool's own setup and travel with it.) — and the permissions you've granted for linked files — which folders MojoPad may reach on disk is a decision made at each keyboard, and carrying it across would approve folders the other Mac was never asked about. Everything else travels.
A page opens under its own title, set in serif, with the date it was made and how many pages link to it. That masthead is a good part of what MojoPad looks like, and on a large screen you would not want it any other way.
Open a second page beside it, though, and you pay for that introduction once in every pane. On a thirteen-inch laptop that is a real amount of writing gone.
Settings ▸ Appearance ▸ Slimmer headers when more than one pane is open is for that. With it on, every pane's masthead folds onto a single line while more than one pane is open, so they all begin on the same line. Nothing is put away to manage it: the title is still there and still renames when you click it, and so are the type, any source or linked-file chip and the created-and-edited line. They simply stand in a row instead of a column. Close the other panes and the full masthead returns. Off unless you turn it on.